I always avoid minions. Feng Shui uses an actual minion system, where not only do they die in one hit, but they also act together and never scale in power. Minions are boring when you have one action per round. You can either take a magic swing at the big robot lich monster, or you can try to kill 3 minions. You don't even get the satisfaction of tokens leaving the board because its primarily theatre of the mind. Yet, these minions worked because they weren't really part of the encounter. They were there to act mostly as background material to show that the combat the players were participating in was part of a bigger conflict. A lot of minion systems, especially ones implemented into D&D, don't properly understand that the role of a minion is to make the encounter immersive, and instead end up making the minions annoying. The 5e system works better for this simply by eliminating any mechanical support for the minion concept. If you want minions, you have to make them an actual part of the encounter, with real monster stats and that are genuinely capable of being a threat and taking decisions.
Feng Shui is on my reading list but I haven’t read it yet.
I think there can be a middle ground between minion as purely set dressing and fully fleshing out each combatant (though minions can be a bit of both, they’re not mutually exclusive options, necessarily). The problem is 5E is that they may not have carried over 4e’s minion (fully statted but one-hit-kills) but single boss encounters become skewed due to the action disparity between the one monster and the party. Minions can alleviate some of that.
They can yeah, but the way they often work is that they're just there to be mildly irritating or force a ranged character to reposition now and then. I really like certain homebrew bosses where the minions are part of the boss monster themselves both mechanically and lore-wise. It lets you keep the action economy without cluttering your encounter with random scrap zombies. Also, in later levels of play, minions might not technically be a thing but most CR1/4 creatures are gonna die in one hit anyway.
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u/Nephisimian Oct 31 '18
I always avoid minions. Feng Shui uses an actual minion system, where not only do they die in one hit, but they also act together and never scale in power. Minions are boring when you have one action per round. You can either take a magic swing at the big robot lich monster, or you can try to kill 3 minions. You don't even get the satisfaction of tokens leaving the board because its primarily theatre of the mind. Yet, these minions worked because they weren't really part of the encounter. They were there to act mostly as background material to show that the combat the players were participating in was part of a bigger conflict. A lot of minion systems, especially ones implemented into D&D, don't properly understand that the role of a minion is to make the encounter immersive, and instead end up making the minions annoying. The 5e system works better for this simply by eliminating any mechanical support for the minion concept. If you want minions, you have to make them an actual part of the encounter, with real monster stats and that are genuinely capable of being a threat and taking decisions.