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Tried to do a thorough search before making this thread, but couldn't find anything on it, so here we go!
I started DMing with 3.5, moved onto 4e, and have recently returned to my first love in the form of Pathfinder.
While I have come to terms with preferring the verisimilitude offered by 3.5/Pathfinder's simultationist design philosophies, one thing I really miss about 4e's "game-ism" is the encounter design. In other words, I really miss minions. Using lower-CR creatures just isn't a satisfying answer to the problem either, as they just end up missing a lot and generally not being much of a threat.
So I want minions.
I've thought things over, and I came up with the Minion subtype/template. Let me know what you think.
Minion Subtype: Minions represent creatures that, enmass, can still threaten player characters with their strength and skill (rather than luck, i.e. hoping to roll critical hits), but are ultimately small-change and can be taken out easily. The minion subtype can be added to any creature, and provides the following traits:
- Chump (Ex): All minions have 1 hit point. They retain their number of hit dice for determining their vulnerability to certain spells and effects, but these hit dice never increase their hit point total to greater than 1. Minions can never benefit from effects or abilities that grant them temporary hit points.
Minions always deal minimum damage with any attack or ability they have, including bonus damage dice (such as from sneak attack). This applies even to ability damage, ability drain, bleed damage, etc.
The Difficulty Class for any ability a minion might have is reduced by 5.
- Minion Resistance (Ex): Minions reduce all damage dealt to them from any source (weapons, energy attacks, force effects, spells, etc) by an amount equal to 1/2 their Constitution modifier + 1/2 of their CR. If the creature has preexisting damage reduction or resistances, use those against applicable attacks if the reduction in damage is greater. (For example, a CR 10 construct minion has Minion Resistance 5 to all damage, but might have DR 10/adamantine against weapon attacks. All non-adamantine weapon attacks would have their damage reduced by 10, but all damage from any other source, including adamantine weapons, would be reduced by 5). Any immunities possessed by the minion still apply.
Minions never take damage from an effect they have successfully rolled a saving throw against. Spells or abilities that impose conditions or other effects beside damage on a successful save, such as some that allow Fortitude (partial) or Will (partial) saves, still impose those effects on minions.
- Gang Up (Ex): Minions always appear in gangs of four. Four minion versions of a creature are equal to one normal version of a creature in terms of Challenge Rating. Minions never appear alone, so they do not have individual CRs.
A gang of four minions have treasure equal to a single non-minion version of the same creature, divided evenly among members of the gang.
EDIT: Want to update the minion resistance math, and account for Constructs:
Minion Resistance (Ex): Minions reduce all damage dealt to them from any source (weapons, energy attacks, force effects, spells, etc) by an amount equal to their Constitution modifier (minimum 0) + 1/2 of their CR. Construct minions gain a bonus to this value equal to 1/10th the bonus hit point non-minion constructs would receive from size (+1 for small, +2 for medium, etc). If the creature has preexisting damage reduction or resistances, use those against applicable attacks if the reduction in damage is greater. (For example, a CR 10 medium construct minion has Minion Resistance 7 to all damage, but might have DR 10/adamantine against weapon attacks. All non-adamantine weapon attacks would have their damage reduced by 10, but all damage from any other source, including adamantine weapons, would be reduced by 7). Any immunities possessed by the minion still apply.
Minions never take damage from an effect they have successfully rolled a saving throw against. Spells or abilities that impose conditions or other effects beside damage on a successful save, such as some that allow Fortitude (partial) or Will (partial) saves, still impose those effects on minions.
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Some design thoughts.
The reduction in DC for all abilities is to mitigate the potential to throw four saves at the PCs instead of one. For instance, an outsider might be able to cast, say, Implosion 1/day. Minion versions of that same outsider still have that ability, and they can all unload their Implosions at the same PC in the same day. Reducing the DC by 5 is a pretty hefty nerf to keep it from getting too crazy. It also keeps minions with a poison attack from being able to stack doses of their poison to pump the poison's DC to ludricrous levels.
The uber-DR granted by Minion Resistance is intended to keep higher level minions from being immediately chumped by low level effects, like Magic Missile. Four Minion Balors would be CR 20, but without Minion Resistance, all that's stopping a wizard from killing all of them in one round is a couple of SR checks, and the investment of just four attacks from the party would kill them just by beating their AC. With Minion Resistances, any single attack would need to deal over 23 damage to take one out (13 for the Balor's Con modifier + 10 for 1/2 it's CR). Completely attainable, but no amount of magic missile pot-shots will get through it. The value of the "uber-DR" being based of Constitution as well as CR is to get some variance between different types of minions in one CR range. For instance, a tiny fey minion at CR 2 might only have "Minion Resistance 1", but a big burly 3rd level half-orc fighter NPC might have "Minion Resistance 3" if his Constitution is 14 or 15.
The Evasion and pseudo-Mettle granted by Minion Resistance is also intended to give minions at least some lasting power, modeling 4th edition's minions getting that "never take damage from a missed attack" rule.
The division of treasure will not normally affect monster minions; it's mainly a limitation for NPC minions. By dividing the treasure, NPC minions won't have as good equipment as a non-minion version of the same NPC. This means player characters with DR/magic or DR/adamantine (or other expensive materials) might enjoy their damage reduction actually being relevant to combat for more levels that they'd otherwise think (because who really expects DR/magic to do anything beyond level 3?) This is fine by me, as it just means NPC mooks are that much easier for PCs to deal with.
There was a large thread discussing minions in another sub forum a while back... I'll try and find it and post a link for you.
*Edit* Found quite a few threads on minions. I don't use them and am not able to judge which are "best". Go to the Suggestions/House Rules/Homebrew rules sub-forum above under Pathfinder RPG, click on that header to go to that sub-forum and type "minion" into the search box upper right. It will pop up with numerous threads on minions including several with varying rules for minions in PF.
There was a large thread discussing minions in another sub forum a while back... I'll try and find it and post a link for you.
*Edit* Found quite a few threads on minions. I don't use them and am not able to judge which are "best". Go to the Suggestions/House Rules/Homebrew rules sub-forum above under Pathfinder RPG, click on that header to go to that sub-forum and type "minion" into the search box upper right. It will pop up with numerous threads on minions including several with varying rules for minions in PF.
Thanks! Appreciate the point in the right direction.
