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

[TwoSix]

However I have not read "Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters". Didn't know it existed. Seem interesting, so I will probably pick it up. Thank you for the tip!

Looking at the 4e design decisions after reading both Wizard Presents books (the other is Races and Classes) provides quite a bit of clarity as to why things were developed they were.

Those 2 books were fairly instrumental in moving me from being initially cool on 4e to becoming a 4e fan.

 

[Enrahim]

Let's move past the goblins shall we?
The issue is not goblin minions but minions of monsters that are historically tougher.

Yes, and I pointed out to me the xps indicate to me that they were originally intended to follow the same pattern as goblins, but that the math involved caused the effective level of moderate xp monsters to explode in a way I suspect was not anticipated.

Do you find ogres complex to run?

Not particularly. But 4 ogres I need to track hp for is a bit more overhead in a battle with a lot going on than 4 ogres i can just remove on hit. However I agree the cost is more than it tastes. It seem like a case of possibly premature optimalisation.

You mentioned tight deadlines...

Jupp.

 

[Cadence]

Thinking about the place of minions in the game reminded me of this from 1e. I thought it was by DMG combat tables, but it is on page 25 of PHB under the table about fighter, paladin, and ranger attacks per melee round (that increase from 1 to 3/2 to 2 as they level):

Granted that melee rounds were one minute in AD&D because it "is not in the best interests of an adventure game, however to delve too deeply into cut and thrust, parry and riposte" and instead the "system assumes much activity during the course of each round". (DMG page 61). Still, a 20th level fighter getting 10x as many attacks against a 0-level (or d7 or less) monster than against a 1st level (or d8 or higher) monster shows how big of a difference that 1st level is.

I somehow knew the rule existed, but I have no recollection of fighters always (after1st level) taking multiple attacks against Goblins (d7) and Kobolds (d4). I wonder if that comes from starting with B/X and if those who started with 1e always did (and also used a lot of the combat rules in the DMG I don't remember).

 

[Enrahim]

I do not think the disparity of hit points between minions and others was an issue for 4e.

I'm not sure sim was a concern given math of the game.

I agree to this. I think this was a tradeoff I think they would be aware of, and they decided to take open eyed. I just think the tradeoff was larger in context of 4ed than what it might be in some other contexts.

What do you mean by groups?

Never mind about 2024, seem like I misread the mob rules, or confused them with some other system.

Draw steel (and some other system I do not remember, might it be hero quest I was thinking of?) has rules where a group of creatures (minions in DS case) pools together hp, and members die when a hit brings the total damage passes some treashold. It can still give some weird effects, require some tracking, but seem to me overall a bit more robust.

 

[Cadence]

Draw steel (and some other system I do not remember, might it be hero quest I was thinking of?) has rules where a group of creatures (minions in DS case) pools together hp, and members die when a hit brings the total damage passes some treashold. It can still give some weird effects, require some tracking, but seem to me overall a bit more robust.

Mooks in 13th age have pooled hp (from the 13thagesrd):

 

[AlViking]

What do you think the idea was?

I think the idea was: "With only 1 hp, we don't have to track hp". This was meant to fix the hp tracking problem for insignificant goons - a staple of the genre.

As such I would think pure game consideration in terms of limiting complexity might have been just as much a motivation (or even more) as any narrative motivation.

Unfortunately this solution was too extreme with D&D 4ed big numbers philosophy. The gap between a minion and non minion in terms of HP became too big at higher levels - further compounded by their math for ordinary high level creatures was off as well - in the bag of HP direction. This caused this solution to fall completely apart in a "sim" perspective.

As such it might be that Dagger heart with it's flat, low HP math can get away with it? It is nice to not have to track HP at all.

Meanwhile D&D 2024 and Draw Steel try to dial it one step down by not getting rid of HP tracking completely, but simplify it to one track per group.

The idea according to WOTC at the time was to have action movie enemies that show up in large numbers that the hero easily dispatches. If tracking HP is too much work, perhaps D&D isn't the best game.

It just didn't work for me in the long run. Like a lot of 4e it was an interesting idea but I don't think it fit well with the rest of the game. I'm not sure what the correct implementation would have been and given the different design approaches of 4e to 5e (and previous editions) I'm not sure how you port over but fix the core issues if I wanted to.

But the main reason I expressed a difference of opinion is that a lot of people like to lay the blame on not liking them on misunderstanding and rumors. Technically an ogre minion had a different label than non-minion ogres ogres so by the text they were different monsters. Except that if something looks like a duck, quacks like duck, then its probably a duck. They broke that in a fundamental way, minions looked like, talked like, hit like ogres except a very defining trait of ogres is that they are a big brute punching bag.

Being turned into a glass cannon just didn't work for a lot of people. It changed their identity too much.