I THINK we both have valid points. I wasn’t saying I was right or you were wrong, I was simply stating my opnion about Minions.

What I meant about the minions and dragons idea is that your hp is low near the end.

(A) It’s all about defenses and attack rolls.
-A level 26 Minion is still attacking and damaging PCs at 26th level, until it gets hit and dies.
-A level 5 creature, minion or otherwise, will virtually never hit 26th level PCs, and the PCs will crush it whether they have 1 hp or 70. If it has 70 hp it will just take longer to kill it, but will be no more threat than the minion, thus, kind of boring compared to the L26 minion who, along with his 4 other friends, can really do some damage!

(B) I don’t see how fighting minions first causes the PCs to die fighting the dragon later. It just keeps them on their toes because (if you DM the way I do) they never know when an enemy will drop from one blow, or when it’s got 80 hp. Plus, if they’ve fought easier fights and then they fight a tough fight, then they’ve probably stored up action points and dailies, so in theory they are MORE prepared to fight a dragon, not less. Don’t you think?

(C) Maybe the reason you don’t think it makes sense to have a L26 minion is because of logic? Does it seem like becoming more experienced in combat should ALWAYS and AUTOMATICALLY make you more resistant to damage?

You might be right, but in my mind there are several things you can learn in combat, and these are often learned as separate lessons. You can learn

1- techniques in how to hit enemies (+ ATTACK)
2- techniques in how to deal more precise/injurious blows (+ DAMAGE)
3- techniques on how to dodge/block blows (+ DEFENSE)
4- techniques on how to withstand injury without dying/fainting, etc. (+ HP)

It seems to me that most creatures who learn to fight would learn 1 and 3 more than anything else, and 4 would be the hardest to learn. That would mean that logically, we should expect to find more L26 minions in the world than L8 Brutes. The exception would be monsters (specifically LARGE monsters with lots of meat on them), which you literally have to hack apart until they stop moving.

Think of the samurai. Some of the most highly trained warriors in history (arguably?) able to kill left and right with wild abandon. When one samurai goes up against another, the battle would be decided by one blow, at which point one of the samurai would be dead.

I will go out on a limb and assert that most combat training would focus on one thing above all others: DON’T GET HIT. Whence my Axiom of Sharp Things, as follows.

AXIOM OF SHARP THINGS: sharp things hurt, and they make me die.

If anyone has the first monster manual of the 4th Edition, look at the Lich Vestige on page 176. It is a level 26 Minion. I think it would be better as a level 6 or 7 regular monster. Becuse I don’t see a point in a minion as high ranking as that. Maybe a level 5 minion at the most. And letting your PCs charge through minions, feeling like a hero, only to be killed by the dragon at the end. You get their hopes up, then they die.

I mix all sorts of a kind of creature together and just say “there are 8 goblins. four of them wield short swords, one has a spear, and 3 carry clubs.” Any of these could be a minion, or none of them, and the players don’t know. This strikes me as the most “believable” way to get the players into the feel of it. (Granted, my campaign is RP-focused)

To all the people who say minions don’t make sense, I say this: Minions are the ONLY creatures who actually make sense in D&D! In real life, how does one go about, “getting more hit points”, exactly? What does that even mean?

How many times could YOU get hit by a sword (or even a dagger?) and keep living, let alone fighting??! Probably not more than once – maybe twice. I think of minions as the ones who aren’t experienced enough to get into position so the blow doesn’t strike vitals.

Not that I’m bashing D&D, or hit points – it’s a system that allows D&D to work, and it does work, I think, based on its internal logic. I use it happily because it allows the game to function. But I don’t think you can defend having 200 hps on the basis of LOGIC! As far as logic is concerned, minions make way more sense.

I like to have a dungeon where there are lots of minions, and maybe each main encounter has 1 to 3 mini-boss or two (normal/elite creatures), and occasionally (maybe one per dungeon), a nice (PartyLevel + 3) solo beastie as a boss – maybe with more minions. This allows the players to have cinematic sequences where they sweep through the dungeon and end with a climactic battle. (Plus, the battles don’t take so long, which is a constant issue for my whole group.)

Sometimes I wonder if I’d like to try a game system where most things have 1 hp, then more experienced things have 2 hp, or 3. And every hit you do does 1 damage. Bosses might have 10 or 20 hp, and high defenses. Or some bosses might have 5 hps and REALLY high defenses. Or it might be a group of 5 mini-bosses together, each with 5 hps… Anyone play a system like this? Thoughts on whether this would/does work?

They are the ones without any battle scars!

I once got a group of orcs into a punching contest to see who was the strongest… Out of 25 orcs,
20 died on the spot! It was the funniest thing!

MINIONS: – PeeeeUuuuuoooooo!!!!!!

I could write a whole article about how amazingly useful Minions are for clever encounter building, but I’ll try to make a few quick points.

- First, there’s nothing wrong with rewarding a controller by putting them in a situation where they get to show off. This isn’t an MMO where you have to make sure every encounter is impossible to trivialize, worst case you throw in an extra encounter to make up for it.

- There’s no need to keep your minions closely grouped all the time. Minions that are spread out give your ranged strikers a chance to shine without penalizing your players for not focus-firing.

- Minions can help put time pressure on an encounter by having them enter fights in a “monster-generator” way — alerted guards streaming in, monstrous nasties crawling out of a pit, elite casters summoning throughout the fight. The players have to quickly do something to get through the encounter or get overwhelmed, and they can’t take them out all at once because they’re streaming in.

- Don’t forget minions don’t take damage from “on-miss” abilities.

- Minions create interesting tactical choices in some situations. If there are normal-monster archers at a distance, often the best solution is just to go for cover… it’s hard to move the whole party sometimes, often the party is (rightly) reluctant to separate, and monsters take a long time to kill solo sometimes.

But, if you had a few minion archers for example, a melee-er is free to break off, run/jump/climb their way to the archers and quickly take them out.

Minions are very powerful encounter building tools. In previous editions, by the rules, you’d use low HD monsters which can’t hit anything and don’t deal damage. With minions, players have easy-to-remove but hard-to-ignore menaces.