If a minion pool is right on the threshold of losing another minion, do you tell the player so they could spend their Advantages in other ways?

If the minion pool needs to take 1 more wound before a minion falls and the player rolls a successful attack with enough Advantages to spend on a Critical Hit, should the player know that her damage is going to kill a minion and she could spend the Advantages on giving the minion group a Setback die next turn or something else?

Or do you let the player spend the Advantages on a Critical Hit?

I hope this makes sense and that I am understanding the minion rules correctly. Thanks!

I tend to tell my players if a specific course of action will kill an NPC so they don't feel duped.

Though the best people to be asking this question is your players. Do they prefer to know or would they prefer the mystery of not knowing.

You kind of have to step back and look at minions as a gelatenous blob of game mechanics. Yes, when they recieve enough wounds to hit an aggregate member's threshold they lose a member. BUT, they still have one overall wound pool. So rolling a crit on a minion group that is 1 wound away from weakening/losing a member allows you to add a minion member's worth of wounds with the crit, and deal the rest of the damage to the mechanical blob normally (thus whacking another minion member)

So if I had 5 minions with 6 wound threshold each, that's a total wound pool of 30.

The PCs do 7 damage to the minion group, so one minion dies and the group now has 4 members. Then the PCs do 5 damage to the group, so it has a total of 12 wounds and 1 more wound will mean another minion dies.

A PC rolls a successful hit doing 5 damage plus enough Advantage for a Critical Hit. Does this mean if they choose the Crit, they do the 5 damage, killing one minion, and then another 6 damage, killing a second minion in the same round?

Yes... it is possible to kill two (or more) minions in a single round this way. It might represent the player successfully snapping off two shots... even if it was only one attack roll.

That's cool, or they could blast something on the street that falls on the minion, or something blows up on them, or the minion shoots as it falls, accidentally killing its compatriot.

That's cool, or they could blast something on the street that falls on the minion, or something blows up on them, or the minion shoots as it falls, accidentally killing its compatriot.

Now you're thinking with portals!

a crit is always worth using on a minion. It can be thought of "automatically killing a minion", but what it REALLY means is that it automatically deals one minion's worth of damage. So, if there's a minion group of 3 dudes, each with 5 wound threshold, the Triumph (or enough advantages for a crit) automatically does 5 wounds of damage. So, if the squad is only 1 wound away from losing a dude, the remaining 4 damage goes to the rest of the group, IN ADDITION to whatever damage you're dealing based on successes rolled.

The way I've been handling it is that I apply the damage to the minion group first, and then the critical, reducing the combined Wound Threshold by whatever amount the minion added.

So if dealing with a Minion Group of 4 Stormtroopers (Wound Threshold 5 each, total of 20), and the Hired Gun hits them for 12 damage with his blaster carbine but also triggers a critical injury, I apply it as follows:

1) Reduce the 12 damage by the stormtroopes' Soak Value of 5, leaving 7 damage.

2) Apply the damage, which means 1 defeated stormtrooper and 2 points applied to the group total, which is now 15.

3) Apply the critical hit, which means 1 more defeated stormtrooper, dropping the minion group's Wound Threshold to 10.

A PC rolls a successful hit doing 5 damage plus enough Advantage for a Critical Hit. Does this mean if they choose the Crit, they do the 5 damage, killing one minion, and then another 6 damage, killing a second minion in the same round?

That's how I read it...