Paper Minions - WT?

[Korgoth]

Maybe this will help, if the other explanations don't:

I don't consider Minions as "relative to the PCs", and every time I see words like "narrativist" I want to go all Savonarola and round up every role playing book in existence and BURN them. So explanations that hinge on making me despise my own hobby are unhelpful to say the least.

What I focus on is the fact that in every edition of D&D it has been possible to have 1 hit point... a first level character or an unclassed "normal man" who rolled poorly could be walking around with 1 hit point. Does that mean that like 25% of all non-adventurers die if punched in the face? That would be a pretty lame world. Rather, it means that when something inflicts 1 hit point of damage it is inflicting a life-threatening wound (a dagger is actually a deadly weapon, after all).

Also keep in mind that the a combat round used to represent 1 minute, so a single hit from a knife or a dagger was probably several stabs... which could amount to only 1 hit point of damage.

Therefore, hit points above 1 represent your ability through skill, luck or fate to avoid a potentially life-threatening injury and turn it into something inconsequential.

Especially in 4E, where "healing" is accomplished by "taking a breather", inconsequential injuries are actually like taking zero damage. Your hit points are the pool of "Not Be Killed Points" that you spend from to turn a being-killed into a not-being-killed. Minions, even high level ones, simply don't have any of those points (either because they're losers or because of fate or because they lack some heroic spark).

So the first time you stab a Minion in the heart, he dies from being stabbed in the heart. The first time you stab a hero/villain in the heart, the blade turned against an armor buckle or deflected off a rib or he turned aside at the last moment or you were blinded by a Valkyrie or he parried. Combat is still basically abstract (just more positional and using shorter rounds) so the DM still has to narrate exactly what happened.

 

[Samurai]

I like the idea of minions, and plan to use them, but they should not be automatically taken down in a single hit IMO. I think they should be taken down by the first decent hit, not the tiniest nick or scrape.

So I'll be giving Minions a Resilience value. Think of it as Minion Hardness... it is an amount that is subtracted from all damage a minion takes. If there is still at least 1 point of damage left after subtracting Resilience, the Minion goes down. If not, he's still up and has suffered no appreciable damage. No need to track hps this way, because they still have just 1 HP, but getting to that 1 HP may not be quite so easy.

My formula (which I'll adjust on a case by case basis if needed) is 1/2 Minion's level + Con bonus. So, for the level 1 Kobold minions, it's 1/2 of 1 (0 because you round down) + their Con bonus (+1), for a total of 1 point. That means a 2 point hit or better will take them down.

For a 25th level Minion with a +6 Con bonus, (12 + 6 = 18), a hit of 19+ points will take him down while 18 damage or less is shrugged off.

 

[GWEk]

I find it interesting (but not surprising) that the game is not even officially released, and there's already a solid line between people who love and hate the idea of minions.

I wasn't lucky enough to get the books early and read the Minions excerpt when it came out a while ago, but I think part of the divide here is that Minions represent something that hasn't really appeared in D&D before (although the ideas of minions or "mooks" have been in many other games).

In traditional D&D, hit points, combat capability, and level all scale up simultaneously. While this often works, it also creates an awkward situation for the GM:

Want to throw a horde of mooks against your PCs? There's a good chance the fight is going to be lopsided because if the mooks are high enough level to challenge the PCs, they also probably come with enough hit points to slow combat down considerably.

The idea behind Minions is to provide opponents who can be a challenge for the PCs without forcing every fight to be a battle of hit point attrition. Books, movies, video games--regardless of what you use for inspiration, there are always scenes of the hero plowing through a horde of lackeys... and sometimes he's unscathed, sometimes he's not. Minions allow for that in a way that nothing else in D&D or d20 does.

Personally, I GM Star Wars, and while the Saga Edition has a decent idea with the non-heroic class, the idea of Minions are much more streamlined, and I'll probably be using them from now on. For a GM/DM who likes to run a cinematic campaign, Minions are a godsend.

 

[Scribble]

This is the thread that never ends... it just goes on and on my friend...

No one has a problem with things like skeleton minions or kobold minions, these are weak monsters and not bothering to track hp breaks no one sense of verisimilitude.

It's at the higher levels when apparently you have minion dragons and demons and mammoths that it gets absurd.

So for some reason weak monsters of one type should be able to be a credible threat yet still weak while others shouldn't?

THAT makes no sense to me.

The stated purpose of minions is to allow for creatures too weak to stand up to the pcs to still present a credible threat. If I have a 29th level character who is literally a demi-god, then why should a horde of mooks represent a credible threat?

Light weight boxer vrs Heavyweight boxer.

Chances are lightweight is going to get off a number of hits against the heavyweight. He might not be as strong, or able to take as much of a beating as the heavyweight, but he's still trained to dish out a good fight.

Heavyweight, however, probably only needs one good punch to take the lightweight out. His strength is just so much greater.

Now, surround the heavyweight with about 4 lightweights.

Aside from being a fight on HBO I really want to see, it illustrates the minion vrs PC thing to me...

You want the cinematic scene? Fine, but leave them as the window dressing the are. Box text works just fine for describing a horde of mooks getting butchered by Gods.

Boring.

Creatures that can actually threaten the gods should take more than one hit to deal with, or they weren't really a threat.

They're only a threat when you don't deal with them.

 

[Dausuul]

I believe the difficulty in accepting how the Minion mechanics work is two-fold:

1) Players are still under the assumption that HP equals true wounds
2) Players are still under the assumption that Damage equates to giving true wounds

Exactly. An ogre is big and tough, and can take a lot of physical punishment. That applies to ogre minions just as much as to regular ogres.

But hit points don't represent raw toughness any more. The ogre minion simply lacks the wherewithal to defend itself for long. After a round or two, the fighter puts a sword in its belly, or the wizard melts its face, and it falls over. That's why it only has one hit point--it's not because it's physically more frail than any other ogre.

 

[Korgoth]

I like the idea of minions, and plan to use them, but they should not be automatically taken down in a single hit IMO. I think they should be taken down by the first decent hit, not the tiniest nick or scrape.

I would argue that 1 point of damage is a decent hit. A nick or scrape does 0 points of damage.

 

[Lizard]

You're misusing the term 'false dichotomy'.
There are no dragon, demon or mammoth minions in the MM. In fact all dragons are solo monsters.

But there are devil minions. This makes your statement a bit disingenuous -- from a "ridiculous or not" perspective, a 21st level devil minion is the same as a 21st level demon, dragon, or mammoth minion. If you can accept high-level devil minions, you can accept the rest; if you can't accept the rest, there's no logical reason to make an exception for devils (and probably other high-powered things; you're apparently supposed to face minions all the way up to level 30, part of the whole 'game experience doesn't change, ever' philosophy of 4e.)

As far as I can tell, there is no game mechanical reason why there can't be demon, dragon, or mammoth minions. If the DM wants the Halls of Tiamat to be guarded by an army of Guardian Dragons (level 30 minions), then, so it will be, and the PCs will cleave through the massive beasts. Everything in 4e obeys the Ninja Rule -- ninja power is divided evenly among all ninja present.

If there's one dragon, it's a solo monster.
If there's five dragons, they're standard monsters.
If there's a dozen dragons, either most of them are minions or your DM is tired of the campaign.

 

[Henry]

...If I have a 29th level character who is literally a demi-god, then why should a horde of mooks represent a credible threat?

Because in adventure books and movies, hordes of mooks DO present credible threats to the heroes. In Star Wars, Stormtroopers can and DO wound the heroes. In Spellfire, the Zhentarim do threaten the heroes with bodily harm, and the only one who is completely unworried about them is Elminster himself. In Jackie Chan movies, there has to be a sense that he's doing great things, and being incredibly skilled and lucky to succeed in beating up the minions.

So how does one create that sense of threat from the mooks to the Players, instead of just the characters? You use minions who, when in a gang, CAN kick the characters' butts, instead of making their stats so incredibly weak that the players don't even sweat a lucky hit from one of the mooks. 1000 1st level warriors in 3e wouldn't mean a thing to a 20th level PC. Only a percentage could attack at any one time, and of those that hit, only 5% will do any palpable damage at all. On the other hand, just 10 minions can scare the bejeezus out of a couple of equivalent characters. 10 of those shifty little kobold minion bastards can surround a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd level PC and turn them into hamburger if they get the chance.

Now, all well and good at low-low level, but what if I want to recreate the feeling at high level? Do I, as a DM, track 10 critters with about 40 or 50 hit points apiece, for multiple rounds, IN ADDITION to the name-level bad guys? (Using a Feng Shui term here.) I could, but I get the same effect if I jsut ramp up their saves and AC, and just say "1 hit takes them down" -- in other words, what 4e has done, and I avoid a lot of bookkeeping just to get the same effect.

Important Question: For those in extreme dislike of minon rules, will there EVER come up a situation where a single high-level minion will be threatening a village, absent of any PCs or NPCs?

Now, I CAN see a perfect scenario involving a high level minion threatening NPCs - one which highlights a PCs obvious skill and power over what is perceived to be a greater threat. I'm reminded of an Issue of the old DC Spelljammer comic, where the captain and crew landed on a world for some R&R. The locals were threatened by a mysterious enemy, which turned out to be a huge Red Dragon. One of the crew members was helpless before its power. Then, the captain shows up, gets pissed off with the dragon, and KILLS IT IN ONE SHOT with a finger of death. I loved that scene, because it turned the whole "climactic battle with the bad guy" theme on its head. The dragon turned out to be a pansy next to the ship's captain.

 

[phloog]

I like the idea of minions, and plan to use them, but they should not be automatically taken down in a single hit IMO. I think they should be taken down by the first decent hit, not the tiniest nick or scrape.

So I'll be giving Minions a Resilience value. (((SNIP))).

Which is almost exactly like the True20 minions...they still get a Toughness save, but as soon as they fail a save they are gone.

I like the idea of a rule for minions, but the fact that True20 did it fairly gracefully reinforces that this is yet another enhancement that could have been made to 3.x without requiring a whole new edition ("if I like the girl who cares what you like!?")

 

[Korgoth]

Important Question: For those in extreme dislike of minon rules, will there EVER come up a situation where a single high-level minion will be threatening a village, absent of any PCs or NPCs?

Also, in the vein of a follow up:

In, say, 3.x, when a really beefy monster threatens the village, any civilian who stands to fight it is really just throwing his life away, isn't he? Even if he rolls that 20, he's going to do piddling damage and the monster won't even notice... except maybe to crush him. Because there's no chance he will significantly hurt it. So obviously Brave Peasant is a fool for fighting and should just run instead.

From my perspective, 4E mixes it up a little bit. Maybe that big beefy monster is truly the stuff of legends, and rightfully ignores Brave Peasants. But maybe it's just a big critter that flourishes because it is hard to get through its hide and because most stuff run from the sight of its terrible maw... but if somebody did stick a spear through its eye it would bite the dust. It's not a Monster of Legend, it's just a Big Monster.