Minions and character adjustment to encounter XP budget

[Baron Ulfhamr]

My group is thinking to acquire some minions to beef up their survivability so I've been reading up. I usually have 5 players, so I either adjust the encounter XP budget accordingly, or reduce the xp gained by a like amount as per the rules found in the Core Rulebook pg. 489 3.0.

Minions have to be four levels below the character (at least those created via the Create Undead ritual do, which is what we're using), and I noticed in Table 10-2: Creature XP and Role that four such creatures are the equivalent threat as a creature 4 levels higher. That is to say, adding 4 minions is akin mathematically to adding another character per these tables.

I'm thinking to adjust the xp budget accordingly, with every four such minions (at party level -4) being equivalent to another PC. Does this make sense? How do you handle this?

[breithauptclan]

Baron Ulfhamr wrote:

I'm thinking to adjust the xp budget accordingly, with every four such minions (at party level -4) being equivalent to another PC. Does this make sense? How do you handle this?

Only if these minions don't actually have the 'Minion' trait.

If they get a full set of 3 actions each round and are simply controlled by the players, then yeah - they should count against the party's budget when designing encounters.

But if the players have to spend an action commanding them in order for them to do something, then they really shouldn't. Druids and Rangers with their Animal Companions, Inventors with their Construct Companions, several archetypes that provide minion companions of various types - all of these characters still only count as one.

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What you and your players will likely find is that it becomes a money sink having to replace all of these undead minions that they are creating. At party level -4 they will get destroyed rather quickly as soon as one of the at-level or above enemies sneezes in their general direction.

[HumbleGamer]

4*party-4 are far from being a character ( useless is the right term here).

I had logistical issues running AP even with 5 characters, two of them with a companion.

Are you sure giving 4 extra token on a large group wouldn't result hard to handle given the map size?

If their purpose is to boost survival, there are plenty of possibilities ( but it's hard to address the issue not knowing neither the party composition nor what happens during combat encounters).

If you want to go with minions, even if you don't want your players to expend feats into companions, I'd follow the druid/beast master companion progression, just to have an idea in terms of saves, hit, damage, hp, AC.

[Baron Ulfhamr]

Well hHumbleGamer, the reason the players are taking this option is because it's thematic for their characters and they have access to the necessary rituals. This party runs a bit dark, lol. I don't think map size will be an issue (at least, not one I care about- it's their problem!) as we're running Abomination Vaults. These maps are plenty big, albeit with some troublesome corridors that I take full advantage of.

Thanks for that input breithauptclan about action economy... I hadn't considered that.

I was considering allowing undead from Book of the Dead with class levels to be created, but for simplicity and in light of your post I'll restrict such to non-minion NPCs.

Thanks, both, for the input!

[Blake's Tiger]

If they're using class/rules options legally (e.g., ritual) to obtain these minions--i.e., you're not just giving them to them--then it shouldn't count against the XP budget at all. They're using their resources to gain the minions.

And 4 levels below character level is barely anything more than a speed bump to NPCs.

Even if you were running the free archetype variant and they all took Beastmaster, for the sake of example, you wouldn't necessarily be changing the XP budget.

[HumbleGamer]

Blake's Tiger wrote:

If they're using class/rules options legally (e.g., ritual) to obtain these minions--i.e., you're not just giving them to them--then it shouldn't count against the XP budget at all. They're using their resources to gain the minions.

Yeah.

Not sure whether the trade off might be fair or not but, unless exploiting downtime activities too much, trading currency for X rather than Y should always be enough.