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.

Improve your GMing: Minor Quests by Players

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Details: Kameron presented the great idea that the players create their own Minor Quests in his article Silly DM, minor quests are for players.
Why is that a good idea? For one thing the players do your job since you as a GM do not have to come up with quests and for another thing they tell you what they are interested in.

Usage in the session: The obvious usage is that players express their wish to either continue or start a story line which cannot be followed at the current point of a story which which ever reason.
But the players could also come up with minor quests for their characters as part of the background creation. That would give the characters something to do right at the beginning of the game and it would give the player an opportunity to flesh out his or her character since that first quest probably addresses personal issues.
When we started playing D&D 4E I told my players that I would create a personal minor quest for every character based on the background story they gave me. I wanted to motivate them to get invested into the game by introducing and following personal agendas of their characters. If I had known this concept at that time it would have saved me time since instead of me creating the quests I would have asked the players to come up with one. My plan was to give them a new personal quest every time they have finished one but due to lack of time I never created new quests after the first ones.
In an ideal situation each minor quests creates plenty of reasons for new quests on their own and you as a GM have only to get along with the interests of the players.

Impact on our session: Unfortunately since reading the article it did not made sense to introduce this idea to my players because I master the Wizards of the Coast adventure Pyramid of Shadows which is mostly dungeon delves with very little room for side quests.

Advice: Do not be afraid of getting strange or seemingly unusable minor quests. If you, as a GM, do not like a quest or if it does not fit into the story, you do not have to go down-that-line. But sometimes if you just go with it, such ideas turn out to be quit entertaining for everybody.
Our D&D 4E campaign started with each character being on their way to a certain city and they met on the way. I asked everybody why their character was going there. One of my players decided that the purpose of her character's voyage was to visit her aunt to get rosehip jam. At first I was a bit annoyed because I was hoping for something more heroic or dramatic but this story line lead to more role playing and laughter than we had in the rest of the adventure. As it turned out the rosehip jam would have made for a good minor quest worth a reward.

Random Findings: Do not be afraid to kill - resurrections as story opportunities

Scott Wallace shares the same reluctance for fudging rolls to prevent character deaths and gives another reason why not to do it. He writes about resurrections as story hooks in his article Ashes to Ashes, Death to Life.