“Do you want fries with that?”
Continuing on with last week’s post regarding the potential for 4e combats to run a wee bit longer than we sometimes want, a cabal of brilliant GMs brainstormed with me about steps we can take to build more effective encounters. I think the top answer was, use more minions. OK. But the Monster Manual as it stands doesn’t provide minions for everything. What then do we do?
In keeping with 4e’s (timesaving, lifesaving,sanity-preserving) motto of “less GM prep-time”, here is a quick procedure for taking any monster and making a minion out of it. I’m going to use the gray wolf, as I ran a combat with a group of them which, in hindsight, should have had minions out of them with the dire wolf being a full HP bad-ass.
Minimize Powers
Keep the at-will attack and then choose one power to keep. Drop everything else. In the case of the gray wolf, this is very easy, as it only has one other power — knock the opponent prone if it hits on combat advantage.
Make the Variable Damage Static.
All I’m going to do is add up the maximum damage, and half that. In the case of the wolf, they do 1d6+2 damage, and 2d6+2 to prone targets. So, 4 normal damage and 7 versus prone targets.
Quarter the XP cost.
The gray wolf costs 125 xp normally, so each minionized wolf now costs 31.
And we’re done!
That was a little simple, so let’s try it again with a more complex monster. Let’s use everyone’s favorite, the deathjump spider.
First, which powers to keep? I want to keep the at-will basic attack and one power that is iconic. So the deathjump keeps it’s bite, and Prodigious Leap. As minions, the deathjump spiders will be all about poison and speed.
Then we take a look at the spider’s bite. This one’s a touch more complex as it has poison damage. What I’m going to do is give it 7 damage on the bite (half of 2d6+3 maximum) and give it 2 poison damage in place of 5.
Chop up those XPs, and we are done! The minionized deathjump spider is 44 points.
It really is that simple.
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
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It’s a shame the DMG doesn’t provide the mechanics to do that, but as you’ve pointed out, it is really that simple! Thanks for the info. Do you mind if I translate that to Portuguese and put in my blog with the proper credit?
Hey Daniel, glad you like it. Certainly, translate away!
This is a nice way of systematizing a short hand I use often. Some monsters need to be ‘Oh crap’ monsters, but most are there for fun challenge. My only variation is that minions need a hit on the upper half of a characters damage roll or a second hit to drop them. So a character rolling a one for damage still feels that drop in his stomach that he should, while any hard hit drops the mob. I still don’t have to do math for the minions but is raises their value slightly so I give slightly more exp for them.