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

[Maxperson]

Any one term runs into similar problems. Such as applying "dying" to that which was never alive to begin with.

My mother's car battery died last week. People kill the lights all the time. Using kill and die for things never alive is something folks do, though in the case of minions they usually are alive.

That's actually the most problematic thing about minions that I can see. They are using the term destroy which typically is meant for objects, elementals, undead, and constructs, to describe living beings. For minions that are not elemental, undead or construct, killed is the term that should be used.

 

[AnotherGuy]

@Enrahim you seriously making the contention that in 4e with so many player freedoms - such as flexibility with powers via keyword usage, skill challenge freedom where players literally pick the skills, page 42 of the DMG for innovative powers, residuum and rituals, magical items in the PHB... etc, that somehow through all of that, the designers' intention was that a PC couldn't knock out or speak with dead with a minion because of the word destroyed?
So freedoms were afforded throughout the game, but when it came to minions there was no room to budge.

EDIT: And to be fair I agree with your Stormtroopers imperative but I find it strange that you dont afford the same latitude towards 4e designers' ethos.

 

[Maxperson]

Hors de combat?

 

[Maxperson]

Except that dying is rules defined and you're somehow trying to argue that those definitions don't apply to "destroyed" mostly because that specific interpretation supports your argument. You are rejecting any other interpretation. In other words, you're playing semantic silly buggers in order to score points.

After all, "dying" is a game defined term. But, apparently, you somehow believe that minions are immortal beings that are without any biology because they can never "die" only be destroyed. By your interpretation, a minion orc never needs to eat (since you don't take damage from starvation - which means it cannot starve), drink (same) or breathe (same - suffocation doesn't destroy, it causes the target to die).

All because you insist on an idiosyncratic reading of the rules that is very clearly not supported by the intent of the rules.

I'd be fine with it if destroyed were actually defined in the rules and the definition was different from killed, but it isn't. To make matters worse, in 4e elementals, undead, outsiders(not sure that's the term for them), and constructs are all destroyed, yet since they are all creatures they can be knocked out.

Why can destroyed creatures(elementals, undead, outsiders, etc.) be knocked out, but destroyed creatures(minions) cannot be? It makes no sense.

 

[Maxperson]

You realise you just brought up Game of Thrones killing off main characters as a defense of your style game (which I have no issue over) in the other thread but somehow draw the line at one-shot minions as the bridge too far?

Going only by what you posted here as I didn't see the other thread, I can see a stark difference between the two. Pointing to Game of Thrones to justify a narrative style of play(gritty/dark) is very different from using radically different mechanical implementations of the same creature.

I can easily see where one would be acceptable to a person and the other not. In both directions. Someone could just as easily be good with minions, but really against gritty/dark games.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Going only by what you posted here as I didn't see the other thread, I can see a stark difference between the two. Pointing to Game of Thrones to justify a narrative style of play(gritty/dark) is very different from using radically different mechanical implementations of the same creature.

I can easily see where one would be acceptable to a person and the other not. In both directions. Someone could just as easily be good with minions, but really against gritty/dark games.

The argument @Lanefan made is not mechanics but rather why enforce movie tropes at all because they're a different medium. Which is a pretty bizarre comment to make...
Considering RPGs are modeled after different mediums all the time which would include their tropes (PC games, Series, Movies, Novels, Cartoons)

 

[Lanefan]

You realise you just brought up Game of Thrones killing off main characters as a defense of your style game (which I have no issue over) in the other thread but somehow draw the line at one-shot minions as the bridge too far?

Yes.

A TV-based example of one-shot minions are most of the fights in Hercules and Xena. Usually there the mooks get clobbered, pick themselves up, and run for the hills; and while fine for campy entertainment like that, it actually makes very little in-character sense that the heroes a) let them go (usually without even catching one to question) and then b) don't track them to their base to either round them up or finish them off.

The other thing Game of Thrones does that Herc-Xena really doesn't is better reflect the idea that there's a whole range of fighting capabilities (i.e. levels) between mook and master.

 

[Enrahim]

@Enrahim you seriously making the contention that in 4e with so many player freedoms - such as flexibility with powers via keyword usage, skill challenge freedom where players literally pick the skills, page 42 of the DMG for innovative powers, residuum and rituals, magical items in the PHB... etc, that somehow through all of that, the designers' intention was that a PC couldn't knock out or speak with dead with a minion because of the word destroyed?
So freedoms were afforded throughout the game, but when it came to minions there was no room to budge.

EDIT: And to be fair I agree with your Stormtroopers imperative but I find it strange that you dont afford the same latitude towards 4e designers' ethos.

I just want to point out that all the examples you list are the designers putting in subsystems defining up structure and rules for things that previously was up to the game table to decide. That is they indeed are defining up details of what should happen at the table. That is they have defined up "freedoms" within constraints that was not previously there.

I think this speaks of an agenda to more strictly define how the game looks, and is played. For instance a player of 3.5 likely had no problem describing to the GM if there was some magic item they wanted. 4ed formalizing the process and giving guidelines for how to hand out these wishes isn't really giving any more freedom, but rather acts as defining how the designers envision the game to be played.

In this context, the designers trying to bring across how they intend the minions to be used trough rules language fits perfectly this pattern of these other sub systems. It gives the players a new category of things to interact with which wasn't there in the past - and defines up how they are supposed to interact with them. The ability and combat system give huge freedoms in how to do this. For instance when playing a wizard I thought it was pretty cool to be able to make a one square wide door impassable by minions using cloud of daggers. I couldn't do anything quite like that in 3.5 by the book.

 

[clearstream]

My mother's car battery died last week. People kill the lights all the time. Using kill and die for things never alive is something folks do, though in the case of minions they usually are alive.

That's actually the most problematic thing about minions that I can see. They are using the term destroy which typically is meant for objects, elementals, undead, and constructs, to describe living beings. For minions that are not elemental, undead or construct, killed is the term that should be used.

And yet the game text has "destroyed". It uses this word in a game-system sense, rather than simulative.

It will be a poor interpretation that interprets a "minion is destroyed when it takes any amount of damage" in a way that results in a minion taking some amount of damage and not being destroyed.

This is not a case of Specific Beats General. Specific beats general requires specificity. You cannot open a locked door. Lock picking lets you specifically open locked door. It uses language that very clearly(with specificity) makes an exception to the general rule.

The minion rules are general minion rules. Nothing there specifically overrides the general knockout rules. Assuming that the word destroyed overrides it is an assumption you are making, not a specifically worded rule that beats the general knockout rules.

You are engaging in general beats general, which doesn't work.

I disagree. Knocking Creatures Unconscious generally applies to all monster roles. The Minion monster role specifically asserts an exception to it.

EDIT One way I look at this is to consider what text would make all creatures with a specific role not knock-out-able when reduced to 0 hit points without making them immune to  sleep etc.

In any event, I remain pessimistic about your chances of presenting an argument that I will agree with, and am not particularly optimistic about mine in return. So let us again just agree to disagree?

 

[Micah Sweet]

The argument @Lanefan made is not mechanics but rather why enforce movie tropes at all because they're a different medium. Which is a pretty bizarre comment to make...
Considering RPGs are modeled after different mediums all the time which would include their tropes (PC games, Series, Movies, Novels, Cartoons)

I don't think that's bizarre at all. Stories and games are different things, and there's no need to use mechanics to direct a game to follow a particular narrative path. To me, a story set in the exact same setting as a game is simply one way, however unlikely it might be, that a game could have gone, and personally I don't want the rules of that game to make it go that way or any other way in particular. Events in play, actions by players and the GM in the setting, are what determine the ultimate course of the narrative IMO, seen as a story only after the events have occurred.