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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ShockMeSane" data-source="post: 4213833" data-attributes="member: 64606">The hilarious irony in the whole two weapon combat thing is....You can't use two-weapon fighting without a feat (and really, to be effective at higher levels its painfully restricted to the improved/greater two-weapon feats that also force a high-dex build upon you) in 3.x. I mean, yea, technically you can swing two longswords without a feat in 3.x, but you aren't going to be hitting the broadside of a barn.I'm not sure what the difference is in 4e. Yea, you either have to take a power, or possibly a feat, or hey, maybe even both. But um, you had to use the same finite character creation resources to do so in 3.x as well. Calling it a dealbreaker sort of implies you didn't play 3.x, either.As far as some of the OP's concerns, I feel him on some of the stuff: Eldarin teleport is a little iffy, haven't seen a MM table of contents so we'll see how that goes.On other things, like the minions and the two-weapon fighting thing though, you totally lose me. Minions are presented in the MM as a tool. There are plenty of non-minion options within the Orc MM entry that you can use if you want to. In fact, if you want to run slightly wimpier orcs, we already know the rules for how to do that. Take the Orc Raider, move him down to level 1, adjust his stats, tadaa. It's like doing it in 3.x, but quicker because the reverse engineering isn't nearly so obtuse.If you dislike Minions because hypothetically a group of 200 peasents will inevitably triumph over 4 level 30 minions (requiring only 4 20's for victory), I think you are basically just looking for ways to make the rules NOT work for you. From my perspective as a DM, minions look a little more like this:Minions are totally an abstraction. They are meant to create cinematic battles for higher level players battling against enemies that were once a threat that they can now mow down easily. Sure you can do this in 3.x, they just couldn't really hurt you, which made the threat kind of... unthreatening.Minions also represent the bastard children of destiny. These are the Orcs that the first hit from a player they will fail to parry, and off with their (insert vital body part here). A standard raiding party of Orcs against a town does not include "X Drudges, X Raiders, X Bloodragers, etc". The DM needs to make intelligent decisions about when the inclusion of minions will add to the encounter. Heck, we've seen a level 3 human sentry who wasn't a minion, and with even a little luck he could kill 3 Orc Drudges, which are significantly higher level than he. It bears repeating that minions are a plot device, not a specific subspecies of the race that somehow evolved to die when hit by anything.Now, this may be too abstract for some people, and I can buy that. It is the kind of thing that works just perfectly for me, though, as you can easily create larger scale battles for the PC's without overwhelming them with wimps that can barely touch them.Trust me, I feel your pain, as I have a player in my 3.x campaign who loathes the idea of minions for the same reasons. But it's for the bag of rats reason, not a reason that would ever occur at a gaming table run by a sane DM.</blockquote>

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