[4E] Coupla house rules I'm toying with

[hong]

1. Every 2 milestones counts as an extended rest. Remove the limit on extended rests per 24 hours.

2. Minions have hit points equal to 1/2 their level, rounded up. Do not track hp for minions; instead, treat it as a "damage threshold". If a minion doesn't take enough damage in one hit to kill it outright, it's bloodied. If a bloodied minion takes any damage from a hit, it dies. Retain the rule that minions aren't damaged on a missed attack.

[CLAVDIVS]

I like the simplicity of minions, but rather than 1 hp they should've just made it "HP: --" and said one hit kills them. Functionally identical, but it would feel more elegant to me.

As for the rest thing, my first thought would be to spread out the benefits more evenly, like with each milestone you recover half your healing surges and and one daily power, or something like that. Or do you prefer the "all at once" thing?

Another thought is to give them the benefits of an extended rest when they level (which would require adding up XP at each encounter). Sorta like how in a lot of CRPG's you get full health and mana back when you level up.

[mlangsdorf]

For your minion idea, I'd drop the rule that minions don't take damage on misses. The damage threshold will handle that well enough.

I'd also add that Blinding, Dazing, Stunning or giving a minion a minor (-4 or less) penalty causes it to be Bloodied instead, and that making a minion Petrified, Unconscious, or Helpless kills it. I don't want to track minion state at all, especially for save ends effects.

[hong]

I like the simplicity of minions, but rather than 1 hp they should've just made it "HP: --" and said one hit kills them. Functionally identical, but it would feel more elegant to me.

The problem with 1-hp minions (so I've heard) is that they're too weak at high levels, where there are lots of ways to deal automatic damage. A damage threshold might be a way of dealing with this.

[hong]

For your minion idea, I'd drop the rule that minions don't take damage on misses. The damage threshold will handle that well enough.


Well, lower-level minions with the damage threshold are still only going to have teensy hp. If they still took damage on a miss, that would make fireballs real killers.

[Shawn Conard]

I like the idea of #1, but the implementation seems weird to me since everything resets. I imagine you'll see a lot of "might as well use it now" attacks in the fourth encounter or the day, because there is no reason to hold back even if the situation doesn't warrant blowing all your dailies. Plus, action points reset to 1 as well, which can be a little unsatisfying since you basically lose the ones you have prior to gaining one from the milestone. Magic rings are going to be weird, since either the PCs will have nearly continuous access to their milestone powers (they activate if you have reached a milestone "today") or else they'll turn on and off constantly (if you read "today" as meaning "since the last extended rest"). And does it take a short rest to gain the benefits of that extended rest, or is it automatic once you reach the milestone?

As for #2, it's a bit more work for the DM to keep track of stuff, but if you are willing to put up with it then it seems fine. Mostly, it just protects against those 'automatically do <stat mod> damage' powers, but won't even do that until near the end of heroic tier. And even then, you'll still drop them in two hits. I would consider just giving minions a save against automatic damage, much like how people get saves against being pushed off ledges. If they fail, they die as normal. If they roll well, they are bloodied (or die if already bloodied).

...actually, that doesn't save much paperwork, does it? You still need to track who is bloodied and who isn't.

[HeridFel]

What are you trying to do with your house rules? I haven't had a problem with resting or minions in my games, so I'm not sure of the purpose behind the changes that you propose.

[rickyh]

Hi everyone, back a little early.

Curious houserules hong. Like a couple of others I'm curious to see how #1 works out. It seems that the PCs as is are given a lot of leeway and help with resources to play with it RAW. I'm just wondering how it will work out if every four fight or so they have all their resources reset.

[CLAVDIVS]

The problem with 1-hp minions (so I've heard) is that they're too weak at high levels, where there are lots of ways to deal automatic damage. A damage threshold might be a way of dealing with this.

You could just rule that certain automatic damage effects (like the feytouched's slashing wake) aren't enough to kill minions. Or just all autodamage: There has to be an actual attack roll, but just one hit is enough.

[Victim]

OTOH, it seems like half the point of those low amounts of auto damage is to kill minions easily. Obviously, this becomes a problem at higher levels when those abilities are increasingly common and cheap.

Your house rule also doesn't necessarily prevent autodamage from killing minions - it just puts more of a premium on high damage things that are already generally superior. Do you really want the impact of the change to be "Fighter, your autodamage stances with a Mordenkrad and feats to add damage are good to kill minions, just like everything else. Feylock, your crappy damage now sucks against minions AND normal monsters."

However, I think that changing the design of minions works better than adding more special rules to protect them. It's faster and easier to handle a change at the monster design and encounter design levels than something in play, IMO.

First of all, if minions lose effectiveness as levels increase, then their value in relation to normal monsters can also change.

Second, some minions are much better designed than others. First of all, let's look at some good minions. Kobold minions are pretty nasty as far as minions go. They have a ranged attack, so they can be spread out (making them harder to area attack to death) while still attacking effectively and concentrating their fire. They're mobile via Shifty, so they flank and threaten rear combatants easily if needed. And other kobolds have mob attack, so the minions can provide bonuses to their allies just by existing.

Abyssal Ghoul minions explode when killed. So as long as they can get a move action off before dying OR someone else moves up to them, they'll do some damage. They have good stealth, which could help them get surprise (and thus more actions before dying) or avoid the attacks of a higher initiative PC. And they impose a condition on a hit, so it's not a matter of doing 6 damage or so. Especially since normal monster ghouls do extra damage to immobilized targets.

OTOH, Legion Devils are all about bunching up. They get a bonus to defenses when next to other Legion devils. They have no ranged attacks, so they also pretty much have to bunch up to bring their numbers to bear. In other words, they're tactics are all about making it easier to eliminate them. Even the buffing abilities from other devils doesn't really seem enough to make them good - note that the other minions I mentioned have abilities that help the big monsters. With Legion Devils, the big monsters tend to have abilities to assist them. That seems a little backwards.

[Yakk]

1. Every 2 milestones counts as an extended rest. Remove the limit on extended rests per 24 hours.
This generates a nice pacing effect.

My variant is to have 'half an extended rest' at each milestone -- you get back half of your healing surges, and roll to recover daily powers on a 456.

Extended rests no longer recharge daily powers or give back healing surges automatically -- an endurance check against DC 10 gives back 1 surge, +1 for every 10 you beat the check by. Oh, and you are lowered to 1 action point -- if you have 0, you keep 0.

This generates a game that is paced narritively, and has nearly utterly eliminteated the tempation to go 'nacroleptic'.

2. Minions have hit points equal to 1/2 their level, rounded up. Do not track hp for minions; instead, treat it as a "damage threshold". If a minion doesn't take enough damage in one hit to kill it outright, it's bloodied. If a bloodied minion takes any damage from a hit, it dies. Retain the rule that minions aren't damaged on a missed attack.

Try a shared HP track for minions. Every (Level) damage to any minion kills the one hit. Miss damage now applies to minions. Overflow damage is thrown away.

This actually reduces bookkeeping (as you don't have to record which is bloodied) compared to yours. It also works well with auto-damage abilities, or half-on-miss abilities -- they tend to kill a chunk of the minions, while others stay up.

Finally, when a minion takes a minor status effect (Dazed for one turn, or weaker), it goes prone instead. When it takes a more serious status effect, it makes an immediate save -- on failure, it is defeated (dies, flees, or whatever). On success, it goes prone.

[Beckett]

1. Every 2 milestones counts as an extended rest. Remove the limit on extended rests per 24 hours.

2. Minions have hit points equal to 1/2 their level, rounded up. Do not track hp for minions; instead, treat it as a "damage threshold". If a minion doesn't take enough damage in one hit to kill it outright, it's bloodied. If a bloodied minion takes any damage from a hit, it dies. Retain the rule that minions aren't damaged on a missed attack.

1. Quite a change to the game, but not necessarily a bad one. Would see a lot more use of daily powers (both class and item), but could also make encounter balancing harder as the PCs now have more uses of their most powerful resources.

2. I think I like this. The last D&D podcast had Dave Noonan and Mike Mearls talking about the ineffectiveness of minions at high levels. Minions would still mostly be pushovers (a 16 str fighter is still killing minions up to 6th level on a cleave), but have a little more chance of earning their 1/4 standard experience.

[hong]

Change to 1: every 2 milestones you get back all your daily powers and healing surges, and you keep your action points. You don't regain hit points though.

The idea behind this is to push the "15 minute day" even further into the background. Not that it's been a huge problem for us; we tend to have about 3-5 fights per day anyway. I just think that finishing a dungeon in one extended foray is more elegant than going in, coming out, going back in, etc. This house rule is mean to facilitate that outcome.

[mlangsdorf]

Well, lower-level minions with the damage threshold are still only going to have teensy hp. If they still took damage on a miss, that would make fireballs real killers.

As minion or other killers go, fireball is very weak compared to Stinking Cloud. Fireball is 3d6+int, half on miss, for 1 round. Stinking Cloud is at least 1d10+Int for 1 round, possibly 2d10+2*Int for a single round, plus it blocks line of sight and can be sustained. Anything you can do to make Fireball viable is probably a good thing.

[Lizard]

1. Every 2 milestones counts as an extended rest. Remove the limit on extended rests per 24 hours.

2. Minions have hit points equal to 1/2 their level, rounded up. Do not track hp for minions; instead, treat it as a "damage threshold". If a minion doesn't take enough damage in one hit to kill it outright, it's bloodied. If a bloodied minion takes any damage from a hit, it dies. Retain the rule that minions aren't damaged on a missed attack.

1)Wouldn't this turn the "5 minute adventuring day" into the "24/7 march to adventure"? It would also greatly increase people simply nova-ing, I think, especially if the encounter "looked like a milestone".

2)Not sure what this adds except math, unless you develop some minions which have interesting effects on being bloodied. (And you could probably get the same 'fun factor' by giving them powers that trigger on 'x fellow minions killed'). This is similar to John Nephew's original model for mooks in 3.x, but w/out the bloodied. I guess the main effect would be to eliminate the use of low-level roomsweeper spells to clean out high-level minions, which might be a worthy goal if it's a problem.

[Neil Phillips]

I'm not worried too much about minions being weak in my campaign, but the players only just reached level 4.

I'm thinking about implementing this house rule at Paragon (saw something similar posted here). It's hard to write out but I think will work in practice. I've renamed Minion to Mook to avoid confusion or angry players, and also to leave option of using a horde of goblin minions in a huge battle, with the players should trivialise..

- Each mook has a number of hit points about equal to 1/4 the hit points of a similar non-mook of the same level. This is called a "threshold" value
- The hit point totals of all mooks in the encounter are "pooled".
- Each time the hit point pool ticks down past a threshold, one mook that was the target of the last attack dies.
- Extra thresholds build up, causing a mook to die the next time it takes any amount of damage.
- Damage on a miss will reduce the hit point pool, but not kill a mook directly.

Say each mook has 20 hit points and there are 8 of them. The pool has 160 hit points.

- A wizard hits four of them with Flameburst, doing 10 damage each. The pool takes 40 damage. That's two thresholds, so two of the mooks hit by Flameburst (at the wizard's choice) die.
- The Fighter unleashes a daily and does 55 damage to one mook. The pool has taken 95 hit points total now, so two more thresholds are reached. Only one mook was targeted by the attack, so it dies, and one threshold is saved until hhe next attack.
- The following round, the wizard (who is a Blood Mage uses his second wind, automatically doing 3 damage to the remaining 5 mooks. The pool has taken 110 hit points total, so one extra threshold is reached, for two total. Two mooks affected by the power die.
- The Fighter then misses a mook with reaping strike, spends an action point and misses again, taking the pool to 120 points. This reaches a threshold but doesn't kill a mook yet.
- The Wizard flamebursts the three mooks, hitting only one of them for 8 damage. (128 damage total) One of them dies due to the saved up threshold.
- The Ranger decides he's had enough of this and hits the last two mooks for 16 points each, killing them both and ending the example.


(The non-house rule version of this would be "The Blood Mage uses his second wind at the start of the first round and kills all the minions in the encounter, trivialising them")

Not sure how much XP Mooks should be worth relative to Minions.

[Lizard]

- Each mook has a number of hit points about equal to 1/4 the hit points of a similar non-mook of the same level. This is called a "threshold" value
- The hit point totals of all mooks in the encounter are "pooled".

This is the way FATE system handles it, mostly, and it seems to work pretty well.

[Yakk]

Why shouldn't miss damage kill mooks? If they have a HP pool, miss damage should be just as effective against them...

The threshold value works -- but you can do mooks with no pool, and just a threshold.

A level X mook has 2*X damage threshold. Damage from one attack against a mook that exceeds their threshold is discareded.

Whenever mooks are damaged, compare the accumulated damage against the threshold. If it breaks the threshold, the mook dies, and you eat that much damage off the mook damage total.

Each "clump" of mooks (which should generally be the same type, or sufficiently similar) shares a damage total.

In the event of area damage hurting multiple mooks at the same time, the DM picks which die, using whatever whimsical method the DM chooses.

[Neil Phillips]

Why shouldn't miss damage kill mooks? If they have a HP pool, miss damage should be just as effective against them...

Mostly for stylistic reasons, I guess. You need a solid hit to kill something. They still die real quick to miss damage due to the rather low HP's

The threshold value works -- but you can do mooks with no pool, and just a threshold.

A level X mook has 2*X damage threshold. Damage from one attack against a mook that exceeds their threshold is discareded.

Whenever mooks are damaged, compare the accumulated damage against the threshold. If it breaks the threshold, the mook dies, and you eat that much damage off the mook damage total.

Each "clump" of mooks (which should generally be the same type, or sufficiently similar) shares a damage total.

In the event of area damage hurting multiple mooks at the same time, the DM picks which die, using whatever whimsical method the DM chooses.

I don't think I like this system as much, because it means extra damage from critting a mook is wasted. With the system I posted above, landing huge damage on one minion makes the next couple easier to take out, a sort of morale system I guess.

Also, with your system, against level 10 minions (20 HP), hitting minions A,B and C for 5 damage each then doing 20 damage to minon D means that earlier damage was wasted.. this could lead to some bad blood at the table. (especially if say, the Stormwarden consistently puts out 20 damage a turn, making the Wizard's flamebursts count for nothing over a couple of turns).