You can still narrate this as the minion(s) having been injured (scorched by a fireball, a minor flesh wound from a sword). In fact, I plan on doing exactly that, to prevent my players from being able to easily distinguish minions from regular mobs (at least until the mobs attack). It's simply that, mechanically speaking, they haven't been damaged(and it is a lot simpler to track that, of the 30 minion zombie horde you started with, 15 are still alive, than it is to track that 12 are uninjured, 1 has 1 hp left, and 2 have 4 hp left). IMO.
Eh. This annoys me because it robs the fun the players have hewing through masses of mooks. The POINT of a minion is that any damage the players can dish out, the little dude can't take!
I think I might implement a rule like this:
REINFORCEMENTS: Minions still take damage on a miss. However, any minions killed on a miss are immediately replaced on the next round with an equal number of reinforcements that have arrived. These reinforcements are equal to the minions that were killed in every way.
Keeps my sense of believability intact (I can probably usually buy that there are "hidden reserves" somewhere that my character doesn't know about), lets my players shine (it's gonna be so much fun when the fireball wipes out the mass army!) while preserving the intent of the rules (re-spawning minions basically act as if the regular minions didn't die), and allowing me to add a nice little "last hurrah!" moment to the combat.
Alternately, a rule like this:
Incapacitated Minions: Any minions damaged on a miss are dying slowly, but not instantly dead. They can't participate in combat, but they remain concious. They can be healed, they can be interrogated, they can be squashed under your boot, they're talking through gritted teeth as their blood pools beneath them, but they're not dead yet! You get no XP from minions killed on a miss.
The problem with this is that it STILL means damaged minions are out of the fight, so they're not providing a challenge, but the freed up XP lets me inject more minions at some later date (or save it up for the Momma Minion at the end).
Actually, to keep it fairly simple, "No XP for minions killed on a miss" works pretty well, because XP is used to populate monsters in an encounter, so it just ramps up the challenge of the next encounter or something.
Hmm....kind of like that.
