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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6660602" data-attributes="member: 82106">It seems pretty jarring when my level 5 fighter gets 1 attack per round against orcs, but 5 attacks per round against goblins, which are only marginally inferior to orcs. If the goblin boss shows up, 1 attack per round on him. I don't think this was a vast problem, but it was jarring at times. The fact that the boundaries of that bonus never changed was odd too. The PC got more and more skilled but even at 12th level he still didn't outclass an orc enough to get bonus attacks, yet he could kill 12 goblins with a single blow. I guess C&T addressed that, but it wasn't very commonly put in practice in our games (we just ignored most 2e supplements as being too poorly written mechanically to be useful). The 4e minion thing OTOH, how jarring really is it? PC damage output increases pretty steeply. A level 1 goblin warrior has 29 hit points. A level 7 fighter, using an at-will power and assuming he rolls reasonably well, can get a one-hit kill. He can get a one-hit kill on a level 8 hobgoblin warrior (minion) too of course. In fact he can probably kill 2-3 of them in a round, maybe even 4 or 5 in a 'perfect storm' (IE they trigger his CC and OA, he gets to use Cleave, etc). So there's SOME difference there, but its not huge. 4e minions aren't a perfect emulation of weaker lower level enemies, but they certainly aren't any more crazy than many oddities of other editions, and they do add a fun dramatic element to the game.EDIT: And [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s response is very germane here too. There's no such thing as "sweeps" or even a modeling of attacks into any specific fiction in AD&D. A combat round is 1 minute long, there are no absolute rules about positioning and thus no hard-and-fast positional requirements, etc. Its perfectly reasonable to model a 5th level fighter's 5 goblin attacks/round as systematically hunting down and slaughtering 5 individual goblins one at a time. No fictional disconnect would happen if orcs were treated the same way. There's simply a MECHANICAL convention which is used to provide support for a fiction that certain creatures are very trivial opponents for that level of character. Its quirky, like minions, but it works.</blockquote>

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