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

[AlViking]

Look, last session the kobold delivered Gastlagast's insult, and the final moment of the evening was Cronut popping the kobold's head like a grape, bellowing, "Enough banter! I'm going down to the DMV tomorrow to wring an apology from that devil-spawn!" I have a week to put together a cool encounter for it.

The minion thing is a tool. If it does a job you wanna do, use it. Or don't. No skin off my nose, either way. It isn't deeper than that.

The point is that minions are for times and places that aren't loaded with 10-year-old commoners, so comparing them is kind of silly.

Whether or not that was the intent (and they were often not used that way), that was my point. Minion ogres no longer ogres, they're paper cutout narrative set pieces. If you wanted Cronut to wade through dozens of lackeys, there are plenty of low level monsters that could fill that role.

While D&D is not designed to be a focused simulation game, it does have its roots in war game sims and for a lot of people that's still a core piece of it's identity. Minions were serving a narrative master while every other monster served a sim master. I think they're better off choosing a lane like every other version of the game.

There's nothing wrong with a monster or any other rule component (like inventory in BitD) serving as a narrative conceit, but minions stuck out like a sore thumb to a lot of us.

 

[Lanefan]

Show me how mathematically?
How do you know what Damage Threshold a minion ogre in MY 5e game would be? Because that is what you are responding to, right?

Question: what's the functional difference between giving minions a damage threshold and just leaving them with the hit points they would have had were they not minions?

EDIT: And the other mechanical option I offered in my posts for a 5e minion were x number of successful attacks would kill it where you could have a lower Damage Threshold like 5 for instance or none at all.

Again, though, what's the functional difference between this and just leaving them their normal hit points?

 

[Lanefan]

Here I meant mostly because it got weaker as the dragon did.

Not sure what you mean here. The dragon's breath weapon does its max hit points in damage, not its current hit points.

I'm guessing the rationale was old movies. I've seen a couple of movies from the 50s and 60s where the hero hacks away at the dragon and, because the special effects and/or Hayes code prevented obvious injuries and blood, the only way to easily show that the dragon was injured and dying was for its head to droop listlessly and have its fire breath be a weak trickle instead of a powerful blast.

This is all new on me. Dragons in various media today tend to get nastier as they get more injured, not the reverse.

 

[Faolyn]

Plausibility and judgment.

Really? And how do you determine that something is less plausible? Do you assume it's impossible to come up with a plausible reason on the fly, or an implausible reason that's thought up days in advance?

 

[Lanefan]

Only if your goal is to strictly simulate the physicality of the ogre (and other monsters).

Yes it is, to the point where this should pretty much go without saying.

If you are trying to represent the narrative role of the ogre, then it can have different representations depending on the narrative state in which you encounter it.

Get the mechanical simulation of its physicality vaguely right and the narrative will take care of itself.

Bringing up 10-year-ols should be a clue that you're barking up a strange tree, since D&D is not centered on 10-year-olds without PC class levels. Monster stat blocks are designed for pitting against a PC in play, not for pitting against children in theorycrafting.

And yet in a D&D play situation it's very easy to imagine a situation arising where a 10-year-old villager is stuck facing down (or is even intentionally trying to help the PCs against) an Ogre to which the level of the PCs has given "minion" status. Then what?

Or never mind a 10-year-old; let's make it the village policeman, all one level of Fighter of him, standing up to that minion Ogre while the PCs deal with some other threats. Now what?

This goes back to my much earlier question about lower-level henches in the party and how they work with minions, which got largely pooh-poohed with answers saying, in effect, 4e didn't have henches; hardly helpful, and I'm sure there's 4e tables that did (and maybe still do) have henches or followers or hirelings as a thing.

 

[Lanefan]

Saying that the minions mechanic is essentially unnecessary doesn't seem like a particularly robust defense of it.

Good, because I'm not defending it.

I think minions are one of 4e's poorest mechanic ideas.

 

[SableWyvern]

Not sure what you mean here. The dragon's breath weapon does its max hit points in damage, not its current hit points.

As I recall, current vs maximum hit points is an ancient debate (which I'm not planning to weigh in on).

 

[Maxperson]

The section you quoted from is from an out of date section of the old PHB labeled and you are taking it out of context.

The sentence you keep quoting does not say commoners are proficient with simple weapons, it says "most people" are and you conveniently left off the sentence proceeeding:

"Your race class or feats can grant you proficiency with weapons or certain categories of weapons"

This is the opening sentence from the paragraph you keep quoting and it makes it explicitly clear who they are talking about - "YOUR" proficiecnes, not a random NPC or commoners or anything else, they are addressing YOU.

Further if we are to say this text applies for all NPC then that means they need a race, feat or class to get proficiency because the paragraph you are qouting makes it clear that is how you get proficiencies. Not by being a commoner and since "most" people have these proficiencies then clearly some don't.

So what is the race, class or feat that gives commoners this proficiency?



It is not. It is written in 2nd person.

Your position makes absolutely no sense. You've just claimed that if there are 10 million people in the world, over 5 million of them are PCs, because that's the only way most people could be proficient with simple weapons and only be talking about PCs.

Thankfully, you're wrong with your position and the PHB 100% includes the entire game including PCs. The 5e DMG says so.

Page: "This book has two important companions: the Player's Handbook, which contains the rules your players need to create characters and the rules you need to run the game"

Page 5: "The Player's Handbook contains the main rules you need to play the game."

Page 9: "This book, the Player 's Handbook, and the Monster Manual present the default assumptions for how the
worlds of D&D work."

The PHB contains the game rules. Not player rules. Game rules. The PHB contains default assumptions for how the worlds work. Worlds include NPCs.

Except the parts which have been replaced ... and that includes proficiencies by race (and race in general in fact) and therefore that whole paragraph considering the first sentence.

No. You are allowed to keep any old rules you wish. You aren't required by the game to update to the 5.5e versions.

Most people, even in the out of context way you are using it, means some people don't. It means exactly the opposite of what you claim - that being a person does not automatically give you proficiency.

But most have proficiency. Not the zero you are claiming.

No they are not. The entire definition of person is not even clear.

A commoner is a specific monster, and one of over 500.

So tell me then. Who outnumbers the commoners of the world? Understand that there isn't one commoner in the entire world just because they are one stat block among five hundred. There are lots and lots and lots of commoners. That's why they are called commoners and not uncommoners or rarers.

No it doesn't. It does not say commoners are proficient with anything.

Riiiiiiiight. Commoners are not among "most people."

Gladiator is already a background in the 2014 PHB - page 131. It provides an unusual weapon like a net or trident as starting gear but does NOT provide proficiency with that weapon. To emphasize my earlier point you get the weapon, you presumably use the weapon every day, but you don't get the proficiency in the weapon .... and any PC can take that background. The proficiencies you get from Gladiator are Acrobatics, Performance and a Disguise Kit.

Backgrounds are not for weapon proficiencies. They are supplemental to class which dictates PC(but not NPC) proficiencies. NPC proficiencies are from different areas of the game.

I am confident a gladiator subclass will not provide proficiency in any class of weapons. If they have proficiency it will be because of the class it is attached to.

Um. If they are a subclass of fighter, then gladiators will be able to use all weapons. They aren't going to be a subclass of whatever "class" you think gets only one weapon proficiency.

This discussions of Gladiators brings up another good point. PCs Gladiators use weapons in their performances every day, but they don't get proficiency in them .... yet commoners automatically do???

There aren't going to be many wizards, sorcerers, or druids with the gladiator background out there. Those corner cases that do, are just that, corner cases. The overwhelming majority of gladiators are going to be fighting types who have proficiency.

NPCs don't have classes and the only official Gladiator published for PCs to date did not require the Fighter class and did not provide any additional weapon proficiencies.

The 5e rules on that are still in effect, so some NPCs do in fact have class levels. It's an option for NPCs in the 5e DMG.

 

[Maxperson]

And then even earlier in my post
#21398 to @Pedantic whereby I used a Damage Threshold of 15.

I'd love to see a 10 year old with a stone do 15 points of damage in 1 attack.

EDIT: And the other mechanical option I offered in my posts for a 5e minion were x number of successful attacks would kill it where you could have a lower Damage Threshold like 5 for instance or none at all. There is also Damage Reduction and probably others mechanical ways of representing minion types.

Hey! Maybe it's ten year old Thanos.

Okay. I forgot you had altered minions that way. Others have said that the 4e ogre minion and 4e ogre are different mechanical expressions and so that's what I was thinking with my response.

 

[Maxperson]

Only if your goal is to strictly simulate the physicality of the ogre (and other monsters).

If you are trying to represent the narrative role of the ogre, then it can have different representations depending on the narrative state in which you encounter it.

I suggest to you that the moment when a single ten-year-old human child faces down an ogre, the narrative role of that ogre is probably not "minion", so the encounter you are envisioning should never take place.

Bringing up 10-year-ols should be a clue that you're barking up a strange tree, since D&D is not centered on 10-year-olds without PC class levels. Monster stat blocks are designed for pitting against a PC in play, not for pitting against children in theorycrafting.

Your discussion will go to weird places when your argument is based on using game elements for things they weren't really designed to do. Talking about using ogre statblocks against 10-year-old commoners is kind of like talking about using a hammer to drive a screw. You can do it, but it doesn't tell you much about the typical reality of building a backyard deck.

There have been a lot of posts so you probably missed the scenario when it first came up. The scenario was minions attacking a town and fighting the PCs, but with a ten your old kid on a roof throwing down rocks, which is something that could easily happen in that situation.

The ogre minion isn't going to simultaneously be a minion for the PCs and also have 111 hit points for the kid's rock.