[4e] Creating Minions

[Crow]

I can't seem to find any guidelines for creating minions in the DMG. Does anybody know on what page they can be found?

[kieza]

I haven't found any either, but I came up with a few guidelines on my own:

1) Make or find a monster of the appopriate level that you want to base the minions off of. Artillery, skirmishers, and soldiers work best as minions.
2) Reduce the creature's HP to 1.
3) Remove any encounter or recharge powers, making sure they have a couple of simple, generic at-wills.

Voila! Minion!

[Yakk]

And have them deal min damage?

A minion damage curve might help.

[Dragonmuncher]

Those seem to be good rules.

Really, though, are there no rules in the DMG? That seems... odd. Minions are one of 4e's shiny new concepts, you'd think they would provide rules on how to make them.

[Tsotha-lanti]

Minions are weirdly ignored all over. They don't seem to get a section in the MM, and there are no minion creation guidelines in the DMG. It's easy enough - you create a monster, reduce hit points to 1, give it very few powers, and give it low damage. Determining what that damage should be is a bit difficult - you'll have to eyeball it. "Minimum damage" looks like it might be true for a lot of minions (goblin, hobgoblin), but it's obviously not true for others (ogre, orc). I'm more inclined to connect it to level somehow, but that's not quite true either.

[wodan46]

Isn't specified, even though all other roles and elite/solos are.

Here's how I do it: Use standard monster build, mainly using the skirmisher. Minions deal 2 damage to start, add an additional 1 damage every 4 levels. You can reduce or increase their damage by 1, but in turn increase or reduce their defenses by 1 as well.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Minions are supposed to resemble one big monster split four or five ways, as far as experience value goes.

I tend to use the maximum damage a soldier should do at the given level and divide it by four. If somebody is ganged by a group of minions, who all hit, they take full damage from a decently powerful attack.

Like, four legion devils (lv 6 versions (or lv 5, the exact number escapes me at the moment)) can dish out maybe 20 damage if they all hit the same target. On a lv5 wizard (around 34hp) that'll bloody them. For the lv5 fighter (around 55hp) it's a solid hit but not crippling.

The odds of all four devils hitting a target (assuming there's not some AC penalty on the character) is pretty low, at least it has been with my dice. Two usually hit, three a fair amount, seldom all four.

The Fighter will have a decent chance to drop one of the suckers, maybe two if it's got cleave, in the next round. The wizard might take down two or three or all of them.

Legion devils are kind of a bad example, they get that defense bonus for standing together, but my point is more or less there.

[Dausuul]

Minions are weirdly ignored all over. They don't seem to get a section in the MM, and there are no minion creation guidelines in the DMG. It's easy enough - you create a monster, reduce hit points to 1, give it very few powers, and give it low damage. Determining what that damage should be is a bit difficult - you'll have to eyeball it. "Minimum damage" looks like it might be true for a lot of minions (goblin, hobgoblin), but it's obviously not true for others (ogre, orc). I'm more inclined to connect it to level somehow, but that's not quite true either.

I'd approach it a different way. Instead of trying to minion-ize a normal monster, take an existing minion and scale it up or down to the level you want.

[Starsinger]

I'd approach it a different way. Instead of trying to minion-ize a normal monster, take an existing minion and scale it up or down to the level you want.

Maybe slap on a special ability like the one Aboleth Servitors have.

[Thray]

I always read it as minions are exactly like normal monsters except they get destroyed easily. If you reduce the damage too much, then 4 minions are a substantially easier encounter than 1 standard monster.

[Yakk]

Minions are supposed to resemble one big monster split four or five ways, as far as experience value goes.

I tend to use the maximum damage a soldier should do at the given level and divide it by four. If somebody is ganged by a group of minions, who all hit, they take full damage from a decently powerful attack.

That damage is too high, I suspect.

On average, a single soldier does (hit%)*(average damage).
On average, 4 minions do (hit%)*(fixed damage).

It is true that a minion typically has a lower hit% than a soldier (who specialize in a high hit percentage), and soldiers are particularly defensive (hard to kill)....

You can start with a more "normal" monster, like a skirmisher.

Claim that it takes ~4 hits to kill a skirmisher, and ~4 hits to kill 4 minions. 4+3+2+1 = 10 minion hits over the kill duration of the 4 minions.

So take average skirmisher damage, multiply by 0.4, and that is a baseline for minion damage per hit.

[wodan46]

4 minions, if they hit, should do high limited instance damage. Minions are marginally more fragile, but make up for it by being dishing out lots of damage and make players target them.