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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6861653" data-attributes="member: 6775031">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.</blockquote>

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