D&D 5E what is it about 2nd ed that we miss?

[pemerton]

Because they deal damage, and one point of damage is fatal to a minion (unless the attacker decides to leave them alive, I guess).

I guess there might be some AoEs that require an attack roll to deal damage, so the minions wouldn't die from partial damage on a failed attack, but I don't remember any of those coming up during the time I was playing. I do very distinctly recall AoE attacks that did damage without requiring an attack roll, even if it was only 4 damage, because that was sufficient to kill all minions on the scene.

I'm still confused.

Are you aware of the rule that minions take no damage on a miss?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm still confused.

Are you aware of the rule that minions take no damage on a miss?

Yes.

Are you aware that not all damaging effects require an attack roll?

 

[pemerton]

In 2E, an ogre has stats that don't change depending on the level of the PCs who are looking at it. That is an objective reality, and 4E fails to provide an objective reality.

As demonstrated by special relativity, the distance between two events, or the time between them, will change depending on the velocity of the person who is looking at them.

Yet special relativity does model an objective reality. And the space-time interval is constant across observers.

Checks happen when there is uncertainty. If your blacksmith has +13 to blacksmithing, then a DC 15 check is uncertain, and a roll is required. Ergo, a smith who doesn't fail at DC 15 tasks must have a CR of at least 13 in order to guarantee a proficiency bonus of +5.

That is not how 5e measures uncertainty. Per the Basic PDF, p 58:

The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.

For every ability check, the DM decides which of the six abilities is relevant to the task at hand and the difficulty of the task, represented by a Difficulty Class. The more difficult a task, the higher its DC.​

In other words, the GM first settles the question of uncertainty, and only if that is settled in the affirmative does the GM then set a DC.

It is not clear whether the question of uncertainty is settled by reference to infiction considerations (a bit like one approach to finding secret doors set out by Gygax in his DMG), or by reference to pacing/dramatic considerations (similar to various indie RPGs like Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel, etc), or both.

But it is clear that the question of uncertainty is not settled by reference to DCs, because that question has to be answered before a DC is set.

in the name of the little black pig what level were you when you were facing minon giants? The lowest level giant in the Monster Manual is the Hill giant at level 13 and it isn't a minion. And should only be minionised at around level 20. Either you were approaching epic tier fast, that was a bad homebrew monster, or someone at WotC really screwed up.

I think Revenge of the Giants has level 17 minion frost giants. In my own game, I ran a version of Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl (my own conversion, not Chris Perkins') at mid-epic, and some of the giants were minions.

I knew that my stats hadn't gone up enough to make a difference, so this should have been a big and scary fight.

It seems to me like this relates back to [MENTION=77932]ZzarkLinux[/MENTION]'s observation upthread (post 314): 4e is story/fiction first, not mechanics first. Part of the role of the 4e GM, in accordance with this, is to convey to the players, via narration and framing, the relationship between their PCs and the gameworld. You can't just read this off the stats.

This feature of 4e has come up in the past in discussions about the 4e Neverwinter book, which deliberately changes this relationship compared to "default" 4e, by mapping the whole heroic to paragon arc onto the first 10 levels. (And as a result, that book has monster stats that aren't suitable for use in a default game, like high heroic rather than paragon mind flayers and aboleths.)

Are you aware that not all damaging effects require an attack roll?

I though you were talking about AoE attacks. If you're meaning SoT or EoT damage, then you needed to give your NPC friends out-of-turn movement. That's not all that uncommon in 4e. If you let them stand in the fire, or poison webs, or whatever, it's not that surprising that they suffer.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I distinctly remember entering a room and feeling like we were in way over our heads, because there were seven giants in the room, and the last time we'd fought a giant or two (a few months and ~six levels prior), they were big and scary. I knew that my stats hadn't gone up enough to make a difference

Then you 'knew' wrong, a 6 level difference was pretty huge in 4e, regardless of tier.

so this should have been a big and scary fight. Instead, while I was still figuring out which Daily power to use in order to best coordinate with the rest of the party, two of the giants just died outright from the curse damage.

Heh. I tended to describe minions as such (or at least hint broadly at it in the description) - to avoid that 'gotchya/robbed' thing from a player dropping a big gun on a nasty-looking minion.

Are you aware that not all damaging effects require an attack roll?

In 4e, virtually all attack powers that immediately caused damage did require attack rolls. Those that didn't inflicted damage situationally, usually on an enemy's turn.

Effect-line damage was added later, in Essentials, and in the notorious Magic of the Feywild Dragon article.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I will say this in the defense of the minion mechanics: They probably work out mostly okay, within narrowly defined parameters. If you do have a dozen goblins, and they would each die in two attacks (because they are so much lower level than the party that missing is a non-issue), then giving them higher AC and lower Hit Points can get you close enough to the right end-goal without nearly as much bookkeeping. It's only when you start to push them out of that comfort zone, where cracks really start to appear.

The Rod of Reaving did serve a legitimate purpose (aside from minion-smiting), because some powers worked differently depending on if the enemy was damaged or undamaged. The spider web that killed all of our Dwarf allies was an NPC ability, rather than a PC ability, and minions were mostly assumed to be enemy combatants rather than allied ones. It's entirely possible that these were edge cases that were never considered (or considered too late into the design process to fix). There were a lot of edge cases, though, and it was sometimes hard to tell what the assumptions were actually supposed to be in the first place.

And that's what I miss about 2E, really, is that 2E didn't make so many assumptions. A miner might have 6 Hit Points (as recommended for sturdier level-0 characters), and that would be enough to (probably) survive a small accident in a mine. They would probably die if you stabbed them, but the DM didn't have to decide whether any given situation was out-of-combat narrative stuff where the rules didn't apply, or whether it was time to invoke combat rules and now the character was instantly dead. You had all of the ecology and world-building stuff that told you how everything interacted with everything else - not just the PCs - and it all worked together. There was no assumption about how it was intended to be used. It just was what it was.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I will say this in the defense of the minion mechanics: They probably work out mostly okay, within narrowly defined parameters.

I'm not sure what you think those parameters are. Within the parameters of a class/level based RPG, for instance, they work pretty well. Similar rules were in other games before D&D cribbed them, and worked well. They model the kind of grunt foot-soldiers you see constantly in genre, that the hero just tears through, looking bad-ass, even though they are dangerous.

Prior to 5e bounded accuracy, a horde of merely much-lower-level monster never delivered on that trope too well for D&D. It still doesn't deliver it quite as well as minions did, IMHO.

The Rod of Reaving did serve a legitimate purpose (aside from minion-smiting), because some powers worked differently depending on if the enemy was damaged or undamaged. The spider web that killed all of our Dwarf allies was an NPC ability, rather than a PC ability, and minions were mostly assumed to be enemy combatants rather than allied ones. It's entirely possible that these were edge cases that were never considered (or considered too late into the design process to fix).

The Rod /was/ errata'd, so not too late to fix, in that sense. And, yeah, monstercide is an edge case.

There were a lot of edge cases, though

So far you've brought up two, neither that legitimate. Maybe exception-based-design felt like a collection of edge cases, though. It kinda is in some sense.

and it was sometimes hard to tell what the assumptions were actually supposed to be in the first place.

The assumptions are both simple and surprisingly numerous, and inherited from genre. D&D is an heroic fantasy TTRPG.

And that's what I miss about 2E, really, is that 2E didn't make so many assumptions. A miner might have 6 Hit Points (as recommended for sturdier level-0 characters), and that would be enough to (probably) survive a small accident in a mine.

That's a lot of assumptions of a different kind. The biggest one being that hps are some sort of in-world scientific law, rather than a game mechanic. It's also a bit of an assumption that it matters how many hps a miner has if he's just mining his whole life.

You had all of the ecology and world-building stuff that told you how everything interacted with everything else - not just the PCs - and it all worked together. There was no assumption about how it was intended to be used. It just was what it was.

You may have read that into it, but, as cute as the ecology articles were they were hardly that exhaustive. 2e, like all editions of D&D assumed you were going to be playing a character, that you only wanted to play a character that could be modeled by a set of classes - a pretty small set in 2e, really - and that you'd go out killing things and taking their stuff. Among a lot of other things. It also de-facto invoked a lot of the assumptions of the fantasy genre, and failed to deliver on them. Again, just like D&D had always done and continued to do.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

As demonstrated by special relativity, the distance between two events, or the time between them, will change depending on the velocity of the person who is looking at them.

Yet special relativity does model an objective reality. And the space-time interval is constant across observers.

I will reconsider this stance if I'm playing a game that is approaching relativistic speeds.

One of the best things about using a game system to model an event, rather than trying to apply our real-world best-guess physical models, is that most of the terms fall out of the equations as irrelevant on the scale that we care about. A good RPG system should be able to model a world-setting with a meaningful degree of complexity using only un-aided mental math, by focusing on just the two or three most relevant factors.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

That's a lot of assumptions of a different kind. The biggest one being that hps are some sort of in-world scientific law, rather than a game mechanic. It's also a bit of an assumption that it matters how many hps a miner has if he's just mining his whole life.

Even having read FATE, I cannot imagine a game being so poorly designed as to fall into the trap you are suggesting. So yes, I'm going to give the designers some credit, and assume that Hit Points are a real thing which exist in the world - that all of their spells and potions and poultices actually do something - and it's not just a game mechanic which exist entirely outside of that reality.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Even having read FATE, I cannot imagine a game being so poorly designed as to fall into the trap you are suggesting.

I suggested no trap for a game fall into, just pointed out that in claiming 'fewer assumptions' for the game, you were making some pretty serious assumptions, yourself.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I suggested no trap for a game fall into, just pointed out that in claiming 'fewer assumptions' for the game, you were making some pretty serious assumptions, yourself.

My only assumption is that the professional designers of the world's most popular table-top RPG are not blitheringly incompetent and have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of Role-Playing; both of which statements would have to be false for them to include HP as a purely meta-game resource that doesn't reflect an in-game observable reality.