Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9182433" data-attributes="member: 42582">You asserted that representing an Ogre as a minion reflects nothing in the fiction. But representing an Ogre as a 16th level minion - which one would do if the PCs are mid-Paragon, but not if they are Heroic - does represent something in the fiction, namely, that a mid-Paragon hero is notably more powerful than the Ogre.You could, if you wanted to, represent the same state of affairs by using the standard 8th level Ogre. But that would be contrary to the precepts of the game (as per my post not far upthread about the mathematical purpose of minion stats).This is [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s point, as I understand it: 4e D&D has multiple ways of representing a given creature, just as there are multiple temperature or climbing scales. Unlike the temperature scales, though, the choice of representation is not purely conventional: it is also connected to making the maths of the game work, with the goal of supporting play. For instance, precisely because it is anticipated that the PCs are likely to encounter larger groups of weaker foes, it improves game play to use stats for those foes that reduce spike damage from them.Now one could disagree with that, and think that spike damage makes for better play. That would be an aesthetic disagreement with the 4e design. I'm not defending the 4e aesthetics here - though I can report I found them pretty satisfactory. I'm refuting the point that being a minion does not represent anything. It uses game states to represent a power relationship.</blockquote>

Verification