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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kordeth" data-source="post: 4182551" data-attributes="member: 5036">The fly in this logic ointment is that the kobold minion stat block says under HP: "Minions are killed when hit by an attack that inflicts damage." Granted the vampire spawn has 10 hp listed in its stat block, but as many people have pointed out, the DDM RPG stats appear to be out of date when you compare, for example, the DDM Grell with the MM Grell that we aw from the D&D Experience.They don't have 0 hp, they have no hp. It's like the difference between a creature having a 0 Con score and undead having no Con score in 3E. And yes, there is a reason for it, if you assume that minions' purpose in the game is to provide a credible threat that can be thrown at the PCs in fairly large numbers without bogging down gameplay. The fact that the kobold minion inflicts a static amount of damage rather than rolling a die bears this out, and if minions die with one hit, that means they require basically no bookkeeping.If you're trying to design a creature that goes down in one hit and requires minimal bookkeeping, why give it hit points that might be low enough that a PC can one-shot it, but then again might have to be tracked if that dreaded low damage roll comes up, when you can just say "if you hit a minion and deal damage, it dies?"Yep. That's the thing I love about minions--they make the "horde fight" a viable tactic all the way up to 30th level. It's really hard in 3E to build an encounter for high-level PCs where the PCs a) can mow down lots of mooks, and b) aren't so ridiculously hard to hit that the fight has no element of risk at all.</blockquote>

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