You set the other values you want, adjust the hit points to 1. What else really needs to be done? It hardly seems more fiat-based than declaring individual parts of a Solo-level creature's body as individual minions.
Ah, the goalpost move to "player agency." Initially, the arguments were about how presentation of the situation was exactly the same in any editions of D&D -- you could do everything the same way anyway. When challenged, this shifts to "what does this have to do with player agency anyway," as if the initial arguments addressed this either. And then the idea that this is an argument about player agency -- an odd place to start given the example of player by @Manbearcat was in response to how a particular approach to play worked and not player agency. Specifically, the question is how does this approach in 4e work to avoid relying on GM fiat. And, given your answer that GM fiat is perfectly fine, I have no idea why you're suddenly trying to argue for player agency on one hand while gleefully discarding it with the other.
Uh-huh, and how does that work in the game? You're sticking to a narrow statement "I can set hp to 1" without addressing anything else about the mechanical implications of minions or how they affect the GM fiat/player engagement dynamic.
No goalposts have been moved. The example was to demonstrate how 4e avoids GM fiat. This is same as enhancing player agency. Yes, we know 4e mechanics are somewhat different that 5e mechanics, this in fact why they're two different editions! However no one has actually demonstrated how 4e mechanics are different in manner which avoids GM fiat, at least in the case of this particular example. Openness about the mechanics does that, it has nothing to do with what the mechanics actually are.
This is just some bizarre magical thinking at this point. 'Minion' is just easily killable enemy that still can hit relatively hard. You can do this in 5e, as demonstrated (though you seemed to be unaware of this.) It works just the same. 4e having specific term 'minion' for this doesn't actually alter the situation one bit.
CL, I'm willing to accept that there's a huge and largely unbridgeable difference in gaming styles here between presenting a situation narratively without mechanical details and letting the players guess/make assumptions about the situation from their perspective and having the mechanical situation and the tasks laid out in detail. There simply is - and I'm with you and Lanefan that the latter pretty much strips away a lot of the charm of role playing games for me. That doing so may be done in the service of trying to keep a GM from railroading the situation just seems like a grossly disproportionate price to pay... for me. If that work for Ovinomancer's or Manbearcat's games, that's fine for their styles and players who like that sort of thing.
4e doesn't just have a term, it's a conceptual, genre-laden package that significantly reduces GM cognitive workload and provides clear situational information to players as to how the fiction is organized. To expand on the GM cognitive workload, to do this thing in 5e I have to engage the detailed monster creation rules or just wing it randomly. Both of these significantly unbalance the assumptions of encounter design, so I have to again take this load onto myself as GM to manage encounters involving these 5e 'minions'. And, when it goes pear shaped because the balance is opaque, invites use of Force to course correct.
No, it isn't moving goalposts, because the initial complaints had nothing to do with GM fiat - you moved here after those were challenged as a way to dismiss the challenges. That the initial situation was related doesn't change that you started with complaint set A about issue A and have moved to complaint set B about issue B when A was challenged.
This is, again, confusing form with function. I've already shown that it's not about revealing too much information, but just being concise about it. You can go either way. To say, though, that you can give statblocks in any edition is rather missing quite a lot of information -- it's not about statblocks, but about how 4e organized the bits of play. I can surely have 1 hitpoint monsters in any edition and give the statblocks, but how those function in play cognitively - on both the GM and player sides - is vastly different. Every edition other than 4e requires that this kind of thing be balanced by the GM in real-time, with either lots of effort and cognitive workload on encounter balancing or on using Force in encounter to manage divergence from intent. On the player side, the cognitive workload to situation within the fiction engagement is also higher outside of 4e -- I need to understand how that statblock operates at a much deeper level of analysis than I do with a 4e minion, and what fiction that represents is going to vary wildly. My ability to evaluate the fiction and make choices requires quite a lot more before I'm on the same page as the GM.
This starts to remind me of alignment discussions, where alignment proponents bring in their internalised assumptions and headcanons and claim that the two letters communicate all sort of information that simply isn't there in any objective sense. Gamey mechanical shorthands may speed up communication, and that might be valuable in certain instances; but that's it, they don't actually change how anything functions.
On the contrary, that I am open about my opinions and preferences makes my engagement honest. It is ironic that you can't see this given the topic.
I try my best to be objective, but then again, who of us can truly be that? But I really don't think the point has been close being made. It is perfectly possible that I am wrong, and 4e has robust anti-fiat elements, but just repeating names of 4e rule concepts like magical mantra is not going to demonstrate that.
