You Don’t Have To Leave Wolfy Behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' Your Companions Level Up With You!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7638861" data-attributes="member: 29398">Exactly.4e thus gives formal terms to previously-informal variances within a group of monsters - you might have the 6 ordinary ogres with 40 h.p. each, the shaman ogre with 45 h.p. and spell use, and the chieftain with 80 h.p. that fought as a higher HD/higher level foe.My argument is that any mechanic that turns the 40 h.p. ogres into 1 h.p. ogres is intentionally not being true to what's established in the fiction, and is thus very flawed.Agreed.But as the PCs are a part of an internally-consistent (I hope!) setting, what applies to the PCs must then by extension apply to the rest of the game-world inhabitants; meaning that toggling them up and down is every bit as bad.I forget the exact term for it - dissociated something-or-other, it's been a while - but if the resolution processes and the fiction don't at least vaguely try to match up then the problem is with the processes, not the fiction.Indeed; and here Gygax is in fact trying to match up the resolution process (one attack per round) to the fiction (1-minute-long rounds) by saying that the attack roll represents the best of many attempts over that one-minute span.  In other words, he's taking a good approach.Which, given that 4e rounds are but 6 seconds long, seems counterintuitive.Actually I'd say that's every bit as realistic - and maybe even more so - than the non-4e D&D model.There's a word missing in the above which, if inserted, makes all the difference: A paragon PC can maybe kill a ghoul in 6 seconds.Look at it another way: unless you're fighting something that really only does have one hit point or less, such as a kitten or a small rat, there are three possible outcomes of any attack roll or sequence:1. You do no damage at all (typically in D&D this means you miss outright unless some sort of DoaM mechanics are in play)2. You cause damage to the foe but do not cause enough damage to kill* it3. You cause enough damage to kill* the foe* - or defeat, or subdue, or otherwise achieve your desired win condition.Minion rules disallow #2 as an option, which is not only unrealistic but - again unless you're fighting a kitten - doesn't give the monster an even break.A ghoul might normally have 30 h.p. and a paragon character might normally hit it for 4d6+20.  Most of the time the paragon is going to one-shot it but there'll be the occasional time when she rolls really badly on those 4d6 and the ghoul survives with 1or 2 h.p. left - highly relevant if the ghoul then gets a good attack in and paralyses the paragon.And a side note: this brings up another mechanic I've personally come to detest in all versions of D&D - all RPGs where it exists, come to that - and that's that, using the same example above, a hit can't do less than 24 points damage.  There's a huge gulf between 0 damage (miss) and 24 or more (hit); and the greatest warrior in the world should still be capable of hitting for only 1 point damage on an unlucky shot no matter what bonuses she has going for her.  To its credit 4e kinda waved at this problem a bit with some damage-on-a-miss mechanics, but to me a miss is a miss and thus 4e was coming at it from the wrong direction.The far-from-perfect-but-better-than-nothing solution I use is that on any 'minimum' damage roll - here this would be 4 on the 4d6 - you add the bonuses to that roll (here giving 24) and then roll a die of that size to determine what damage you actually did.  This means there's a small (sometimes very small, but never zero) chance that anything with more than 1 h.p. can survive a hit from pretty much anything - and the minion model again defeats this.</blockquote>

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