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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5452930" data-attributes="member: 93119">You can also "minionize" non-solo opponents once they get bloodied or their ranks are significantly thinned. There's a couple ways to do this. The easiest is to just drop a monster's HP to 1 once it gets bloodied. They're still a danger if the party ignores them but they're easily dispatched once they've taken some hits. This keeps you from wasting two players' turns finishing off a weakened monster. If you want a monster to last a little while longer but not forever you can just treat all successful hits against them as critical hits once they're bloodied.Turning opponents into minions or making them minion-like once they are bloodied helps make combats go a lot faster. For instance let's say you've got a monster like the trusty Goblin Cutthroat with 30 HP with an AC of 15. For a well mixed party the average attack damage is about 8 (D6 avg roll of 3 + 4 ability modifier) points. Assuming the party doesn't miss the Goblin it takes four turns to kill him. If there's five Goblins you're looking at a minimum of twenty rounds to kill them all. *see note belowCharacters are going to miss about half of their attacks on average so that's an average of forty player turns (10 rounds). If you only take two minutes per turn that's almost an hour and a half for a single combat encounter. By "minionizing" opponents or simply including more minions instead of skirmishers you can cut the number of player turns needed to finish the combat by at least 25%.Either "minionizing" monsters or using an accelerant are both ways to cut the number of turns required to take out the bad guys. D&D has had a problem with an imbalance of monster HP and character damage output for a long time. This is really an artifact of the whole idea of HP. Mechanically there's no penalty for PCs or monsters to run around with only a few hit points. A creature's curve mapping its effectiveness in combat is essentially flat until it hits 0 HP. There's no real penalties (outside a few powers that trigger when bloodied) for running around with 3 HP. D&D's hit point system has always been a bit of an odd abstraction for a creature's ability to absorb damage. Hit points make sense when you're modeling a unit of soldiers on a battlefield but less so when you're talking about a singular creature.*note: These are all averages. A Barbarian with a great axe, a Rogue with combat advantage, and a controller with a good high damage AoE can all help dispatch opponents faster than the average but the "long combat" meme says "on average" combats take a long time.</blockquote>

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