NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 4864931" data-attributes="member: 61155">"A minion is destroyed when it takes any amount of damage." I'm not entirely sure how to read that statement as implying that 0 damage butterflies can kill minions. Is it a combat encounter? Has the DM statted out NPCs that are explicitly designed to be relevant to the combat? Then yes, they can certainly kill minions, if he is essentially treating them as backup characters. But determining whether a tribe of Ogres can threaten a village - that doesn't require rolling out an explicit combat that doesn't involve the PCs, that takes place off-screen, and which is motivated by the DMs story to begin with. The minion rules are there for combat relevant purposes. Generally, that means the PCs. If the DM really decides something else is combat relevant to the minions, sure, he can use them then. If he does so in the fashion you are describing - deciding that a butterfly needs to be combat relevant to an Ogre minion, he is making a bad judgement call, and one that goes against the intent of the minion rules to begin with. And yet, I'm making it in this thread, since this is the one where you are making arguments based on misinterpretations of the rules and spontaneously invented fake rules. But yes, some common sense is coming into play. The fact it is backed up by the intent and direct instruction of the 4E designers certainly helps, though. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/ponder.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hmm:" title="Hmmm    :hmm:" data-shortname=":hmm:" />Why are the NPC farmers there? Do you, as a DM, intend for them to be a threat to the Ogres? If so, you can assign them stats capable of killing the Ogres. If you desire them to instead only be able to hinder the Ogres, you can probably treat them more as some sort of terrain or obstacle that only hinders the Ogres. If you simply have a bunch of level 1 commoners and roll for 20s to kill minions, I suggest you are ignoring the explicit instruction and intent of the minion rules. So what precisely is your issue with the minion rules in 4E, which the designers have clearly stated are only intented to come into play for combat-relevant context with appropriate level PCs. Folks have already pointed out earlier in the thread where to find the rules that prove you can't deal fractional damage. (Namely, you always round down. One of the few big rules put forward in the very beginning of the PHB, I seem to recall. Thus, fractional damage less than 1 = 0 damage.)Indeed, that is a perfectly valid comparison! Or, alternatively, not remotely so. We know new content will appear, since that is an underlying assumption of the game. Assuming that new mechanics will appear that completely contradicts all previously seen mechanics and core fundamentals of the system is a lot less reasonable. Inventing a hypothetical butterfly that does 1/10000 of a damage at a time is blatantly preposterous, and attempts to treat it as a serious possibility within the context of the game only serve to demonstrate an unwillingness to genuinely engage in this discussion on a reasonable level.</blockquote>

Verification