Minion design

[Lonely Tylenol]

Are there rules for designing minions? I don't seem to be able to find any. I love the minion rules, and think they're an excellent device for fleshing out encounter areas. However, my monsters of choice do not always have appropriate minions attached, and I'd like to design my own without having to reverse engineer their defenses, attacks, etc. to come up with a system.

Am I just overlooking the rules, or are there none? In the latter case, has anyone gone ahead and done the work to figure out what the minion-generation algorithm is?

 

[Obryn]

Strangely, there are none. Minions are statistically very simple, though, and I've made a few... I'd just find one of the proper level (or a close level) and slightly adjust them.

I made some skeletal archer minions by taking the baseline skeleton; adding a few to attacks, defenses, and damage; and adding a longbow attack.

-O

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I haven't seen any rules either, but my advice would be:

1) Choose a monster.
2) Change its type to minion, but leave it level as-is.
3) Reduce to 1 hit point.
4) Remove all "active" powers, except for its basic attacks. Leave passive abilities that make sense for a minion to have.
5) Determine appropriate damage for its remaining attacks by looking at similar minions of its level.
6) Optional: Raise or lower the level of the new minion by +/-5 using the rules in the DMG.

This should give you approximately what you are looking for.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Are there rules for designing minions?

Apropos of absolutely nothing, it's only now that you've changed your name to "Lonely Tylenol" that I've realized that "Dr. Awkward" was also a palindrome.

Me am smart.

 

[Scribble]

I haven't seen any rules either, but my advice would be:

1) Choose a monster.
2) Change its type to minion, but leave it level as-is.
3) Reduce to 1 hit point.
4) Remove all "active" powers, except for its basic attacks. Leave passive abilities that make sense for a minion to have.
5) Determine appropriate damage for its remaining attacks by looking at similar minions of its level.
6) Optional: Raise or lower the level of the new minion by +/-5 using the rules in the DMG.

This should give you approximately what you are looking for.

Yeah you can pretty much do the same thing from scratch by using the rules on 184 and applying your steps.

The only things they seem to play around with are Defenses (they're off by a few usually.) But the rules on 184 seem like they'll give you a playable thing.

 

[Cadfan]

Minions tend to be an absolutely generic base onto which one or two flavorful abilities have been added to create variety and theme. I'd take an equivalent level minion, delete its flavor ability, and replace it.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I think one of the designers gave the same advice: take a minion of the same level or a level close to it and use the same stats with different flavor.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Apropos of absolutely nothing, it's only now that you've changed your name to "Lonely Tylenol" that I've realized that "Dr. Awkward" was also a palindrome.

Me am smart.

Well, you can't win 'em all.

Actually, my location has always been a palindrome too. When the system started to confuse me with dr. awkward when they changed to ENWorld 2, I had to really think hard to decide how I wanted to change my name. There are few palindromes that make good user names.

 

[Hjorimir]

I was pretty surprised myself when I saw there were no hard rules for minion design. I think the easiest approach is what mshea said, just reskin an existing minion and make a few tweaks.