You Never Pit 9th Lvl Minions Against 1st Lvl PCs.

pemerton said:
I'm pleased to have pleased! But if you read the rest of my post, you'll see that I was embedding the opportunity to showboat within a broader and more sophisticated context of narrative development. The showboatin means something.

Well, the narrative is taken for granted. If the people around the table are those who appreciate the value of showboating, I suspect they'll also be the type who are into the game-as-movie/TV show/drama metaphor than strict world simulation. Which puts you into that narrative-facilitating mindset as a byproduct.

I don't understand why those who like gritty simulationism aren't playing the games that do it well, like RQ and RM.

I wouldn't really say RM is simulationist. The only thing it simulates is the Darwin Awards, when someone rolls on those sweet, sweet crit tables.
 

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Saying that they don't have 1 hit point is indeed false : they do.

But what you must understand is that hit points are *not* the ability to survive damage, big or small, but the narrative ability to make a killing blow into something not deadly, like a near miss, a scratch, ...

Hit points have been named plot points by some, and I agree : your minion with 1 hit point is not going to die if he happen to cut himself while shaving, or if it is bitten by a angry kitten, it's just that when the situation became serious, and a PC blade comes your way, you are among the unluckies that won't be able to survive the first hit by deflecting it slightly to the left, making it miss your heart.

A 10th level fighter with 120 hit points is not going to survive being stabbed in the heart anymore that he was when 1st level with only 12 hp. But of cours his training and experience will make stabbing him much harder.
A high level character that survive a coup-de-grace by an assassin while he was sleeping ? He just wake up at the last instant and manage to deflect the blade. Sure, he might have been injured, but it's just a small wound instead of a blade straight into the heart.

That's what hit points represent, and always have (sometimes poorly, I agree *cough* cure light wounds *cough*)

So, going back to our minion with 1 hp, it just means that he will die at the first *deadly* attack againts it, like most people would in the real world when attacked with weapons.

It is better for verisimilitude, not worse, than previous editions.
 

hong said:
I wouldn't really say RM is simulationist. The only thing it simulates is the Darwin Awards, when someone rolls on those sweet, sweet crit tables.
On this we disagree - I've played a lot of RM, and read a lot of RM rulebooks - and I think Ron Edwards is dead right when he locates it in the "purist for system" category (although some later additions to RMSS/RMFRP are moderately incoherent).

And for unfettered simulationist thinking visit the ICE message boards some time. It's a sobering experience.
 

Well, I'll agree that RM is pretty rules-heavy. I still don't think it actually _simulates_ anything. Not real life, not fantasy action, not dark fantasy.

Perhaps you could say that it simulates the model of reality that lives inside the RM designers' heads, but that's a rather weak criterion.
 

I think I'm considering going my minion rules:
1/2 Level (1/2 of 1 is 0 since round down) + 1/2 Con Score.
So level ones always have 1 hp.
But I think I'll make Level 1-4 1 hp; after that use my rules.

So level 9 Orc Warrior is Level 9 with Con 15 so 11 hp.

Though, that makes the my higher level minions die on a miss. Wait, unless I add back it, "a missed attack never damages a minion."
 


Paraphrasing Mike M or Dave N on the podcast (I forget which was talking):

The experience based encounter building is much more flexible than the CR system. You can go higher in level and much lower in level without the system breaking down, but there are limits. I would think throwing creatures from the end of the Heroic tier (even minions) at characters just starting the heroic tier is not going to produce fun (for the players) and predictable (for the DM planning) results.

Fights that hinge on a lucky roll tend to wash. It looks like in the encounter presented, if the players roll good before the orcs... well... roll at all--the fight is over.
 

Orc minions appear to have more than one HP because they do not take damage on a missed attack that does damage, such as an AOE attack the does 1/2 damage on a miss. The minion took damage but survived because you have to score a hit to kill orc minions.

Anyway, as a DM, I really like the new orcs. And it will be much easier for me to model orc clans that are disciplined militocracies (a la hobgoblins) instead of tribal.
 

Wolfspider said:
I've read this claim several times from different posters, and I really don't know how people are able to make it considering the previews we have seen. Minions (at least the ones we've seen in the various D&D previews) DO have a single hit point. Let me quote from the Orc excerpt:

"HP 1"

Seems pretty clear to me....

I'm just going to direct you to our earlier posts, and encourage you to try and understand them, because we pretty much said it there. If I were to try and explain again I would just get frustrated. I don't remember exactly where it came up, but we've known for months that if a particular NPC was hugely outclassed in a fight, the DM could give him a 'Minion' status and he would go down in one hit in the context of that fight. Turns out that the MM comes with that work already done, and some of the monsters are minions with only one HP.

Using 1 hp minions in any other context than a fight where a similar creature with fully statted hit points would probably go down in one hit anyway is using minions in a way that they were not intended to be used, and will most likely cause your gameworld to not make sense. Period.
 

Minions is one of those things that drums up furor amongst speculating internet fanbase and will work like a charm in practice.

It's sort of the reverse bag-of-rat tricks for 4e. You remember the noise about using cleave to kill weak monsters for the express purpose of doing 3 hp to an adjacent tough monster? Only a problem on the board, will not be one in practice. Same thing for minions.

DM will just look at the situation, look at the participants and assign a role. He may decide that these guys are nameless mook while this guy is the shaman/leader with a bodyguard. For the fun of it he'll add a sneaky bastard who'll try to gut the wizard. Eight Minions, One Controller (Leader), a Brute and a skirmisher. Let's roll.

And thus the DM realized he could craft a good fight with variety aplenty in less time than it took his faithful disciples to fetch him a cold beer. At last! He said. No need to waste hours adding character levels and tweaking stats to achieve true glory! He saw that this was fun and knew that it was good.

And after his players shall have their fill of excitement and laughter, having slaughtered dozens of imaginary orc in grand fashion, they shall look up to their wise DM and ask:
-''Truly you say, dozens of people on a far away board split their hairs in twain, trying to ascertain what might happen should two minions clubber each other in a bar fight? But... why, oh wise one?''
-''Dear disciples, it is because they hadn't gotten the chance to play yet and needed to do something to kill the time. But these were the dark age. Rejoice for now the reign of 4e has come!''
 
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