1. easy to track
Minions as wrritten cons:
1. binary (either dead or not dead)
2. a 3 damage cleave kills a minion but a fireball that misses and does half damage for 8 points doesn't
3. no tension - if I hit the minion it is toast - no need to roll a good damage roll to take the minion out
4. players metagame - oh those are minions
There are others I'm sure.
Question: How do you keep the pro and minimize/eliminate the cons?
Here's my solution:
1. Minions do not have hitpoints - they now have a Kill Threshold which is 1 point per level (i.e. a 7th level minion has a Kill Threshold of 7)
2. Minions can be damaged by misses
3. The player rolls damage and if the damage exceeds the Kill Threshold, the minion is dead. If the damage is equal or lower than the Kill Threshold, the minion is bloodied
4. The next hit on a bloodied minion kills it
Thoughts? I think this is a simple solution that eliminates the binary nature of minions but also eliminates record keeping....
1. binary (either dead or not dead)
How is that a con?
That is the very thing which makes them so easy to track, which is your only pro listed for some reason. If you take away their binary nature, you take away the pro that they're so easy to track.
2. a 3 damage cleave kills a minion but a fireball that misses and does half damage for 8 points doesn't
You still have to hit to cleave into something, so you get the same effect.
3. no tension - if I hit the minion it is toast - no need to roll a good damage roll to take the minion out
Just because there's no damage doesn't mean there's no tension. The tension just doesn't happen to come from damaging them. It happens to come from hitting them and/or hitting the right ones, as minions tend to come in swarms.
4. players metagame - oh those are minions
Don't tell them what's a minion and what isn't. Let them figure it out on their own. Problem solved.
On the flip side, from an in-game perspective, if I see my buddy drop that guy over there with a single hit, it's not unreasonable for me to assume this other guy over here who looks exactly like him will be just as easy to kill.
2. a 3 damage cleave kills a minion but a fireball that misses and does half damage for 8 points doesn't
Just ignore the damage values (if you can). What is important is what goes on in the game. The cleave was a direct hit which kills the minion. The fireball was a miss, which might have given the minion horrible burns, but not enough that it dropped.
3. no tension - if I hit the minion it is toast - no need to roll a good damage roll to take the minion out
If you want tension you can throw in non-minions. Non-minions are for tension, minions are for wholesome slaughter, or to serve as a minor distraction from the non-minions.
Don't tell them what's a minion and what isn't. Let them figure it out on their own. Problem solved.
I've made a habit of mixing in blackblade goblins amongst my cutters, using the same miniatures to represent both. The players don't know which ones are stealthy assassins, until either they get stabbed in the back or they hit one, and finds that it doesn't immediately die.
If you really want a mechanical adjustment to minions, I think this is as far as you should take it:
[INDENT]Minions aren't affected by miss effects as written; instead, a miss effect grants combat advantage against affected minions until they save against it.[/INDENT]
This gives the minions a mechanical consequence when something (splash damage or whatever) would have happened, without messing around with how they should be used.
If you want minions to be scarier, just use more. Ever play Left 4 Dead? The zombies go down easy enough - two shots with a pistol, one with a well-placed shotgun blast; single burst with an automatic. They're like minions. But there are so many of them. Throw in a single special zombie (non-minion) and things can get real wild.
Minion toughness CAN be a pretty good rule to use for those cases where you want to have some not very dangerous opponents that you can use in goodly numbers because they don't require tracking but would still like them to fall down a bit less often. Tracking bloodied is pretty trivial, it really doesn't add measurably to the overhead of running the minion.
However, the suggestion of setting the toughness level of minions to some fixed number doesn't work for me. It is pretty situational and 1 point per level is usually too low to matter. If the minion is worth making a bit tougher than it is usually worth giving it a toughness of at least 5 and sometimes quite a bit higher.
Minion clearing spells are still valuable against tough minions, they just don't sweep them off the table every time anymore. Now a miss with an AoE bloodies the minion, making it the same as a regular minion, and doing some damage with the AoE over the minion's threshold still clears it out. Either result has some value.
Plus it gives minions a bloodied state, which is nice because it lets "when bloodied" effects in for minions, and it removes the magical meta-gaming "that's a minion because it doesn't get bloodied" problem.
It isn't even actually a CHANGE to the rules in any sense either. Existing minions are just "toughness 1" and using some other toughness number greater than 1 is just a DM option they have in their bag of tricks. Personally I don't use it often, but it can be a nice tool sometimes.
In any case I know tons of DMs that are using it. Seems to be pretty popular.
Tough Minions
Tough Minions have hit points equal to 12 + half level (14 + half level at paragon, 16 + half level at epic). Any amount of damage that fails to kill a tough minion bloodies it. A bloodied tough minion that takes damage is killed.
This way, tough minions are killed in a single good hit- or any two hits. It also makes them a bit less vulnerable to auto-damage, since it takes two "hits" to kill them. They also are still fairly easy to track, since they are either alive, dead, or bloodied.
The defenses of a tough minion are all one higher than those of a normal minion. Their attacks inflict (on average) one extra point of damage - which is still kept static - and they inflict an additional one damage per tier on a critical hit.
Three tough minions are equivalent to a normal monster (rather than the 4:1 ratio used for regular minions).
These rules have worked really well in my game- they still go down quickly, but players don't feel like they're wasting an attack to target them- especially if they roll a critical and/or use an encounter power against them.
HP 1; a miss attack never damages a minion
Besides, as to the issue of metagaming, turn that metagaming against your players.
For instance, my level 1 PCs just had an adventure defeating golbins that ransacked a village. That means they fought a lot of Goblin Cutters.
Toward the end of the adventure they were saying "Oh its just a cutter, they'll die in one hit." So they started weeding out the Cutters first and then the other non-minion monsters.
On the last encounter of the adventure, I threw in a Goblin Hexer with some Goblin Warriors as bodyguards. While my PCs were weeding out the Cutters, the Hexer rained down untold horrors, afflicting them with negative buffs, blindness, and damage.
Just mix up how you use the minions.
[INDENT]HP 1; a miss attack only damages a minion if it's bloodied; if a miss attack would have caused damage to a minion they instead count as bloodied[/INDENT]
Same amount of accounting as would be associated with tracking combat advantage. You could throw in the combat advantage, too, or just make use of the bloodied state to sync story and stat.
Let's try to take the math out of making minions tough, too:
[INDENT]HP 1; an elite mook only takes damage from critical hits, daily powers, encounter powers, or while bloodied; if an attack would have caused damage to an elite mook they instead count as bloodied[/INDENT]
Gives you a new tier for monsters, with a fun new name, and allows you to easily re-classify any monster without calculating anything new (kill threshold, HPs, etc.)
Tough Minions have hit points equal to 12 + half level (14 + half level at paragon, 16 + half level at epic). Any amount of damage that fails to kill a tough minion bloodies it. A bloodied tough minion that takes damage is killed.
Thanks Bastard_DM for this idea. I like that better than 1 hp per level. I'll have to experiment with this. I think if you went lower: say 6 + half level for heroic tier for example, you could keep the minions at the 4:1 ratio??
Like I said, I'll have to try this out....