The Gaming Den

You get to show off how awesome you are.

Every movie I have ever seen has the heroes going through mooks. Never once have the mooks managed to do shit to the heroes. And that's okay. Why? Because how else are the heroes supposed to show off how awesome they are? A lot of big tricks don't work on the big villain, big villains don't go down so easy, etc. You need to show off just how much more awesome you are than everyone around you by killing the mooks.

Agreed. Case in point, the latter half of my Shackled City campaign in Afghanistan.

The group gets called to save their local cleric from an assault by the thieve's guild. Arriving, they have about ten mooks to deal with. The party cleric walks into his temple, casts Inflict Mass X, and drops the six lesser mooks. General machoness ensues.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't really care how "awesome" my character is. I want him to be good, sure, but I don't need a "minion mechanic" to stroke him off.

I think blowing through mooks is cool, but it only really works if A: they are dangerous, even if minimally so; B: if you have cool ways of killing them; and C: the mechanics for having a large group of mooks function together than having to micro manage each of them.

Personally, I can see the point of mooks...but I'd say mook fights are meaningless unless in some way the hero is challenged.

Its one thing for Nanoc the Barbarian to beat the finest champion of the king...that's clearly a mark of how good he is, because the champion is a good fighter. But for him to just wade through a dozen mooks really says more about how pathetic the mooks are than how good he is, which doesn't feel right.

I don't want to feel that my character is so awesome that the majority of the enemy would do just as good snapping their fingers at him. Even if that may be true to some extent, I don't want to get that feeling.

And speaking of game mechanics, if mooks are just there as targets, there is no point having minion mechanics...just have it be "Okay, you see forty orcs between you and your goal.", and you say how you attack, the DM describes them dying, and we move on to the combat we care about.

I agree that mooks have to have the potential - however small - to actually threaten the heroes, else they literally become set dressing. Mooks are supposed to occur in hordes because that's the only way they can threaten the heroes. If they can't even threaten the heroes in groups of 200...they're literally pointless.

A mook fight should involve the party needing to kill the mooks so the mooks don't clobber (or at least, severely wound) a couple PCs through enough lucky blows or sheer weight of numbers.

It seems that, and has been stated before, that come variation of a swarm mechanic is need to represent a large number of individually insignificant opponents. The tricky thing will be how to show that the swarm/unit is being damaged (I have honestly never looked over the 3e swarm rules so I'm not exactly sure how they work) as a unit you've already blown in half will obviously not be as effective as a fresh one. One solution my being to say that when HP are out, while the whole group isn't necessarily dead, they lose morale and discontinue fighting/the swarm breaks up and runs off...something like that.

I love mooks when they're done right. The trick to making them not suck though, is less about them being able to hurt the good guys and more about making them have a PURPOSE.

If you think about those awesome mook fights in the movies, there is always some element where the hero is being hurt by the mooks, but more often than not it's not because they might get maimed. It's because they only have 10 seconds to get to the bad guys plane before he takes off, and there are a half dozen mooks in the way. Or the bad guy is in the middle of his incantation to summon a demon from the fiery pits of hell, surrounded by mooks who don't do too much on their own but they slow the hero down pretty damned effectively.

They make good padding around big bad guys too. If the BBG is going to get teamganked alone, surround him with little piddly guys. They take a chunk of the damage output of the party, and they provide positioning support, even if they don't hurt much or live long.

That still requires the mooks to be able to contribute something as something other than "target practice".

Because it is ridiculous to spend an action dealing with a mook if you won't be hurt by him, so having them get Attacks of Opportunity on you as you ignore them means nothing unless they can hurt.

In FATE, mooks can attach themselves to a named character. They grant him bonuses and the PCs *can't* attack the main bad guy until they've taken out the mooks.

In 7th Sea, mooks assemble into "brute squads" and act as one creature. They roll a number of dice equal to the number of mooks (max. 6, I think), and Keep a number based on their quality (usually 1-3). A big gang of mooks can be rolling 6k3, which is respectable but not awesome, and killing a few of them reduces their effectiveness. Of course, if you're feeling ballsy you can try to kill more than one - each additional mook targeted raises their collective AC by 5, and if you miss, you missed them all.

I'm totally concurring with Shoggoth here. There's no reason the mooks have to threaten the PCs, and I'd say that actively takes away from displaying how awesome the PCs are. But they're great at eating up actions.

In FATE, mooks can attach themselves to a named character. They grant him bonuses and the PCs *can't* attack the main bad guy until they've taken out the mooks.

This sounds like a good system, except for the part where you can't attack the leader.

Well, that's sort of the point...you have to fight through the mooks to reach the boss.

Note that it's not *all* the mooks; its the cluster of mooks that have attached themselves to the boss.

I'm meh on that. The PCs should be able to ignore the mooks if they so desire. Kill the queen and the soldier ants fall, or something like that... Though the mooks should be threatening so that ignoring them has its own risks--no "oh noes 1d4 damages" crap.

Yeah, ignoring 2 mooks that guard the boss should be a surmountable but not insignificant hinderance(though in a lot of source material you have to kill the guards before you can really fight the boss) Trying to fight the boss surrounded by an entourage of 20 should be near suicidal.

This is why we need a scalable mook unit mechanic.

Of course, if mooks are adjacent to a leader, the mooks could soak up damage.

Psychic Robot wrote:Of course, if mooks are adjacent to a leader, the mooks could soak up damage.

In the words of Deadpool, as heard on X-Men Legends 2:

"Quick! Shield me with your bodies!"

ckafrica wrote:It seems that, and has been stated before, that come variation of a swarm mechanic is need to represent a large number of individually insignificant opponents. The tricky thing will be how to show that the swarm/unit is being damaged (I have honestly never looked over the 3e swarm rules so I'm not exactly sure how they work) as a unit you've already blown in half will obviously not be as effective as a fresh one. One solution my being to say that when HP are out, while the whole group isn't necessarily dead, they lose morale and discontinue fighting/the swarm breaks up and runs off...something like that.

That's pretty much how swarms work. Even of medium creatures.

Once you bust the swarm's HP to 0, the swarm disperses.

The reason that I don't like mook fights is the statting up, book keeping and useless rolling that takes place.

When the first Barbarian to join the PCs in my first 3.5 campaign (... coincidently, named Nanoc) was attacking a bunch of summoned dretches at level 7, I expected him to be able to kill at least 2-4 per round due to raw damage plus cleave.

The thing is, they were no threat to him (they were a threat to other PCs; several Dretches tried to grapple the cleric, and succeeded in sitting on his chest in a pile-on). I'll have to test out my alternate Mook Fighting system, but I know that it will make the unimportant fights go by faster, and with a chance of threatening PCs, even at very high levels.

Judging__Eagle wrote:

ckafrica wrote:It seems that, and has been stated before, that come variation of a swarm mechanic is need to represent a large number of individually insignificant opponents. The tricky thing will be how to show that the swarm/unit is being damaged (I have honestly never looked over the 3e swarm rules so I'm not exactly sure how they work) as a unit you've already blown in half will obviously not be as effective as a fresh one. One solution my being to say that when HP are out, while the whole group isn't necessarily dead, they lose morale and discontinue fighting/the swarm breaks up and runs off...something like that.

That's pretty much how swarms work. Even of medium creatures.

Once you bust the swarm's HP to 0, the swarm disperses.

The reason that I don't like mook fights is the statting up, book keeping and useless rolling that takes place.

When the first Barbarian to join the PCs in my first 3.5 campaign (... coincidently, named Nanoc) was attacking a bunch of summoned dretches at level 7, I expected him to be able to kill at least 2-4 per round due to raw damage plus cleave.

The thing is, they were no threat to him (they were a threat to other PCs; several Dretches tried to grapple the cleric, and succeeded in sitting on his chest in a pile-on). I'll have to test out my alternate Mook Fighting system, but I know that it will make the unimportant fights go by faster, and with a chance of threatening PCs, even at very high levels.

I'd say up the stats of the swarm based upon how big it is, the way that SotC does it. But that introduces other problems, because positioning is important on a mat in DnD. 20 Medium sized mooks can't be treated as one entity, because they take up 20 spaces. Maybe you could use a 3X3 template and abstract it out, such that the 9 spaces contain 10 mooks or whatever, and anyone in any of those spaces can attack them and they all get a cumulative bonus for numbers (+BAB, total HP, etc) but act as one creature?

The swarm auto-hits and deal damage to all creatures within it's space. It's HD determines damage.

A swarm can also grapple, is a creature of it's current size and uses it's current BaB when grappling. It is also not affected negatively when grappling a creature.

It's a pretty detailed template for medium creatures.