Minions. The DM knows 'em. Do the players?

[Jack99]

Only because my game was canceled tomorrow, so I can afford to put off some of my rewrites from tonight until then.


...

Somehow, that's less of an "I have a life! Really!" argument than it seemed in my head.

So let me get this right..

The only reason you are spending time on this geek board is because your geek game tomorrow was canceled so that you can push the work you have to do on your geek book until then?

Sounds like a life.. riiiiight

 

[MindWanderer]

There was a nasty Delve encounter that opened up with only 4 enemies visible; one of my party members opened up with Acid Arrow. Being minions, all but one died, and then the "real" enemies showed up.

 

[Dausuul]

I'm curious... Why does everyone assume that the minions are wearing rags and carrying steak knives? Sure, some of them could be... But minions have AC, and at least in small groups do damage, on par with normal creatures. So it's reasonable to assume that, at least in some cases, minions will be equipped similarly, if not identically, to their more robust counterparts.

Well, the examples were goblin minions specifically. If a goblin minion isn't wearing rags and carrying a steak knife, it's going to have its Cannon Fodder card revoked.

On the other hand, other minions could be quite well armed *cough*legiondevils*cough*.

 

[ZetaStriker]

I remember seeing in a recent KotS playtest posted here where the player had discovered which minis were minions and modeled his tactics around it. He got horribly beaten because of it by ignoring them and letting the Dragonshields keep their +hojillion to hit, while taking lots of minion damage along the way, but the idea behind it made me cringe. For one thing, it holds a double standard. We know from WotC commentary that you're not supposed to know which zombies are going to take your hit, grab you and hold you down as the main course in an undead banquet. Now, that may be an exception to a general rule, but the double standard doesn't seem to do anything to help gameplay. It just seems to give metagame knowledge to the player, which is something we should be staying away from.

 

[SilverAgent]

In the Lord of the Rings movies, you could tell the minions from the leaders.

In Conan movies, you can tell the leaders from the minions.

In most fantasy novels, characters cut through the chaffe to get to the obvious leaders.

As a rule, people can tell minions from non-minions.

In the event that a bad guy is trying to hide it and pose as one of the troops, I'd make him roll Bluff vs the Players' Passive Insight.

Other than that ... it will be obvious, just like it is in most of the source materials.

 

[AZRogue]

I don't know about any of you out there, but I know my players, and I'm pretty sure that just because they have a daily power available it doesn't mean that they'll leap on any and every baddie trying to utterly destroy it with said daily.
In fact I'm pretty sure they'll use them when they stop auto-killing the little squishy dudes with "Fodder" stamped all over their stat block.

In fact, if I know my players, I'm pretty sure they might conserve their daily powers so much for somthing BIGGER and BADDER to attack that at some points they won't even use them for some days.

Yep... can't wait to torture my players through another homebrew campaign!

I agree. My players are the same way. They won't use any of their Daily powers at all unless they hit something a few times and it doesn't become Bloodied. Or it hits them very, very hard. Then they pause, look at each other in consternation, and start looking up their Dailies on their sheets. They'll horde their powers unless they think they really, really need them.

I don't plan on giving my players clues as to which monsters are minions or not. If they figure it out, fine, but I'm not going to try and describe a meta-game concept in-game, so to speak. As a matter of fact, I choose different miniatures for my minions. All I have to do is make sure my non-minions have a certain type of miniature all their own, remember what those one or two minis are, and then I know all the rest, no matter how varied, are minions. So far it hasn't been a problem, even with 11 kobolds all over the place.

The largest hurdle is that minions don't roll damage. Right now I'm rolling damage for them and ignoring the roll (though the PCs don't know that) but I may start rolling damage for them for real, I'm not sure.

 

[ZetaStriker]

You're right, of course, Silver Agent. I just don't think I should help them realize this. Let them figure out on their own which enemies seem weaker than the others. Using separate minis or descriptions to give them advance knowledge is what I want to avoid.

 

[duke_Qa]

If there is a bunch of kobold minions blocking proper view of what the real guys behind them are holding, i would not allow my players to figure out who's who without rolling a insight/spot/whatever-check.

(warning, no real tactics here but visual ones, might not work InGame)


If there are two dragonshields up front along with 6 minions i would say 'there's 8 kobolds in front of you, two which are carrying strange shields that looks like dragon-scales'.

If theres 11 kobolds, 8 minions 2 shields and one caster, i would distribute them something like 6 minions in front, two shields and 1 minion behind them and one caster and 1 minion behind him, and i would demand a moderate check to spot the minute details of the shields, and a more challenging one to spot the caster in the background. Hell, i could probably make the last minion an apprentice with a voodoo-stick and confuse my players a bit if i want to.

Naturally, use as needed. It won't be fun trying to cover up every obvious mix, and sometimes you want to make an illusion like the minion ogre thing earlier. As a GM i think its your job to make the enemy smart enough to create small traps like this. Its alot more fun when players get outsmarted, and then come out on top of things by working hard for it.

 

[Ian O'Rourke]

In the Lord of the Rings movies, you could tell the minions from the leaders.

In Conan movies, you can tell the leaders from the minions.

In most fantasy novels, characters cut through the chaffe to get to the obvious leaders.

As a rule, people can tell minions from non-minions.

Other than that ... it will be obvious, just like it is in most of the source materials.

I agree, and it obviously comes down to two very different gaming philosophies in that the strength of it, for me, is that the players know. It doesn't take different mini's. It doesn't take obvious changes in dress - like a red shirt - it's how everything is dramatically set-up.

The 'non-minion' that killed Boromir didn't look any different, but it was obvious he was different.

I can agree the odd non-minion Zombie in a crowd would be cool, but then I tend to favour that less and instead go for dramatic set-ups of their being Zombie minions and then the obvious Zombie Lord who is the main guy, the one who just might kill 'Boromir'.

Different strokes for different folks.

 

[That One Guy]

2 cents... or maybe 10 cents... whatever.

In general, I want PCs to make assumptions about things based on descriptions, be they correct or not. A few rounds into battle, I want high insight characters (this happens to be the leader) to get an idea of who's 'tough' and who is 'weak'. After a few encounters with certain types of enemies I'll say there are X type A and Y type B.

...end.