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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Speed-up Combat: Diceless-Minions

Essence: Each minion nearly takes up as much time to resolve during a round as a 'full' monster but without really influencing the outcome of the encounter. Let minions hit automatically to speed up combat and adjust the fixed damage amount by the attack modifier to uphold tactical depth.
Details: To be honest I do not like minions in D&D 4E. The idea behind minions is good but I find the execution of the concept lacking. In every encounter involving minions I played in they were no fun. They either got discarded before doing anything meaningful or they were ignored by the players because they did not see any real threat in them.
Due to the low damage output (at least of the minions from the MM1) some people on the web proposed that minions should spend their standard action on aid another for brutes or such.
But I had enough encounters were the minions did not have the opportunity to help 'full' monsters. And doing aid another for other minion does not really make sense. So I normally keep attacking with minion. And minions tend to come in big numbers. As a result whenever minions are involved you roll many attack rolls for a minimum of damage which drags down the speed of combat.
Therefore let minions hit automatically and adjust the fixed damage amount by the attack modifier. So if a character has cover the damage of the minion is reduced by 2 and if the minion has combat advantage increase the damage by 2. And if you do not mind it to be a bit more complicated, think about letting minions do the fixed amount damage + attack modifier per tier ( 1* attack modifier for heroic, 2 * attack modifier for paragon and 3 * attack modifier for epic tier).
The modification of the fixed amount of damage reintroduces the tactical depth which is lost due to the automatic hit. Without it characters seeking cover before minions or minions attempting to flank characters would not make any sense.
If you compare this concept of a 'diceless' minion to the 'traditional' minion the difference really concerning the amount of time resolving a minions turn is a die roll and, if your game is anything like mine, a following GM's question such as: 'Do I hit you with a 19 vs. AC?'. Not much broken down to one minion but, as already stated before, minions tend to come in larger groups.
The automatic hit makes the minions more powerful. But since the damage output of minions is rather low to begin with I think the balance is not pushed to far and the little bit extra damage lets players think twice before ignoring the next group of minions.
With this approach I am even thinking about a minions only encounter, a thing I have dismissed until now.

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