Converting Creatures to Minions, Teams and Groups

[Bjarkmundur]

I am a firm believer in keeping the number of enemy turns and players turns balanced. I feel like the best-flowing battles are when they players get just as many turns as their enemies.
I've used the following rules to either combine creatures onto a single statblock, or take a single stat block and dividing it either into multiple bodies or multiple turns.

My last encounter included a Spellcaster and a number of Guards. To make the encounter balanced I would have had to add 5 or 6 guards, but then the enemy would have to many turns against my 3 players. What I did is I took those guards and collapsed them into two teams of guards. This made the encounter flow better and easier to run.

The same goes if I only have 2 unique stat blocks I want to run, a 'Leader' and a 'Brute', I could split the Brute down into Minions to add bodies to the encounter without much hassle, or I could divide multiattacks onto different initative values, to increase the overall pace of the encounter.

Likely most of you will find this completely pointless, but for the few of you that might like this, here it is.
The only one I haven't playtested is the Group.



Multiattack over Multiple Turns
When a creature with Multiattacks attacks, it can only make one of its attacks during that turn. The secondary and tertiary attacks happen at initiative count of [Creature's Initiative -5] and [Creature's Initiative -10] , respectively.

Minion
You can convert a single creature into 4 minions using identical stat blocks by making the following changes:


Total XP remains the same, meaning each minion is worth 1/4th the original creature’s XP.
A minion has 1 HP, and a missed attack never deals damage to a minion.
A minion always deals flat half damage. If the creature stat block has a damage that deals 8 (1d8+4) damage, the minion version of that creature deals flat 4 damage.


Team
To convert two creatures with the same stat block into a single team, make the following changes to the creature’s stat block:


The team is worth two times the original creature's XP.
The team has resistance against all single target attacks.
The team deals half damage on a miss.


Group
To convert four creatures with the same stat block into a single group, make the following changes to the creature’s star block:


The group is worth four times the original creature's XP.
The group has double the HP of the original creature.
The team has resistance against all single target attacks, and is vulnerable to all area attacks.
The team has advantage on attack rolls, deals double damage on a hit and normal damage on a miss.

[BoutsofInsanity]

I kind of like what you were doing there. And the group stuff is cool.

Ill point you to the DMG where they talk about running groups of monsters. I used that the other day running a Skaven encounter and it worked exceptionally well. Take a look at that to see if you might combine it with what you have put together.

[Yakk]

I don't like minions as written. Players should be able to know roughly how tough an Orc is, and seeing 16 Orcs should know they are in for a fight.

Your minions are narratively the same as the Orc, but 4 times weaker mechanically.

...

Multiattack over turns makes the game slower not faster.

...

A "minion group" mechanic I've played with is:

* Round the monster's individual HP for easy math.
* Pool multiple monster's HP. They lose a creature when it passes individual monster HP thresholds. Don't track individual HP, just accumulate damage.
* Have aura-like damage; it threatens and attacks creatures near the grouped minions, with damage that scales based on how many are nearby.
* Some systems to make AOE damage a bit easier to work with. (mass saves etc)

So a bunch of guards (rounded HP 10) would move on their turn, taking up space.

When they attack, they get +1 to hit and +1 damage for every guard past the first attacking. If they surround, they get advantage. Every doubling of guards adds an extra die of damage (2,4,8,16).

So if 8 guards surround someone, they make a +10 to hit attack with advantage for 4d6+8 (22).

CR is 8 * 1/8 or 1, HP 80 (10 per guard), other stats unchanged.

This reduces the number of attacks I have to resolve and reduces tracking of HP.

I don't even have to tell the Players they are a troop. They attack etc as normal.