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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 4864780" data-attributes="member: 61155">I think the problem is, you are operating from a profound misunderstanding of the concept of minions (they are equally killable by PCs as by NPCs), enhanced by the introduction of entirely made-up rules (butterflies that do fractional amounts of damage). In short: Batman can take out those minions because that is their purpose in the rules - to be defeated by the hero. A butterfly won't do so because, to the butterfly, those enemies don't exist as minions. The rules don't typically present us what stats are fitting for the criminals to have in regards to butterflies because we don't need to know that. Minion's having 1 hp is not intended to represent the survivability of the monster within the context of the setting, but the survivability of the monster in the context of a battle with PCs. It is a simple mechanic by which monsters can remain a legitimate threat while being easily removed from the fight, in a manner seen in countless fantasy stories, games and movies. A group of PCs can encounter an Ogre Guard at a low level, and have a difficult fight with it. Many levels later, they might return to the Ogre Camp and find themselves facing all the Ogre Guards within - which now are minions. They have not changed in their context to the setting, but in their context to the PCs. Now, the claim seems to be being made that by creating stats that indicate minions die in 1 hit, the DM has to represent that in a monster's interactions with NPCs and the environment. The Ogre village could never prove a threat to the local town, obviously, because enough farmers throwing rocks would eventually hit them and take them all out - right? Well, no. You aren't supposed to be running them as minions against the farmers. You honestly shouldn't be spending time rolling out a combat between NPCs in the first place! Whether the ogres are a threat to the local village should be decided by you, as the DM, based on the priorities of plot and whatever is appropriate to the setting. You don't need to compare some arbitrary variables against each other to determine what should happen within a setting entirely manufactured by your own agency.If you do have a butterfly flitter past an ogre minion and kill it, the fault isn't on the system - it is on you, for applying the minion rules in a manner other than intended and deliberately creating a circumstance to undermine their use. Meanwhile, you have bypassed one of the common arguments against your point here - that this was arguably more of an issue in past editions where commoner's did have 1 hitpoint, 'for reals' within the context of the setting. You have done so with your hypothetical butterfly that does a fractional amount of damage, focusing on the weakness of a minion as 'dies upon receiving any amount of damage', while ignoring the fact that 4E assumes that 'any amount of damage' will always equal at least 1. I don't know whether this is outright stated anywhere within the rules, but it is nonetheless clearly an assumption of the game as evidence by the fact that every single monster in the game, when using attacks that deal damage, does at least 1 damage with those attacks. Inventing something outside of this, again, isn't a problem with the system, but with your deliberate choice as a DM to bypass the system and create something outside of its normal guidelines.</blockquote>

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