The Gaming Den

I'm trying to think of houserules to handle the presence of minions, especially for PCs, doubly especially for necromancers. I want it to stick relatively closely to verisimilitude, not svck like 4E, be balanced, and not a pain to run for players.

Why not just give them a handful of hit points? By mid level, most players will have attacks that deal 5 points of damage fairly reliably. Give 'minions' 4 hit points, so that most every attack will work, but not so low that players can do some "deal 1 point to everything" silliness, not that there's much of that in OD&D anyway.

Minion groups could be special areas / Zones that are moved around and make attacks against characters they come into contact with.

Perhaps degree of success in the attack determines how many minions hit with their individual strikes.

Instead of exact hitpoints just track the number of actual hits. A weak skeleton may take one hit to take out, an elite cauldron born zombie warrior could take 3 hits. It's a lot simpler than using hit points.

Instead of hitpoints, just note a damage threshold: if they ever suffer damage equal to or greater than this value, they die; do not track HP loss.

For example, if a 1 HD hireling suffers 2 damage, nothing happens. If they suffer 4 or more (approximate average for 1d6), they die. You can generalize this to "can survive a number of such hits equal to their HD".

If you don't want to track anything about then individually, consider this house rule.

virgil wrote:I'm trying to think of houserules to handle the presence of minions, especially for PCs, doubly especially for necromancers. I want it to stick relatively closely to verisimilitude, not svck like 4E, be balanced, and not a pain to run for players.

Minions all have 1d6 hit points. Skeletons, troopers, war dogs, zealots, charmed orcs, whatever. You have spare d6's, right?
Leave the dice for them all sitting in front of the controlling player, rolled fresh each session. Damage less than first die in line? Rotate that die so they have less now. Heal them? Reroll that die. New minion? Roll a new d6 and stick it on the end. Damage is greater than next die in line? Dead minion, pull the die.

Number of dice worth of minions limited to lower of PC level or Charisma score (or some combination, whatever). All their attacks use the same table, and they can all have AC 8 (maybe 7). One attack, d6 damage. OD&D almost verbatim.

Doom wrote:Why not just give them a handful of hit points?

My suggestion would be to give them minimum hit points.

I agree with Avoraciopoctules, the important characteristic of minion groups is Size. A Necromancer could animate a zombie horde 2 sizes big for each hit die he possesses. Damage to the horde should reduce the horde's Size equal to the size of the attack (a successful melee or bow attack reduces the size by 1, while a successful fireball reduces the size by 4). Creatures caught inside the horde should be attacked as if the Necromancer attacked them with a spell vs. the target's Tenacity or Dodge, whichever is more, +1 attack for 2 or more weapons, and deal damage equal to 1d6 + 1/2 the horde's Size.

While I can see that working for attack capability of the group, the defense part seems weird by having swords/arrows take out multiples of them; especially since weapon attacks don't normally get to attack multiple targets, and could potentially not do enough damage to kill even one (depending on the minion unit).

Well, that's the thing with abstraction. The idea is that a group of minions are individually puny and irrellevent, and only pose a danger in large groups (like the zombies in Shawn of the Dead).

A single Badass demon or elemental should work like this: spend a manna and summon a huge monster to do your will for as long as you can concentrate; breaking your concentration breaks the link and makes the demon or whatever disappear in a gout of flame and smoke. As another idea, allow multiple mama spent to summon a like number of monsters.

Hieronymous's suggested link rings to me for the playstyle preference I have. Essentially creates a "combined attack" option for groups, reducing rolling and keeping them a threat to higher level characters so long as they have a tough leader to follow. The leader is also prevented from being outright ganked, encouraging the defeat of mooks over leaders.

If I use such a rule, I should probably not make them quite the red-shirts in terms of having wound=dead. I will, however, need to create a morale system which can incorporate the status condition.