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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6639092" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Getting back to Math, Monsters, and Minions.  Throughout the life period of 4e, the designers got better and better at understanding just how incredibly awesome, malleable and capable their ruleset was.  However, I wish they would have gone further.  Minion rules have so, so many applications (as I posted upthread).  One of the best uses of the Minion rules is to use them for monsters with a bunch of appendages.  This makes combat with monsters like the Hydra, Tentacle Monsters (like the Kraken, etc), and the Beholder so much more tactically deep for both the PCs and the GM (do I go after the central mass or this appendage or that appendage, etc).  Also, with "each creature" having their own autonomy, it mitigates the potential of status effect lockdown and/or having to use no action effects/spend action economy to shrug off debilitating status effects.I really like the iteration of the 4e Beholder.  However, the last Beholder boss fight I did in 4e had:1)  Mass with central eye as an Elite.2)  Each Eye Stalk was a Minion, obviously with 1 HP, its own defenses, and its own discrete actions.I've done that with tons of monsters with that general theme.  No other D&D ruleset even attempts this and if you tried to pull it off with any of the other rulesets, it wouldn't work well or be as tactically rich.</blockquote>