Paper Minions - WT?

[Storm-Bringer]

This argument of yours, that D&D fails to simulate D&D, it is a bug, not a feature.

That isn't even remotely my argument. Perhaps you should brush up on some math, because your statements don't add up.

HAW HAW

 

[hong]

That isn't even remotely my argument.

You think it is not your argument, because you have not understood it.

Perhaps you should brush up on some math, because your statements don't add up.

HAW HAW

Yeesh, amateurs these days.

 

[Blackeagle]

I will introduce:

Weak Minions: 1 hit to kill (minions in MM)
Regular Minions: 2 hits to kill
Tough Minions: 3 hits to kill

At three hits it seems like you're setting up situations where a minion could be tougher than a regular monster of it's level, particularly at low levels and versus critical hits (especially with high crit weapons or other bonus damage on a crit). Maybe have a critical count as two hits?

 

[hong]

*pinches bridge of nose* I know. I read it years ago and thought it silly then.

Again, the whole basis of the AC system is that blows that connect are turned by the armour, or dodged by dex or pushed away by delfection. If it connects then it connects. It draws blood. The poison on the blade, or a dozen other rider effects make this a mandatory aspect of the system.

This is not to say that every sword blow spears through the other guys liver, it could be a scratch, but it did connect.

None of which rules out minions. All it takes is one change to your internal model of D&D reality, which appears to be your standard by which everything is judged.

Instead of

IF (atk >= AC) { attack touches target; REQUIRE damage > 0; inflict (damage) }

it becomes

IF (atk >= AC) { attack touches target; REQUIRE damage >= 0; inflict (damage) }

 

[Lurker37]

She doesn't have hit points, it's a movie.

Also, it was more than ten years after the first movie. Getting shot once in ten years of a skirmish war is pretty damn incompetent on the enemy's part.

You're using the movie to illustrate a point about how minions should be simulated in the RPG, which is only valid if you apply all the RPG mechanics to said simulation.

Princess Leia has been 'hit' multiple times, eroding her hit points to the point where the next hit actually drops her below half health. She now is bloodied, hence the highly visible wound instead of all the first and second degree burns she took up until now.

So she hasn't been shot only once in her ten-year adventuring career - it 's just the first time she's dropped to half hit points or lower.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

To me, minions and the 1 hit-point simply means this:

-A minion is the person who gets shot in the head as he peeks his head out in a war film
-the one who gets decapitated in a single blow by the heroes sword
-the one that slips in the mud and gets impaled by a spear
-the one that misjudges his jump and instead of landing in the water lands on the rocks and gets splattered

Basically it is a narrative and story device to showcase such iconic things and simply sometimes to showcase the randomness of combat. Two Orcs may be identical in all manner of speaking, but one is a minion because he is the one that will end up being felled by a single blow.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

I think if they'd listed next to the minion type monsters in the MM the regular version of the same monster, and given a rough guideline on when to use the minion version versus the regular version, it'd have cleared up a ton of confusion. And the rules honestly do already explain that, it's just in the section about creating encounters.

Most of the sections, for example humanoids, I think do a great job of making it clear "these guys over here, statted as minions, are useful to throw into encounters *as* minions." The legion devils, for example. The idea seems to be that if you were to run into a platoon of legion devils, there's probably a 20 foot tall devil in front who's in charge. If your party's powerful enough to fight the big guy who uses these guys as footsoldiers, they're not powerful enough relative to the PCs to use except as minions. Both mechanically and "in game" wise, these guys are cannon fodder used by tougher enemies. If you want to have your party encounter these guys all alone and at a level where just a couple is a threat, unminionize em.

Hey, all you have to do to unminionize something is (a) give it normal HP, and (b) treat it as a non-minion when you create the encounter. The fact that minion status matters for encounter balance indicates to me that we're better off taking our cues for how minions are discussed in the encounter creation section than in the flavor from the monster manual.

 

[KarinsDad]

At three hits it seems like you're setting up situations where a minion could be tougher than a regular monster of it's level, particularly at low levels and versus critical hits (especially with high crit weapons or other bonus damage on a crit). Maybe have a critical count as two hits?

I do not think this is true for the Regular Minion I set up, but it could on occasion be true for the Tough Minion. I do not know of any regular monster (i.e. non-minion) that can typically be taken out with a single critical hit (course, I did not look at all of them).

But, I consider that a good thing. The Tough Minion is not tough because he does a lot of damage or anything, he's tough because he can absorb damage.

Sure, using your suggestion would be fine for the Tough Minion where once in a while, he would have the equivalent of more hit points than a regular monster. But it would be overkill for the Regular Minion.

Another thing I noticed is that I have to change the damage for Minions with this system. The game mechanics do not have them rolling dice, but if I did that, it would be a metagaming clue that they are minions to players.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Can I just say that though there have been a number of decent minion explanations and clarifications floated in this thread, I for one thought that Korgoth's first post on this issue was really really cool and I'm sad that it didn't get more appreciation.

Thank-you Korgoth, initial anger at narrativism aside, that was an excellent way to read the rules and I'm happy to have seen it.

Also, I'd like to add that I, for one, would like to welcome our new Dragon Minion overlords.

 

[Vanuslux]

The designers have said one of the emphases in the 4e MM was to make the monsters runnable right out of the book. The example they used was dragons (creating a full dragon stat block from the 3.x MM was basically an hours worth of work), but I think it applies to minions as well. They didn't want a DM who needed a squad of minions for a fight to have to go through and fiddle with a template. Instead you just open the MM to the appropriate page.

We're not talking about a complex template here...we're talking about saying at a certain level difference a creature would be considered to have 1 hit point and won't take damage on a miss. I can't imagine anyone needing to think too hard about that no matter what the creature is. Is there anything else that seperates a minion from a non-minion?

Edit: As an aside, I'm not overly upset about the way they do it...it's really only a trivial inconvenience in the long run...I just wish they'd handled it differently.