Has anyone applied any henchmen/mook/minion rules for their Anima games? Here are the rules I'm considering...

1. Henchmen do not roll their Defense. Whatever their score is, that's what their defense is.

2. Henchmen rolls are never open-ended.

3. Any attack that would deal a critical on a henchman instead instantly kills or knocks him/her unconcious (player's choice).

The point of these ideas are threefold. First, it should speed up combat with no-name thugs to get to the more important battles. Secondly, it should make the PCs feel even more like bad mambajambas than they already are. Thirdly, in contrast, it'll make the "real" encounters seem that much *more* dangerous.

Thoughts?

Nightchilde said:

1. I like it, but I'd rather say "add 50 to their defense and don't roll it". I'm afraid it can be really to easy if they have always a 0 + their defense.

2. I like it ^^

3. I think it's too strong, they could die too fast IMO. I like the idea of henchmen still fighting with haemorraghies and broken bones ^^

But these are really good ideas I think I will take the 1. and 2. I've said.

During my last game friday night I had a fight that lasted for 2h with only level 1 warriors (my PC are level 2) because everyone rolled only average checks... I was thinking about such rules so, thank you

Nightchilde said:

And, it's logical, as in Gaia we have new rules about gnosis and people with gnosis 0 can't get open rolls.

Cool. I'll take those suggestions into consideration. I haven't actually run a session of Anima yet (this Saturday, though, is the plan) so I'm not 100% sure of how it would work out.

I normally don't drop in houserules before playing at least once, but I wanted to get *these* in place before the campaign started.

Nightchilde said:

If I can give you an advice, just try the game with all the rules once in combat, just because if you apply these houserules now, your players can maybe get a wrong idea of the scale of power and balance of the game, thinking they are better than they really are. I imagine that if a players thinks that 50 in attack is enough because henchmen didn't get any open rolls and never rolled their defense, he can be really disappointed when he will notice that it's not enough for a combat-oriented character in a "real" encounter.

These rules are great in order to make your players feel that they are quite good in front of henchmen, and to make real encounters more difficult.

But if they build their idea of the game scales of powers on it, maybe they will get a wrong idea, so, when they will get a real encounter, they will feel weak... and you'll get the opposite of what you wanted.

I don't know your players so I can't tell how they will react, just an advice

Hm. It was my impression that 0-level NPCs essentially *were* the mooks...

Thoughts?

Yes, but, the combat is still long with level 0 characters, as you'll roll everything. These house-rules are made for spending less time on these fights.