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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5395676" data-attributes="member: 58197">Many of these "silly questions" are answerable with a little thought. A minion's single hit point simply brings into sharper focus something that's always been true in D&D, to wit: Anything that deals hit point damage, even just 1 point, can kill. It follows that anything which shouldn't be able to kill, shouldn't be dealing hit point damage. For any given threat, imagine it happening to a PC with one hit point left (and keep in mind that such a PC is in good enough shape to be up and fighting). Does it seem like that threat should be potentially deadly? If so, why can't it be equally deadly to a minion? If not, why is it dealing damage at all?As for 1d8 + stat damage, minions belong to an NPC class* which gets "deal a flat X points of damage per attack" as an at-will.To the more general point: Unless you're running something like "Order of the Stick," I don't think anyone would seriously claim the rules are an exact simulation of the game world. They gloss over things like the difference between metal and wooden arrowheads, or the possibility of crippling permanent injuries. As I mentioned earlier, there are two main schools of thought on what the rules actually are: An approximation of the game world, or a means of resolving the PCs' moment-to-moment interactions with the world, everything else being decided by DM fiat behind the scenes**.If you take the second view (the rules are entirely subjective), then of course the interaction between NPC villagers and epic monsters is whatever the DM wants it to be. However, a lot of us favor the first view: The rules are an approximation of reality. Most NPC villagers are heroic-tier minions, more or less. The DM may apply some judicious fiat to deal with corner cases where the simulation fails, but in general NPCs play by the same rules whether PCs are around or not.By this view, the question of what happens when you stack a lot of heroic-tier minions up against an epic-level monster is a question with some relevance. If the PCs rally the townsfolk to help them fight the dragon, the townsfolk will bring their heroic-tier minion stats to the battle. The DM may prefer to resolve their impact on the battle by way of a skill challenge--it beats rolling a few hundred d20s every round!--but the possible outcomes of the skill challenge should bear some resemblance to what might happen if the DM did actually roll all those d20s.From there, moving on to the question of what happens if the villagers try to take on the dragon by themselves is a natural step.Yeah, I agree with you here--this is pushing the simulation beyond its limits. The rules don't say what happens if you swap out your regular iron-tipped arrows for wooden ones. In general, I would assume that any given minion has appropriate gear; the militia archer will have wooden arrows and the professional soldier will have iron-tipped. Since the soldier is almost certainly higher level than the militia, this difference (plus better training, greater experience, and a superior bow) will be reflected in the soldier's higher damage output. If you swap the militia archer's wooden arrows for iron, or the soldier's iron-tipped arrows for wood, the DM will have to make something up to decide how that affects them.[size=-2]*This class is an NPC class for the same reason "commoner" is an NPC class in 3E--to wit, it's the suckiest sucky class that ever sucked. It's so sucky WotC didn't bother to do a class writeup for it, on the assumption nobody would ever want to play one. You only get one hit point and your level is set by various semi-arbitrary factors rather than earned XP.**In reply to your earlier post on this topic, I've run adventures where the PCs make decisions beyond the scope of regular combat encounters and skill challenges, and find they work just fine in 4E. In fact, they do a lot to breathe life into a game that can otherwise feel like a chess match between the party and the DM.[/size]</blockquote>

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