Fixing 4e : Minions

[MartinHarper]

The purpose of 4e Minions is to provide large numbers of feeble opposition that are easy to run en masse, individually go down easily, don't have tracked hitpoints, but add up to a meaningful threat. That's a reasonable set of design goals. One limitation is that you can't throw level 10 minions against level 1 parties, because the system breaks. I can live with that.

However, my brain gets cross at the inconsistent damage immunity of minions, and I'm not sure how I would explain it to my players if it ever came up. A wizard can use Cloud of Daggers to reliably take down a single minion, yet a Fighter cannot use Reaping Strike to do the same thing. There is no logic behind this. So, I'm considering two ways to fix this:

The first is to make minions immune to all automatic damage. IE:
1) Damage that is the result of an attack roll hit kill minions dead.
2) Damage that is the result of a conscious decision by a minion kills it dead.
3) All other sources of damage "injure" minions but do not kill them.

The alternative is to make minions vulnerable to attacks that cause damage on a miss. If I take this approach, then I'll also reduce their XP, so that six minions = one regular monster, and never use more than six in an encounter.

Thoughts? There are other ways that 4e minions suck, but I actually have a Reaping Strike fighter in my group, so I care about that more.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

Martin,

The idea behind minions is that your character is so powerful that these enemies are downed with 1 hit. At level 1 you may be able to hit a kobold and kill it with 1 hit, and ogres may take 5 hits to kill. Whereas at level 10, ogres are now minions and take 1 hit to kill.

If your system has scaling damage with level, so that by the time a character reaches level 10, they can deal enough damage to kill off that Ogre in 1 shot, then there's no need for arbitrary Minion rules.

[IGTN]

Minion rules still help, if, for example, you have an attack that does 5d6 + 10 damage (average: 27, minimum 15) and you're fighting enemies with 20 HP, minion rules make bookkeeping simpler.

Of course, they could be "if an enemy's maximum HP is less than your average damage from an attack, then that enemy dies in one hit from that attack." You could even make it more complex; ignore any damage less than half their HP, say, and any damage that averages more than their HP is instantly lethal (rolled damage more than their HP is still lethal), or you could pile their HP into lumps of, for instance, 10 (attacks that do less than 10 damage don't count, just chop off the ones place from damage dealt), and use bigger lumps as levels and HP totals get bigger.

[DragonChild]

Why not have some sort of "Death From Massive Damage" type thing except not dumb, where enemies who took a % of their total HP in a single blow just outright died? So you have your 60 HP enemy, and you want them to be a minion, just say that if they take 40 HP in a single blow, they die. For your 20 HP guys, the 2/3rds would be at 14, still under your average damage.

Edit: Wow, I feel dumb in that I didn't actually address the OP at all.

It's worth noting that the fighter may not feel all that left out. I play a 4e fighter, and there's a level 5 daily fighter power ('rain of steel' ? book not on me) that deals 1W damage to anyone who starts their turn next to the fighter. To have minions not be hit by that seems weird - and to have them hit by that but not cloud of daggers also seems weird. Honestly, I'd just allow the cloud. You take out 1 minion per round only, so it's not a huge deal with the fact that most PCs have some sort of AOE.

[cthulhu]

I don't get why minions hitpoints don't scale slightly.

HP = level + 1 would work okay. 1 + (Level/3) rounded up? Whatever works.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Minion rules still help, if, for example, you have an attack that does 5d6 + 10 damage (average: 27, minimum 15) and you're fighting enemies with 20 HP, minion rules make bookkeeping simpler.

Yeah, but it's 4e. You can have 20 levels on something and still not one-shot it on average.

I don't get why minions hitpoints don't scale slightly.

HP = level + 1 would work okay. 1 + (Level/3) rounded up? Whatever works.

Because the whole point is that they're binary-state enemies.


Honestly, here's what I'd do. Use regular creatures, and just designate some of them as one-hit wonders. Use whatever in-game justification you'd like - goblins with poor morale who'll surrender asap, zombies in extreme decay who'll fall apart easily, cinematically designated casualties who wore red today, whatever.

It's not pretty, but I think it's the easiest kludge you can manage with 4e.

[RandomCasualty2]

One thing I've tried doing is giving minions a save to avoid auto-damage. It works ok.