Minions: Known or Unknown?

[Kaffis]

I'm happy for the players to know. As combat veterans I assume their characters will have some knowledge of how tough/clever an opponent is from his stance, equipment, spatial awareness etc etc. So for humanoid opponents, the peons should be fairly evident.

For non-humanoid/monstrous/aberration opponents? Hm..

I won't (haven't, now, as of yesterday, hehe!) flat-out tell my players they're minions.

I won't go to excessive lengths to disguise them, though.

What I found myself doing was using markers (damn random minis!) to distinguish enemies by type (when recognizably different -- these have slings, these have shields, these have spears, etc.) accurately. I go ahead and roll a die for "damage" when I attack with them, but ignore it and make sure the damage is behind my screen so it's not ridiculously apparent that I'm doing so. I think after the 2nd or 3rd out of 5 minions in the first encounter, at least one of my players caught on that the blue tokens were dropping like flies.

Of course, next encounter, I'll be mixing it up and changing the color on them. But as has been mentioned, the astute among them will probably notice that, gosh, there are a lot of brown ones.

Eventually, when it becomes apparent that they're becoming comfortable with estimating minion status by number, I'll start dividing the minions into two types (either fluff-wise or mechanically), for instance, or design encounters where the standard monsters outnumber the minions occasionally (I'll have a largish group, so I think this will be doable).

But I don't forsee going to drastic measures like actually converting damage to rolls, or anything that would mitigate the time savings of using minions to begin with.

 

[Mercule]

Not overly important, either way. In running KotS, I told the players about minions when they dropped the first one. I did not tell them which opponents were minions, though. Considering the first couple hits from the dragonshields did the same damage as the minions (minimum, IIRC), the fighter was a bit surprised when it didn't fall.

 

[Gothmog]

This is one of the few things I'm not crazy about with 4E- minions. I know I'm in the minority, but I don't think the PCs should be special because they are PCs- they should be special by their skills, how they conduct themselves, and what they do. I know the minion rule emulates movies and tv nicely, but that's not the medium I'm trying to mimic when I play a rpg. The idea of minions is an extremely meta-game concept, and after playing in KotS, I felt they cheapened the experience- they were just so much cannon fodder to mulch through, and once we figured out which critters were minions, we just waded through them without a concern. I played the fighter, and I think I was hit by a minion maybe 3 times in the whole adventure.

Another game I LOVE, Savage Worlds, uses minions as well- but they are not quite as fragile or pathetic as the 4E minions. We've also tried the no minion (called "extras" in SW), and had no problems- the game is just much grittier and more deadly as a result. That works for us because we like less cinematic and more "realistic" feel to our games.

So my plans are not to use minions at all- just use the non-minion monsters. If I were going to use minions in a game, I wouldn't let the players know though. If they "waste" an encounter or daily power on a minion, so be it.