"4th Edition DnD-Minions and 1 HP?" Topic

Am I reading this right? Are there creatures who have only 1 hit point? Most every creature I've seen in 4.0 have tons of hit points. However while reading Keep on the Shadowfell I read about the 'minion' NPC/creature. They look like normal critters, but with only 1 HP.

Is this right? What's the idea behind this? It does let you put up lots of critters for the PCs to trash… maybe a little too easily.

It's supposed to make the DM's life easier. Minions mean not sweating the small stuff, so to speak. However, it does have its own implications…it's one of many changes that makes me scratch my head.

Yeah… I don't think the DMs were supposed to let the players in on that one…

It's not a first. There's this pirate RPG (the name slips my mind) where most of the bad guys are 'mooks' (I think that's the term the game used) and are either up or they're down. It cuts down on DM overhead. If the mini is on the map, it's still going full steam (so no tracking hit-points, bloodied, etc.). Savage Worlds uses a similar system.

Cleave will kill a minion outright. Quite cinematic.

Several games use that mechanic…and quite effectively too. Think the battle in Balin's tomb and you get the idea. It's fast, it's furious, it's cinematic, and it's fun.

Feng Shui has the same mechnic for 'Named' and 'unnamed' opponants. Lots of precedence for this game mechanic set in movies and such.

charonproductions.com

Good point XRaysVision with Balin's tomb. That makes a lot of sense now.

There's this pirate RPG

Seventh Sea, I think. It's a great mechanic.

use the minions to get bonuses from other more powerful guys….

In the starter module (Keep on the Shadowfells) use the Kobold minions to flank/mob up on the characters with the more powerful guys (Dragonshields or Skirmishers) the DS get +1 to hit for every ally adjacent to the target and the skirmishers get +1d6 damage for flanking…can be nasty. They are meant to be cannon fodder…

I got a chance to spend an hour with the 4E books the other night. I was not going to buy them, having read a bit about them on the internet I gained the impression that they were a little dumb.

Without repeating descriptions that are surely somewhere else on the internet, I was impressed. A lot of dumb stuff was gone. A lot of logical stuff was added. First level characters are certainly more powerful than 3/3.5.

And yes, monsters called minions can have just 1 HP. I'm not sure what it means to be a minion, rules-wise. This is not a bad way to let the first levelers cut a swath of destruction. The MM had plenty of bigger beasts, too, of course.

Magic Missile is gone, how do you like that?

Andrew

Magic Missile is gone, how do you like that?

Player's Handbook 4e, page 159:
Level 1 At Will Spells:
Magic Missile…

The idea behind minions was stated somewhat along these lines…

Since it was not uncommon to have a lot of encounter creatures that most of the party could 1 shot, or perhaps 2 shot at the worst, why bother keeping track of hit points for em? Just give em 1 hit. They still attack etc at full power, but only need to be hit to be killed. Saves rolling to see if by some odd chance they survive the first hit etc.
They're up or they're down sums it up nicely.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Keeping track of exactly how many hit points each of 30 goblins have left has been one of the major headaches of DMing, so this is a good change.

I dont like the idea of cannonfodder having only 1 hitpoint.

Because in previous editions a party usually have one bad guy left seriously injured with whom they can roleplay with – usually finding out further local information, or occasionally presenting itself as a moral dilema – what to do with the evil but surrendered Orc… Like the german in Saving Private Ryan if they release him he usually goes straight back to camp to continue his evil ways…

I bought the Keep on the Shadowfell from my LFGS but although I'd like to run through it at least once with my group I suspect I'll be putting it onto ebay at some point whilst rounding out my 3.5 edition books. I dont like the idea that the at will attacks for a fighter are better than the normal attacks of a fighter (if that makes sense!). Why would a fighter _ever_ make a normal attack?

Also how do you hide the more powerful goblin inside the ranks of normal goblins. The players will get used to just rolling hit dice and not bothering with damage dice. Once they hit the powerful bod you as DM will have to then ask them to roll damage – at which point they'll know immediatley this is the fella they have been looking for!

Recording hit points for 30 Goblins is as easy as recording their initiative. Not Simple – but also not 'Hard', IMHO…

Basically the "at will" attacks are the normal ones, they just got fancier it seems.

"Normal" attacks for fighters and all others are reserved for attacks of opportunity and other times where the PC doesn't have time to add a flourish. Think of fighter at will powers more as combat maneuvers rather than powers.

Well, the "one bad guy left" would be the non-Minion typed Goblin you stick in the group who *would* have more than 1 HP. Then either, he survives because he has a lot more HP than the minions, or you simply invoke script-immunity and make him be the defeated goblin that "isn't quite dead yet".

None of this is really any different from how you would do it in any other system (or version of system). 4th just stops pretending that "all monsters are created equal" and gives you some convenient formal rules for doing what you already did anyway… have a wave of "fodder" and a couple "important guys".

"Why would a fighter ever make a normal attack?" EXACTLY. :) Why would you? Why would you (as a player) want to? What's more interesting to you: "I whack it with my sword", vs "I Cleave through these two goblin minions, step over their corpses and then Challenge the boss-goblin they were guarding!"

It's funny, I read all the points SwordLord mentions and think "Exactly!" after each one…. but for the exact opposite reason.

I *want* to cut a swath through mobs of fodder minions.
I *want* to NOT have to worry about minion hitpoints.
I *want* to know which of the goblins is the important one, which we have to capture.
I *want* to make non-standard attacks by default.

All of this stuff helps emphasize the interesting stuff (fighting/capturing the important goblin and getting the next story hook) and de-emphasize the "filler" (wading through 30 goblins).

Per the original post, the reason for "minions" is to have an easy to manage "mob". Minions can do things like flank, and set up pre-conditions for the larger monsters to exploit. Leader-type monsters sometimes abilities that let them improve minions… giving you the classic problem: Do we thin the mob, or try to push straight to the leader first? The end result is larger encounters that are still easy enough to manage.

It's also worth noting that minions still have all the abilities of a full player-character, ie., they still dish out full damage.

I've had 8 goblins dang near wipe out a group of 5 1st-level characters, and 5 were basic minions.