D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Micah Sweet]

For some maybe and can also empathise but only to a degree, because if I were sim-orientated, and I used to be more so, there would be things I'd first consider first rather than worry about minions, namely magic and hit points. To be honest I'm not sure how one can touch on minions and completely ignore how magic and hit points affect sim and world-building.

Hit points are a much bigger part of the rules than minion mechanics, harder to change or ignore. Not sure what you even mean by "magic".

 

[FrogReaver]

So what you're saying is they're abstract in both scenarios.
This is why I said my empathy goes only so far.

EDIT: See there are many ways to represent the toughness of an Ogre, not just hit points which is abstract any way you look at it.
You can have an Ogre with 1 hit point or x attacks
Place a damage threshold for instance of 15.
Any attack that does more than 15 damage kills the Ogre outright or x successful attacks kill the Ogre - whichever comes first.

In the same way you can cap hit points by Level (experience) or Size (meat) or any other combination.

Right now Hit Points provide the most abstract version, especially in the era of uncapped hit points, so the beef with Minions makes little sense.

Is your point that one of those particular methods should be preferred because I have objections to each. Or is your point that there must exist some concrete method for this that allows minions while alleviating all concerns, because I don’t think this state actually exists. So I’m really curious where you are trying to take this.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And yet it is--very much--part of the expected experience for D&D-alike games that one grows so great in power that things which were previously a major threat become so trivial, you swat them away like flies.

For goodness' sake, BECMI went there--but did so with ridiculous unreachable levels that people then actually reached by, more or less, cheesing the level system or being showered with rewards.

4e made it so earning that level of power was both actually challenging--if you generally respected the rules--and actually achievable. The price paid was that statblocks aren't absolute...which they never truly were anyway.

That has never been my expected experience with D&D-style games. I see no reason the game should demand the PC change the nature of their being as they level just by virtue of the core rules, without a specific diagetic cause.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think I have been toying around with the ideas you sketch out here, and have failed to find a good way of doing so. From my understanding your proposal is to use differing rules framework for handling the same creature.

The problem I have found is weirdness happening in transitions. Let us make it simpler with a 2 tiered solution: skill challenges that cannot defeat on low levels, standard combat on higher levels. Chances are that when you transition you find either that the opponent become much easier to handle than with skill challenge ("why didn't we just do this before"), or gets brutally more dangerous ("we easily dodged away from this before, but now we cannot get away due to all the movement restraint abilities even if we try to escape").

Getting this right for one transition is hard enough. Getting it right for 2 sound really ambitious.

Yea. It’s the transitions that really highlight the minion concerns from a sim perspective.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Hit points are a much bigger part of the rules than minion mechanics, harder to change or ignore. Not sure what you even mean by "magic".

Should it not, then, be a top priority to fix this issue at a design level, since doing so at the GM's end is a Herculean task? Should it not be a top priority to fix something so important and widespread and aggressively in-your-face? Indeed, should it not be a top priority for the simple reason that solving the HP problem would almost certainly by consequence resolve the minion problem as well, amongst several other things?

And what he means by "magic" is probably one of two things. Either:

• that a good third to half of the spells in D&D SHOULD make it have a society nearly unrecognizable to us, or
• the overwhelming power that magic can achieve means that the power-structures of D&D fantasy worlds should be radically different and almost totally based on who has access to potent magic

 

[Pedantic]

So what you're saying is they're abstract in both scenarios.
This is why I said my empathy goes only so far.

EDIT: See there are many ways to represent the toughness of an Ogre, not just hit points which is abstract any way you look at it.
You can have an Ogre with 1 hit point or x attacks
Place a damage threshold for instance of 15.
Any attack that does more than 15 damage kills the Ogre outright or x successful attacks kill the Ogre - whichever comes first.

In the same way you can cap hit points by Level (experience) or Size (meat) or any other combination.

Right now Hit Points provide the most abstract version, especially in the era of uncapped hit points, so the beef with Minions makes little sense.

I'm not suggesting those things are equivalent. Personally, I'm perfectly happy with the "fighters can just wade through lava" position, because a consistently applied, knowable mechanic that lets me draw conclusions about the world is significantly more important than modeling real world injury.

It's significantly harder to swallow an inconsistent representation of something in the world, because that makes the board state less knowable and harder to learn from.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Is your point that one of those particular methods should be preferred because I have objections to each. Or is your point that there must exist some concrete method for this that allows minions while alleviating all concerns, because I don’t think this state actually exists. So I’m really curious where you are trying to take this.

Hit Points are abstract.
One can use mechanics available any which way they prefer to reflect the toughness of an Ogre as a minion in a similar abstract fashion.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That has never been my expected experience with D&D-style games. I see no reason the game should demand the PC change the nature of their being as they level just by virtue of the core rules, without a specific diagetic cause.

And yet they do.

They literally do. In 5e as much as any WotC edition--indeed, moreso!

You change the nature of your physical being every time you hit not just an arbitrary point of growth overall, but an arbitrary point of growth within one specific discipline.

Consider a character who gains level 3 Fighter, and then level 3 Rogue, and then level 3 Bard, and then level 3 Paladin, and then level 3 Sorcerer. They are now a level 15 Fighter/Rogue/Bard/Paladin/Sorcerer. They have never changed their ability scores one iota since they first started. Then, upon gaining each of levels 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20, they gain one more level of each class they had previously advanced. They increase their ability scores for five consecutive levels.

Meanwhile, the character who started as Wizard and ended as Wizard with no deviations along the way...gained those perks spread out across their entire run. Exactly the same five, but gained one every four-or-almost levels (the last is accelerated 1 level.)

You literally do change the nature of your character's being as they level just by virtue of the core rules, without a specific diegetic cause.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Should it not, then, be a top priority to fix this issue at a design level, since doing so at the GM's end is a Herculean task? Should it not be a top priority to fix something so important and widespread and aggressively in-your-face? Indeed, should it not be a top priority for the simple reason that solving the HP problem would almost certainly by consequence resolve the minion problem as well, amongst several other things?

And what he means by "magic" is probably one of two things. Either:

• that a good third to half of the spells in D&D SHOULD make it have a society nearly unrecognizable to us, or
• the overwhelming power that magic can achieve means that the power-structures of D&D fantasy worlds should be radically different and almost totally based on who has access to potent magic

Your two things seem like the same thing to me, but I admit it is a legitimate concern, depending on the prevalence of magic in the setting. In my own settings I do my best to take this into account.

As to the hit point issue, to me it is obvious that official D&D never really messed with it much because it gets the job done from a gamist perspective and is easy to adjudicate, and many (but not all) D&D-like games follow the official lead, for business reasons if nothing else. Some versions do make an attempt to adjust the system to allow for a more sim philosophy; I have several adjustments I do myself for that purpose. There are numerous ways to do so, but the influence of the 800-pound gorilla will continue to be felt.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Hit Points are abstract.
One can use mechanics available any which way they prefer to reflect the toughness of an Ogre as a minion in a similar abstract fashion.

One can; that's never been in dispute, but one does not have to.