I have thrown many minions at my adventuring party over the last while and noticed that the student (least capable combatent) kills around 2.5 goblins/imps/bandits etc. in a single ranged attack. What's your experience using minions becouse I'm thinking of putting minnion health at x2 toughness.

side note, a character who has 2 toughness will die if monster looks at him funny, reduced wound threshold, soak and also only two criticals are needed to kill him, that's a fairly large punishment for not spending three advancement points at the begining, and if you have 2 toughness chances are you dont have it as a career ability and it will cost four points to fill that whole.

first, minions are silly easy to kill. 4e D&D, and I am sure there are other games out there that i am unaware of, added henchmen all with 1hp to the mix for fun I think. as a dragonborn you can breath a cone of fire on them and kill them in swathes. they are a tactical distraction while the tough enemies move into position and everyone love killing minions in hordes. In one of my favorite new games 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars you don't roll to do damage, you roll for total kills and compete with other players for the most. but if you don't dig that they are so easy to kill i think your idea makes a good compromise between a henchman and a promotion to full stat creature. or you could try using more of them.

second, you are absolutely right about characters with two toughness. they should stay out of combat as much as possible or buy three toughness.

Yeah, if you chose not to buy up Toughness then you are choosing to be incredibly fragile. Which is a good thing, IMO - I don't want to encourage optimisation style builds, so the fact that you need characteristics for some many things means your players need to buy them up

Minions are just to add numbers to a combat and such, they are easy to dispatch but the added numbers also usually help outnumber the heroes. Often the minions will be good at basically chipping away at hero characters, they are pretty much sure to die, but they can deal some decent damage as their output is no different from a regular npc, but they get bonus fortune dice for each minion in a group of them.

It is just important that you always have a couple standard npcs, mixed in with a couple groups of minions to keep things balanced. Minions by themselves are going to be slaughtered.

Also your using very weak level baddies as minions so it's expected that they are easy kills, toss in stuff like orc minions and they are much tougher to dispatch.

I won't dispute that henchmen are easy to kill, but if your Student is averaging 2.5 Goblin henchmen dead from a single ranged attack, I wonder if you are doing something wrong. Goblin henchmen have a Soak of 4 and 3 wounds each. So to kill 2 it takes 10 damage. The highest DR on the ranged weapon table is a 6, meaning that your Student has an Agility of better than 4 and/or is inflicting extra damage due to rolling rediculously well on a regular basis to average 2.5 kills. Imps have a combined Soak of 5 and a Defense of 2, so harder still to see how 2.5 are being killed on average. It's not impossible for a Student to have an Agility of 5, especially if an Elf, but Agility isn't one of the Student's Primary Characteristics, so he's spent a lot of character creation points to get Agility that high, at the expense of something else, which may be where the T2 observation is coming from. A human Student with the more reasonable Agility of 3 armed with a crossbow is going to deal 9 damage per hit, which after being reduced by Soak of 4 is going to net 5 wounds, killing one Goblin henchman and leaving another with 2 wounds, or 1.66 killed per hit.

They are supposed to die easily. If they are dying too quickly for your tastes, you aren't using enough of them.

In fact, 2 henchmen in a group are more dangerous than a single henchman with x2 wounds, since they get the extra fortune die.

I generally view minions taken down as not dead, but defeated. A single blow is enough to convince them to run off, even seeing one of their comrades take a hit might convince them to flee.

Every movie is filled with henchman who's only job it is to die gloriously for our visual pleasure.

So I see nothing wrong with them here. Keeps the combat flowing. Keeps the players feel like they are progressing in combat. It's win-win.

As it's been said the role of the minion is to die, to make the heroes look cool AND to make the real enemies look even more badass. They also server a secondary purpose to slow up the players for tactical/dramatic reasons, wear down their resources and possibly soften them up a little bit before the real bad guys come into play. That's the point of minions.

However, if you don't want that kind of heroic play in your game you have a couple options. The first option is simply to not use minions. The second option is a simple house rule to *toughen them up a bit.

*Tougher Minions (house rule):

Instead of following the normal rules for dealing damage and killing minions. Instead regardless of how much damage you cause, unless it's an area attack/multi-attack, you can only hurt/kill one minion at a time. So if you are attacking a group of goblin minions and do 10 damage. You only kill 1 goblin in that minion group. Note - just for clarification. If you are attacking with an area effect or multi-attack (rapid shot for example) you may damage/kill multiple minions as per normal. This has the offset, in particular for mages, in making their spells a little more effective.

@kryyst: i like your house rule better. no more killing two henchmen with one arrow and no more additional math. i guess i don't really mind killing two henchmen at once in melee, it is kind of like cleave. but one arrow going through two bodies and killing them both seems too silly.

About the minion killing only one at a time, one attack action represents several attacks.

My old rule for someone being a minion was: Do they have a name? if not then their a minion.

I've changed it to: are they a worthy adversary? which increased numer of real adversaries.

about the toughness thing, I'm okay with a scholar being K.Oed at any time, but the fast that some attacks could cause 2 criticals in one go means that a well thought out, well roleplayed character could die at any moment, while a toughness 5 power playing dwarf troll slayer will never die despite his additions to the party is "Can we pwn some N00bs yet?!" My idea to revise.

Characters can suffer wounds with a total severity value equal to there wound threshold before dieing.

this means even if you have toughness 5 human he has only 3 more health then then toughness 2 human.

not to mention 4 advances is allot.

forgot to note,

@mac40k the student has 3 agility, ballistic skill trained "while I have done some duck hunting" and regularily rolls amazing e.g. Myself: The chaos sorceror would like to see you dead for interfereing with his plan, Ambross: I use winning smile, Myself: umm. O.k. That's a daunting check with 2 extra black dice, Ambross rolls, 1-2 sucess, 0 boons, sigmars comet. Myself: The chaos sorceror is terribly confused and no longer know's what think of you.

reidchapman said:

you might have lost me completely. let's start over with mechanics, death occurs for players when a character gets knocked unconscious from exceeding his wound threshold. he then immediately flips over one of his wounds and turns it into a crit. if he has more crits than toughness he dies. wound threshold is determined during character creation and is a combination of the character's racial base plus his starting toughness. an average human (3 To) starts with a wound threshold of twelve. this means that when the average human takes more than twelve damage he is ko'd, and after you convert a wound to a crit wound he dies if he has more than three crits. a dwarf with 5 To has a 15 wound threshold (a 5 (To) human would have 14). which is only three more health, and he would need six crits to die if knocked out, instead of four. what really makes 5 To better than 3 or 2 is the increase in soak and fatigue.

imo, a 2 (To) character deserves to die at any time. seriously, they are of below average health. they should be disease prone, bed-ridden, and super squishy in combat. unless you are playing a super low-powered campaign with minimal combat they are begging for early retirement. you seem to be ok with that but not really. you seem to feel it is not fair that power-gamers/butt-kickers are much more survivable than a bunch of well-roleplayed but much weaker characters like scholars. you also prefer "worthy adversaries" to minions. if i understand you i think there are some easy non-mechanical, no house-rule necessary ways to get what you want as a gm. first, you communicate to your players you want to do something real low-level like a campaign where all the players are merchants trying to make their fortune. or whatever. then you cull every career that looks power-tastic. and then you keep combat really rare and use hidden rolls so you can fudge the dice if something freakishly improbable comes up. but it sounds like you are throwing a chaos sorceror at them so i really can't tell what you want. oh well:)

problem is our party, a scholar, a soldier (only real combat character), a gambler and an agent all go grandiose quests with danger and peril but there all very non combatent, character death is big especially when all the character are well worked out.

Thease rules don't apply to real heroes*, but for my specific party of half TO 2 character I want to keep them from droping like a fly, at one point ellarion the gambler took 2 points of damage and got a trivial scar that was a critical wound (-1 to fel or something) he took 2 of his 11 wound threshold and got tiny nick and in that moment he was half dead. The players are more likly to die then be KO'd.

thats why I suggest that higher severity values contrinute more to your "deadness"

well, the party your players made sounds pretty funny and it sounds like they are having a good time. maybe you could just rule that they need to have double their toughness in crits before they die when ko'd. if they are all 2 toughness that really would not be a gamebreaker.

let me just make sure i understand. just because the gambler has one crit does not mean he is half dead. if he takes ten more wounds and goes down he will still need three total crits to be dead but i can see how that would make a fella nervous. the gm toolkit proposes an interesting additional rule for wound advancement: if a character get ko'd but survives you can let the player spend one non-career advance to purchase an increase in wound threshold. they also suggest that you make the character take a permanent nasty scar for it and make it party of the character's story.

wait I see what im getting wrong,

A. MORE crits then TO, I thought it was EQUAL crits to TO.

B.You have to be K.O. ed first in order to be dead.

yup, that's it. and now i understand what you were saying earlier. that would suck if you died as soon as you had crits equal to (To).