Paper Minions - WT?

[WayneLigon]

Or is it just hand waving it away? The Minion actually has 200 hit points when fighting each other or fighting other NPCs, they just have 1 hit point when fighting PCs.

I think that's the exact way it works.

 

[Tripgnosis]

Keep in mind that a missed attack is only a miss as per the rules. Some misses can be described as glancing blows, even small wounds. Just nothing that's gonna add up or effect the battle in any meaningful way. A hit represents a good solid blow. (even though that may be hard to picture if you roll minimum damage)

Plus, a 10th level minion is simply no match for a 10th level PC, even though they are both 10th level. So when a minion gets hit with a good solid blow from a PC, he goes down. period.

HP doesn't just represent how much blood you have left to bleed. It's a combination of morale, and fortitude, and rolling with a hit, and any other factors you can think of that all boil down to how long you can last in a fight. Minions just don't last.

And stubbing you toe wouldn't deal actual damage.

 

[el-remmen]

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.

I'm with Andor on this.

I have no problem with skeleton minions (or the like) because a skeleton can reasonable have 1 hit point (assuming it is 1 hd skeleton) - but I have a harder time wrapping my head around things like "giant minions", unless I happened to be playing Thor or somehing.

I also take exception to being told that if you want something different maybe you should look for a game other than D&D. I, and many other people, have played D&D just fine in various incarnations.

Minion rules will certainly be cool for certain kinds of games and it is neat option to have, but I am not quite convinced they are a necessity, or by their very nature make the game better.

 

[Obryn]

That's a false dichotemy though. It's not realistic vs cinematic. It's 'internally consistant' vs 'inconsistant'.

It depends on your standards of consistency.

4e takes a different position than 3e did. 3e described everything in the world in absolute terms. "Simulationist," if you will. Everything in the game used the same rules, could pick the same feats, and could theoretically have similar powers.

4e describes everything in terms of how they interact with the PCs. This is less "realistic" but makes the game much easier to run. A creature's stats don't lay out the sum total of everything it can do; they list what it can do to the PCs in combat.

The stated purpose of minions is to allow for creatures too weak to stand up to the pcs to still present a credible threat.

Not really. They're to allow the DM to present characters of any level with a large group of opponents without (a) excessive bookkeeping, or (b) huge game imbalance.

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

A horde of kobold mooks won't.

A horde of demon mooks? Sure!

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

You're leaving out the "minor threat" range. And the "threat only if there's a group of them" range.

-O

 

[Cadfan]

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

I remember arguing about this before. I made my usual point, about how, from a game design perspective, the test of whether something should be a minion or not was "would it make sense for a character of this level to kill this enemy in one hit?"

Suddenly I was getting mammoth minions thrown in my face.

So I answered that I didn't think there would be mammoth minions, because it doesn't make sense to kill a mammoth in one hit.

I got shouted down on this, and lost the argument because I couldn't prove that there were no mammoth minions. All I had was my intuition about how the system worked. I felt like it wasn't exactly a fair defeat, but there wasn't much I could do about it.

But now we have an impartial referee- the monster manual. Can someone with a monster manual tell us, what's the biggest, toughest minion monster in there, and how does it compare to a mammoth? Someone was right back in that argument, and someone was wrong. Now we can know who. Either my 4e-grokking is much inferior to what I thought, or people were creating a tempest in a teacup.

 

[Anax]

The three highest level minions in the MM are:

level 26: Lich Vestige
level 23: Abyssal Ghoul Myrmidon
level 22: Grimlock Follower

Of these, the Lich Vestige and the Abyssal Ghoul Myrmidon are somewhat special. The Vestige is explicitly described as being dangerous but so weak that it can easily crumble to dust. The Abyssal Ghoul Myrmidon is dangerous precisely because of something bad that happens when it dies.

The Grimlock Follower, however, is a pretty standard sort of minion, one designed as a mook to pad out the ranks to make for a "big" fight.

As for the credible threat thing: Remember that these things come in groups. Is a single rat a credible threat to a level 1 character? What about a swarm of rats? Same sort of idea, only in swarm case you describe the effects in aggregate (because the constituents are quite small), and in the group of minions case, you distinguish each individual (because it's hard to miss an individual ogre all up in your grill.)

 

[Cadfan]

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.)

I can see no reason why this should be so, and you do not provide one.

Why is it that a 21st level devil minion is the same as a 21st level mammoth minion? Mammoths have real world attributes, namely, being big, hairy elephantine beasts that don't immediately die when a human being stabs them with a sword. That creates the possibility for a mismatch between rules and expectations when a player stabs a mammoth and it instantly dies. This makes them poor candidates for minion-hood in anything but the most incredibly high powered of games- and I'm not sure that 4e GOES that high.

Devils on the other hand do not have real world attributes. In game, we know there are some devils which are very dangerous monsters capable of challenging the plans of the gods, and in some cases, fighting the gods themselves. Why can't there also be devils which are NOT particular tough, and which DO immediately die when an epic level character stabs them with a sword? There's really no reason why not.

If you ever work out a method of summoning forth a viewing portal into the Realm of Dungeons and Dragons, by all means, report back on the objective nature of a Legion Devil's combat prowess, and compare and contrast it with that of a mammoth. But until then, there's no reason to assert that a legion devil minion automatically justifies a mammoth minion.

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.

Is this the real issue? You want the game to have built in rules that prevent DMs from homebrewing monsters you don't like?

Yes, a DM could make a dragon, describe it as being the size of a house, give it incredible attack powers, and then assign it one hit point. Whether that would be a good idea would depend on whether the PCs were at a power level where it would make sense for them to one-shot-kill a firebreathing lizard the size of a house. If the PCs are indeed at that level (and I'm not sure that 4e goes that high), then that sort of minion is perfectly fine. If the PCs are not at that level, then a DM who created such a minion would be making a mistake.

This isn't anything new- in 3e, I could create a monster with 20 levels of barbarian, then describe it as a fluffy bunny that inexplicably murders the whole party. There is nothing in the rulebook preventing me from making mistakes.

 

[Tripgnosis]

any average joe couldn't easily take a mammoth down in one hit, but if mammoth minions are comparable to your PC's level, then your obviously not the average joe. And if you are the average joe and find yourself up against a mammoth minion, it will likly not go down in one hit cuz you won't score that hit. If you do, then you were extremely lucky and somehow managed to slip your average joe shortsword into that sweet spot without first being crushed. Extremely lucky, but feasible. A single hit can kill anything so long as that thing is mortal. You've just gotta adjust your perspective a bit. Just because a thing hasn't been hit yet doesn't mean the next one won't pierce the thing's heart or lop off it's head...

 

[micr0c0sm]

There is some ghoul minion i think is in the low 20s. It has an attack with a huge bonus that does about ten damage but also paralysis the PC. I also heard about some creatures exploding to deal necrotic damage, not sure if this was it though. I could see that serving a useful roll to soften up the PCs / slow them down letting the real baddies have that advantage most careful PCs (or not so creative DMs) are used to having. I like minions

 

[Dausuul]

But now we have an impartial referee- the monster manual. Can someone with a monster manual tell us, what's the biggest, toughest minion monster in there, and how does it compare to a mammoth? Someone was right back in that argument, and someone was wrong. Now we can know who. Either my 4e-grokking is much inferior to what I thought, or people were creating a tempest in a teacup.

I assume that by "biggest, toughest," you're referring to physical size and toughness rather than overall power level.

In that case, the biggest, toughest minions look to be the cyclops warrior and the ogre bludgeoneer. Which are big and tough, to be sure, but not mammoth-level big and tough. It's not unreasonable to imagine an ogre or a cyclops going down with one well-placed hit from a human warrior.