Or to be clearer, how do area attacks/effects like blast affect minion groups? does each minions after the first one gets additional damage or is only the initial damage carried over and the blast effect doesn't work on the rest?

If there are several minion groups in close proximity to the targetet one, are they all handled like one entity each either?

I'm gonna take a guess that blast works the same as it does in Star Wars.

That is to say, it works really, really well against minion groups.

Say you hit with your fireball. The original target is the one affected, which in the case of a minion group targets the entire group and hits once, but then you activate blast, which hits each engaged enemy once. So the blast effect ignores the rules of the minion group having a collective wound threshold to an extent and hits every minion individually.

for reference, here is the Developer answered question for the Star Wars RPG

On 6/6/2014 at 11:07 AM, kaosoe said:

Should a group of minions be treated as a group of individuals who happen to share one wound pool, or as a single entity?
That is to say, if a blast goes off in the middle of a group of minions
-- should each minion, individually, take the blast damage, soak it, and apply the remainder to their shared pool, or
-- does the group as a whole get hit by the blast, take the damage, soak it once, and then apply the remainder (and if so, then does the group being the primary target exclude the group from being affected by the blast)?
Or is there some other methodology?

Answered by Sam Stewart:
The first option would be more thematically appropriate. That being said, if the minions were particularly spread out (if you had a group of four with two each behind two separate barricades, for example), I'd rule that some of the minions couldn't be hit by the blast damage. It does make grenades quite effective against minion groups; but that's sort of the idea in any case.

Blast hits each character in reach. Each minion is still a separate character. Thus, each gets their armor, and each takes the damage... if it's enough, they go poof. If not, well, treat that minion group as having just the remaining damage per character.

Grenades and blast effects are meant to take out minions. If you are using them as a group, getting the upgrades on group skill checks then they are a single "wound pool" if you will and I would only soak once, assuming they are all within range and not behind cover.

AK_Aramis ... Each minion is only considered a separate character if you don't have them grouped up. Or at least that's how I've been playing it for the last 3 years.

4 hours ago, Zszree said:

Grenades and blast effects are meant to take out minions. If you are using them as a group, getting the upgrades on group skill checks then they are a single "wound pool" if you will and I would only soak once, assuming they are all within range and not behind cover.

AK_Aramis ... Each minion is only considered a separate character if you don't have them grouped up. Or at least that's how I've been playing it for the last 3 years.

I dare say you've been doing it wrong. Every minion is a character, and blast hits all characters in range.

Before anyone gets into the "I'm right you're wrong" match if you read Sam's official answer, he didn't give one. The question gives a number of options and he talks about what he considers "thematically" correct, but doesn't give a definitive answer. So it's up to the individual table's and GMs to decide what they like. The minion grouping rule makes a odd situation in regards to Blast. Personally I Soak it once and apply the total to the whole and that's got nothing to do with what's thematically correct and everything to do with keeping it simple for me and bookkeeping. The whole point to the minion rule was that and it seems to me when I suddenly have to start tracking individual Wound pools of minions because of Blast it pretty much defeats the primary purpose of it.

I did a segment on this for the Order 66 Podcast specifically talking about Minions in the Star Wars RPG.

You can look at it two ways:

1) The Minions are individuals. This is deadly for Minion groups and honestly is the most complex way of doing it mainly because as soon as you apply it as individuals, you have to remove Soak from each, and then re-calculate (remembering that Minions have a group Wound Threshold). Its complex, time consuming and breaks the flow of the game.

2) The Minions are a single entity. This is the easiest to apply. The difference is that the Blast effect then can also affect the Minion Group.

Yes its a house rule, but its an easy fix.