Rules for allied minions?

[RangerWickett]

Say I want to put my PCs on a ship with a crew. How to handle giving the PCs weak allies?

If I want to have the PCs and their crew fight a pirate crew, how can I cut down on the complication of having so many folks on each side? Have there been any official rules put out to handle this? If not, do you have any suggestions?

 

[Shin Okada]

Well, basically, 4e clearly separated PCs from monsters. And the word NPC is, strictly speaking, used for MONSTERS created via DMG rule.

In some cases, monsters may become temporal ally of PCs. But 4e rules does not cover those area well.

The most practical rule which makes "Allies of PCs" is the Companion Character rule in DMG2.

There are 2 ways to create a companion character. One is converting a standard monster (neither elite nor solo) into a companion character. Another is to create a companion character from PC race and class.

In this case, the first method may have some possibility. I mean, you don't need to make each of the ship crew into separate minion. Instead, make them a SWARM as a whole. Yes, a swarm.

I don't know if some published rule book contains such a monster, but in DDi and Dragon Magazine articles, you can find some swarms composed of human sized monsters, such as Angry Mob. It is somewhat like the mob rule in 3.5e DMG2. As most swarms are standard monster as a whole, you may turn one into a companion character.

 

[Katana_Geldar]

One equivalent I can see is the mass combat rules they have in Star Wars Saga Edition. It's outlined in the Clone Wars book and though it involves weapons of a very different calibre, the mechanics are almost identical.

Been ages since I read a SWSE book and I cut my teeth on it as a GM, good thing the systems are so interchangable as far as encounters go.

 

[frankthedm]

How to handle giving the PCs weak allies? ... do you have any suggestions?

Minions. Let saving the life of a minion 'killed' be a long duration heal skill challenge or something.

 

[RangerWickett]

I was thinking something like:

Trait - Follower:1 HP, like a minion. When the follower is reduced to 0 hit points or below, it is knocked unconscious, not killed. It dies if an enemy uses the coup de grace action on it or if no one tends to it within an hour or so. If an ally tends to it, it regains consciousness after a short rest.

Creatures can move through the follower's square as if it were difficult terrain, but they cannot end their turn there. Whenever a creature enters the follower's square, it takes 5 damage.


Military Follower
Standard Action. Melee 1. The military follower does 5 damage to the target.


Sorcerer Follower
Standard Action. Ranged 5. The sorcerer follower does 2 damage to the target and pushes it 1 square.


Pirate Follower
Standard Action. Melee 1. The pirate follower does 2 damage to the target. The target grants combat advantage until the end of the pirate follower's next turn.


The trick is, how to balance encounters when you've got 4 of these guys on your side? Do they count as an additional PC? You don't want them gaining XP or anything. I suppose you could just say they level up at the same pace as you? Yeah, their attacks, defenses, and damage scale by the level of the people they're following -- i.e., the PCs.

Do you just say to ignore an XP value of monsters equal to the XP value of the PCs' followers? I want the followers to be quick and simple to run, so that while they might slow combat down a smidge, they more than make up for it by creating a cool scene.

What do you think? Do they need work?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My solution so far has been to just narrate the actions of the allies. Add some monsters to the encounter for the allies to fight with and just decide ahead of time that if they fight such and such will happen to them on round one, round two, etc. Really you can eyeball it. The allies tie up some 'extra' monsters and meanwhile the PCs fight pretty much a standard encounter. You can also work it out such that the allies either absorb some punishment the PCs will otherwise receive OR the PCs can shield them, take the extra punishment, and keep their allies safe. Either choice might be significant depending on the situation.

The nut of it is though I didn't give the allies actual stats. In one scenario I had 8 allied soldiers working with the party. A couple of 'extra' monsters engaged the soldiers while the PCs engaged the rest of the encounter. I just narrated them receiving some wounds and a couple ended up going down. One of the PCs came over and flanked with some of them a bit. The monsters were allocated a modest amount of damage, like 5 per soldier per turn IIRC.

Had things gone further or become more dicey then I'd have had one of the PCs use Diplomacy or Intimidate to make skill checks to get them to keep fighting. It could be a skill challenge where once the allies take a set amount of punishment PCs need to make a successful check to keep them fighting and 3 failures means the allies rout. That seems like it would work pretty well.

In another scenario the party Intimidated a dragon into helping them take out some hobgoblins. The dragon flew around overhead and hobgoblin archers shot at him instead of the PCs (mostly). Again I didn't try to run through the mechanics exactly, I just figured the dragon would kill of a set number of the archers and keep the rest occupied for 4-5 rounds and then fly off. As it turned out the dragon rescued one of the PCs that went down and then blew out of town, but that pretty well turned the tide in favor of the party.

I think the good rule to follow is dice aren't really needed when dealing with stuff that doesn't directly involve the PCs. Using dice here seems to me sort of like generating your plot with random die rolls. You CAN and if you really feel like you don't know what you want to have happen that might not be a terrible idea, but even then just toss a couple dice to see which side has the upper hand and narrate whatever seems cool and appropriate.

Now, if it was MASS combat with the PCs in charge I think Mr Mearls outlined a pretty good process for doing that in his SC articles last year.

 

[Markn]

I was thinking something like:

Trait - Follower:1 HP, like a minion. When the follower is reduced to 0 hit points or below, it is knocked unconscious, not killed. It dies if an enemy uses the coup de grace action on it or if no one tends to it within an hour or so. If an ally tends to it, it regains consciousness after a short rest.

Creatures can move through the follower's square as if it were difficult terrain, but they cannot end their turn there. Whenever a creature enters the follower's square, it takes 5 damage.


Military Follower
Standard Action. Melee 1. The military follower does 5 damage to the target.


Sorcerer Follower
Standard Action. Ranged 5. The sorcerer follower does 2 damage to the target and pushes it 1 square.


Pirate Follower
Standard Action. Melee 1. The pirate follower does 2 damage to the target. The target grants combat advantage until the end of the pirate follower's next turn.


The trick is, how to balance encounters when you've got 4 of these guys on your side? Do they count as an additional PC? You don't want them gaining XP or anything. I suppose you could just say they level up at the same pace as you? Yeah, their attacks, defenses, and damage scale by the level of the people they're following -- i.e., the PCs.

Do you just say to ignore an XP value of monsters equal to the XP value of the PCs' followers? I want the followers to be quick and simple to run, so that while they might slow combat down a smidge, they more than make up for it by creating a cool scene.

What do you think? Do they need work?

I think this is a fantastic idea. Consider it yoinked (if you don't mind of course).

What I really like about this is that it give the players options. They can easily play the extra guys, they don't have to roll dice - just move them and do X damage. So it gives them a lot of tactical choices, yet keeps the slowest parts of the game (namely dice rolling, dice adding, power selecting) out of the game.

The down side is obviously that there are still a lot of combatants. Especially if the DM has to run the bad guys as well in mass numbers. And if you do, I'd consider similar traits for the bad guys to keep things moving. So, while the numbers will slow the fight down a bit, the pace should still be pretty quick.

If I was you, I'd consider numbers carefully though. What if the players use them to gang up on 1 or 2 bad guys (meant for the PCs to fight)? They could mow down a combat encounter for the PCs pretty quick with their allies.

Another option I have been considering is to make allies of this nature a swarm. Thus a bunch of bad guys would become a gargantuan swarm for example. It would be based on however many guys you want, but for example, if you wanted 100 guys in the swam, and you gave the swarm 200HP, you know that each guy has 2hp, so at the end of the fight if it has only 100hps left, then 50 guys were dropped during the fight. This would keep things moving, it would treat an army as a single guy and it would let you scale damage for bad guy armies to make them a significant threat or a minor threat depending upon the encounter. You could even break it down further - instead of a gargantuan swarm for an army you could do it in units. The only caution with that is that it is like adding another person to the battle, so if you add 5 units of good guys for the players and 5 units of bad guys its like doubling the number of participants in the fight and that would take a while to resolve.

The upside to the "swarm" idea is that the PCs could conceivably take on an army for a few rounds (and doing so would be heroic for sure) so they would still stand out above the mundane people in the fight. And it keeps numbers of particpants in the fight to a minimum so there are less turns to resolve.

It probably needs a bit of work - but I am really interested in where you go with this so please post your final ideas.

 

[Zaran]

I don't think you need to do much in the way of house ruling. Just make 4 ally minions equal to 1 PC when designing the encounter. During the battle you roll initiative for each kind of minion and roll attacks like normal. If they hit another minion they kill them. It won't take long for the numbers to be reduced.

 

[Mengu]

I also usually just narrate the portion of the fight that's NPC's, I won't bother with mechanics. I'll sometimes make up rules for it based on the encounter.

Had one encounter where PC's were breaking through a line of gnolls to try and help some elves fighting gnolls. The elf-gnoll fight was not significant. I had balanced the fight so the PC's would be fighting the significant portion. When the Paladin completely ignored the gnolls in front of him and went to help the elves, and started attacking their gnolls, I had to get creative. Every time he did damage to one of the elf gnolls, I bloodied or took them down in an ad hoc manner, and reduced hit points from one of the PC gnolls behind the screen. Fortunately for me, he missed a lot and I didn't have to do this very often, so I don't think anyone noticed the hit point bars moving around.

In another few fights, some elf archers were helping the PC's. I statted them out as a skirmisher swarm, and counted them as 1 additional PC.

I also don't mind not even placing minis on the board for a number of allies and enemies, and just narrating their actions. They never get in the way, they are virtually immune to PC actions, but I describe the action going on around them. In the middle of a pitched battle, the PC's may be fighting an enemy sorcerer on a manticore, and focusing all their attention on that portion. Similarly the sorcerer would be completely focused on the PC's. So every now and then I might tell the fighter an enemy stumbles toward him and as an opportunity action, he smashes the enemy's skull in, or the third beam from an invoker's hand of radiance finds an enemy who happened was just about to strike down an allied NPC.

The encounter design tools we have (XP budget, monster XP, hazard XP, etc) give us the math to make the mechanics work. The rest is just skinning. For instance a nearby skirmish between NPC's could easily be considered a trap. On the trap's initiative, two ranged attacks are made from the trap, targeting two PC's. The trap could be attacked and would have defenses and hit points. Destroying the trap would stop the attacks. Or the trap could be disabled with skill checks (though not your traditional thievery/arcana/dungeoneering). Diplomacy could be used to encourage allied NPC's to block those attacks (suppressing the trap for 1 turn), Intimidate could be used to discourage the enemies to attack you for a turn, History could be used to give tactical advice to your allies, perhaps having them use suppressive fire to give you a round of relief from the enemy archers. Proximity to the allies may be required to make yourself heard over the din of battle (similar to the proximity that would be required to disable a trap). The use of certain powers such as a Wall of Fog may be reasonable to even block all attacks until the end of the encounter.

The easier the encounter, the more flexibility you have with modifying the mechanics. For instance I might modify the environment heavily for a level+1 encounter, because even if I unintentionally increase the difficulty to level+2 or level+3, I know the PC's will be able to handle it. The harder the encounter, the more care one needs to take, but I try to keep in mind, PC's are rather resourceful.

 

[RangerWickett]

I'm trying to be ready for scenarios at paragon tier where the PCs have a ship with 20 or 30 crew on board, and they go up against similar ships of bad guys.

If I put a normal encounter worth of bad guys as the officers of the enemy ship, I'm still rolling dice for an extra 40 people. While I fondly recall spending days running 40-mech slogs in Battletech back when I was in high school, that much dice rolling is untenable for me nowadays.

So it looks like the options are either 'hand wave it,' or 'have simple rules.' I personally would go for hand wave, but since I'm working on this for a published product, I want to have rules available for folks who like rules.


Really Rules Light - Crew
Crew are a new variety of minion, specially designed for use on cramped ships, where a scene might call for dozens of foes, but you don't want to slow the game down by running them with normal minion rules. 'Crew' can easily represent soldiers in a huge battle, or members of a mob during a riot.

Do not use miniatures for crew. Instead, mark each crew member with a flat counter (such as a coin) that won't get in the way of other miniatures. If two ships' crews are involved in the same encounter, use different types of counters.

Crew never act on their own, and do not even move unless commanded or subjected to forced movement.

Non-crew creatures can enter and share spaces with crew, even hostile crew. The space a crew member occupies counts as difficult terrain. Creatures that enter the space of a hostile crew member take 5 points of damage (10 points at paragon tier, 15 at epic).

Attacks can target and affect crew just like normal minions, but only damage and forced movement matters. If an attack inflicts a condition such as blinded, dazed, deafened, immobilized, prone, restrained, slowed, stunned, or weakened, it does 1 damage to the crew member. The exception is that a missed attack still does never damages a crew member. Crew cannot gain temporary hit points.

Crew who are allied with the PCs are not killed when reduced to 0 hit points. Instead they are knocked unconscious. If tended to within an hour, they regain consciousness after a short rest and return to 1 hit point. If left untended for an hour, they die. Likewise they die if someone goes to the effort of delivering a coup de grace.

As a standard action, a character or creature can command allied crew. That character chooses four allied crew members it can see within 10 squares, and moves them with a speed of 6. Crew can move through allies' spaces (including allied crew), and can end their movements in the spaces of allied non-crew creatures. They cannot end their movement in a space occupied by allied crew.

If a crew member enters the space of a hostile crew member, both are reduced to 0 hit points. If a crew member enters the space of a hostile non-crew creature, its movement stops, and that creature takes 5 damage (10 at paragon, 15 at epic).

Crew Template - Military
When a character commands military crew, instead of moving them he can have each crew member deal 5 damage (10 at paragon, 15 at epic) to one creature adjacent to it.

Crew Template - Sorcerous
When a character commands sorcerous crew, instead of moving them he can have each crew member push a creature within 5 squares 1 square.

Crew Template - Supernatural
This represents undead or other magically resilient creatures. When a crew member enters the space of a hostile crew member, if one is supernatural, only the non-supernatural crew member is destroyed. If both are supernatural, both are destroyed.


There. That should be stupidly fast to run.