what minions dont get to roll dice? I would think you need to include the average die roll in addition to the bonus successes... Otherwise you are not looking at the whole picture. What is the average die roll going to be for 3 groups of 4 vs. 4 groups of 3?

55 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

what minions dont get to roll dice? I would think you need to include the average die roll in addition to the bonus successes... Otherwise you are not looking at the whole picture. What is the average die roll going to be for 3 groups of 4 vs. 4 groups of 3?

Minions who assist don't get to roll dice. See page 191 with the block on NPC Squads for how that works.

In the first two sections, I just quoted a rough estimate of the bonus successes. In the third section, where I actually list the percentages, those are the chances of the minion group successfully hitting, and the corresponding damage (based on the sum of the strife and extra successes). If the player has less armor, or the minion has a better weapon, you can just add to that damage accordingly (and then multiply by the number of groups, and the chance of success to get the total average damage).

The average die roll isn't that useful, since a die roll with one success is no better than a die roll with 0 successes (it misses). Also, you'd want to include the strife based successes in the successful roll, but not in the failed roll. I'm pretty sure the way I broke it down is the most meaningful, but if you're after something else (like how effective they would be vs. air stance), I can generate that too.

4 minutes ago, ubik2 said:

Minions who assist don't get to roll dice. See page 191 with the block on NPC Squads for how that works.

In the first two sections, I just quoted a rough estimate of the bonus successes. In the third section, where I actually list the percentages, those are the chances of the minion group successfully hitting, and the corresponding damage (based on the sum of the strife and extra successes). If the player has less armor, or the minion has a better weapon, you can just add to that damage accordingly (and then multiply by the number of groups, and the chance of success to get the total average damage).

The average die roll isn't that useful, since a die roll with one success is no better than a die roll with 0 successes (it misses). Also, you'd want to include the strife based successes in the successful roll, but not in the failed roll. I'm pretty sure the way I broke it down is the most meaningful, but if you're after something else (like how effective they would be vs. air stance), I can generate that too.

Sure. The base die roll still matters.

Each of the 3 groups of 4 gets an average of 3.97 successes (and 2.26 or 2.37 strife). Each of the 4 groups of 3 gets an average of 3.25 success (and 1.91 or 2.05 strife). The second strife numbers are for when you prefer dice with strife over dice without (which would probably be the case for fire stance).

I've never had a minion group take a group action. Individual actions don't seem like that much work to me, I just have them go in the same initiative. I have them all on group strife, though. The rules specifically advise against minion groups bigger than 6, so four has never seemed unwieldy to me. The only thing it effects is that group strife which changes as they die anyway.

Just realized that minions don't get a benefit from fire stance, so our goblin example actually doesn't work, but the overall problem remains since it still exists with adversaries. I'm still just tearing these people up with fire stance. I'm just doing it with more competent opponents there. I just used the goblin example because that's what they fought in our tactical grid playtest Saturday so they were fresh in my mind and seemed ironic.

Minions not benefiting from stances has been removed in 1.0

Exakkfr, thanks for that. I've been annotating the main PDF with all the updates, but I missed that one.