My Love Affair With Minions

While I, too, love minions (after all, I loved in 3.5 having low-level monsters that could be killed in one or two hits…nevermind, we had a wizard and a cleric, that’s one hit), I’d have to say my favorite type of enemy is a minion-spawner.

There are some classics, like, an alarm bell which takes a round of rocking before it starts ringing (being a heavy bell) so if you see a goblin start rocking it, you have to kill him before the alarm bell starts summoning minion reinforcements. And if the bell starts ringing, bells can take a long time to stop ringing, so you have to spend a round stopping the bell.

Or, the party interrupts a necromancer, and the rogue spots a large magic apparatus for creating undead, that WOULD be used by the bad guys against the PCs, but the rogue decides to mess with the magic and use it against the bad guys.

Or simply summoning minions is part of a standard monster’s power, like an ooze or that one dragon or a necromancer. But no matter who does it, it adds a lot of dynamic interesting stuff to the battle! Double fun if you make the necromancer nothing BUT a summoner, and when the party tromps his army he surrenders.

While a lone solo monster or a necromancer with a couple thugs summoning minions might not be too threatening, after a couple rounds of not being interrupted while creating the things they’ll become a sizable threat (with no boost to XP!). Or, if the field is littered with minions, summoning new ones already feels like a massive threat since it slows down the progress in killing the minions off.

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Doing the math for them to make sure they’re balanced is rather easy (because even if I’m all about creative new ways to hurt the players, I’m also about doing it balanced). Just multiply the average damage of a standard attack of any given level by 0.375 (3/8) and that’s the average damage a minion spawned on the summoner’s turn will deal before it dies. Then, just take the standard ‘area of effect’ damage value and divide it by that average damage, and that’s how many minions can be spawned by the summoner as a standard action (or, halve that value and make it a minor action).

Explanatory math to follow.

A minion does half the damage of a standard attack. So, at level 6, a minion deals 6 damage (2d6 + 5 average 12 half 6). I’m using my own revised “Creating a Monster” sheets which combine all previous data and errata, so numbers in the DMG II might differ.

Anyway. So a level 6 minion deals 6 damage on a hit. But, they only hit 50% of the time (3 effective damage), and have a 50% chance of dying each round (I’m assuming they’re attacked each round with a 50% hit chance with one ‘freebie’ attack from them before player initiative since they act on their summoner’s initiative) which means they simply get a 50% boost to effective damage (according to my math, they might die before they get a second attack, or they might end up having four of five attacks, but assuming they act on the summoner’s initiative that averages out to a 1.5x boost to damage, 1.0 without the freebie attack) so that’s 4.5 damage. 4.5 is 3/4 of 6 damage, or 3/8 of 2d6 + 5 damage.

So if I were creating a level 6 necromancer, I’d have one of his standard actions be Raise Undead, where he summons skeleton minions and they immediately attack on his initiative and future turns. Average area damage for level 6 is 1d8 + 6, and 10.5 / 4.5 is 2.33, so his summoning ability will summon two level 6 skeleton minions as a standard action. Or, since he will want to use his standard action for attacks and his move actions for running away, he’ll probably only get one minor action per round, thus I might set him up with a minor action summon minion ability.

I have gotten great use out of minions, especially after tweaking them a bit to keep my players on their toes (two-hit minions are a great surprise!).

i love minions but disagree that they dont pose a threat to pcs. they can be quite deadly. i run groups of the same monsters at the same initiative and if you roll hot with a ton of them you can really punish players (which i like)

I don’t use minions enough in my currently running campaign. I recently ran a boss battle that lasted an entire session and it was probably the first time I’d used so many minions in a single session. They were placed in for a variety of reasons: to help the boss run away, to redirect damage away from the boss, to give the boss an easier chance to hit the PCs. I recently created an interesting minion that would mark the PCs and run away, so they would either have to chase this little guy around and kill him or face a significant penalty to their attack rolls (he granted a -5 instead of a -2 but that’s about all he could do).

I like the idea of a minion spawner; I think I’ll implement it into my next session and see how that goes.

The fun thing about minions is that while one hit kills them, you do have to hit them. Ranged minions aren’t much less of a threat than full-grown ranged monsters – at least, not if your party is incompetent at range like my former 4e group.

Also, I use a rule I call “Resillient Minions” where they have resist 5/tier to all damage (except for specific weaknesses like radiant for undead). This way, the PCs still have to deal a minimal ammount of damage to take out a minion, but the DM doesn’t have to keep track of any hp or “two-hit” information.

@onetwelved That is an awful ability to provide your minions as it is remarkably unfair (-5 is pretty much an auto-miss) and is against the spirit of the games mechanics. Defenders are required to maintain melee distance with their targets to continue to gain the benefit of the mark as it would otherwise expire at the end of their next turn. For the fighter this means swinging at the enemy (hit or miss), or for the paladin ending adjacent to the enemy. I’m uncertain what mechanics the other defenders play by but I do not doubt they are similar, especially since they explicitly changed the paladins mark to include the ‘must engage’ text during the beta because of specifically this type of exploit.

Your monsters fleeing halfway across the map does not fit in the spirit of how marks are supposed to work.