We Overkilled Overkill (Patreon)

Note: This post contains some new rules we're testing internally. If you're running the current playtest packet to provide feedback to us via the survey, please use the rules in the packet so all our feedback is consistent.

“Minions—way too swingy.” I’ve been staring at this message I wrote to myself at the top of one of my many notebooks for a few weeks now. We have bigger fish to fry in terms of feedback from our playtest coordinators and you folks, the patrons. I hadn’t really dug into solving the problems with minions. At least, I thought I hadn’t. When I started preparing for the latest playtest, I realized that I had gone over the issues with minions in the back of my head so much that I had a solution.

Before we get to my tweaks, let me (James) lay out the problems. You can read the minion rules I’ll be referencing in the first playtest packet, but they’re also right here:

Only 1 Health

All minions have 1 Health. A single attack or other instance of damage takes them out of the fight.

Damage Threshold

Minions can die in droves. Each type of minion has a damage threshold that helps determine how many minions can be laid low with an attack.

When you deal damage to a minion with an attack that targets a single creature, you can kill one additional minion using the same stat block each time you meet the damage threshold. For instance, if a minion has a damage threshold of 6 and you deal 12 damage to them with an attack, you kill the minion you attacked, plus two other minions. The other minions you choose must be within your reach or adjacent to the minion you initially targeted.

When you use an attack that targets an area of effect that includes minions of the same stat block, one minion automatically dies. You can kill one additional minion of the same stat block who is in the area of effect each time you meet the damage threshold.  For instance, if a minion has a damage threshold of 6 and you deal 12 damage to them with an attack, you kill one minion in the area of effect automatically, plus two other minions in the area of effect.

Minions Act in Groups

Up to five minions with the same stat block act together on the same turn. When minions act in a group, a minion can use a maneuver and then hold their action for a group attack (see Minion Attacks), waiting until all their allies are in position to execute the group attack. If a minion doesn’t use their action by the end of the group’s turn, that action is lost.

Minion Attacks

Unlike other creatures, minions don’t roll 2d6 when they make an attack, and their rolls don’t have static modifiers. Minions also can’t roll critical hits. All of this keeps the damage output of minions low and makes their turns very fast.

Minions can make group attacks, as noted by the special Group keyword that appears in those attacks. Up to five minions using the same stat block can make a single attack with the Group keyword together on their turn, or whenever another feature allows them all to make a basic attack. The minions choose a target for the group attack, which must be within the distance of the attack for each minion, and each minion must have line of effect to the target. If the group attack is made on the minions’ turn, each minion must use their action to join the attack. A group attack’s damage dice are multiplied by the number of minions making the group attack. For instance, if three rotting zombies make a group attack that individually deals 1d4 damage, then the group attack deals 3d4 damage.

Each individual minion’s boons and banes on the group attack are factored together to determine how many boons and banes a group attack has. For instance, if three minions have each gained 1 boon on attacks and one minion is suffering 1 bane on attacks when all four make a group attack, the group attack gains 2 boons.

Die Too Easy

The first issue we have is that minions die WAY too easily. They're supposed to go down fast, but minions should be threatening. They were dying so quickly that they never got a chance to act.

The game has loads of ways to kill minions. Because all attacks in our game deal damage, you’re guaranteed to kill a minion if you attack them. Odds are you’re going to kill additional minions with that attack thanks to the damage threshold rules, especially if that attack gets some boons! The damage threshold rules in our RPG are inspired by the overkill rules from Flee, Mortals!, which the community really seems to enjoy. It seemed like a no-brainer to include them in this game too (more on that later).

Minions can die instantly from forced movement and falling damage. Testers often use the Knockback maneuver to kill two minions at once by slamming them together! Fun!

We also have attacks that deal damage to secondary targets as an effect, like the Rapid-Fire kit’s Two Shot ability:

Two Shot

Keywords: Attack, Kit, Weapon Time: Action

Distance: 7 Target: 1 creature or object

Damage: 2d6 + 3 + MGT or AGL

Effect: Another creature within distance takes damage equal to your MGT or AGL.

This signature ability is a minion annihilator, because you get to use the damage threshold rules to kill more minions and then knock off a bonus minion … as a treat.

With so many ways to kill lots of minions in a single turn, it was hard for Directors to make minions anything other than target practice.

Can’t You Just Add More?

You may be thinking, “Well, if minions die too easily, why not just say that a Director should use MORE of them to make a balanced encounter?” Not a bad first thought, but there’s an issue. First, if we say that 20 minions is equivalent to one standard creature of the same level, then we’ve created a sloggy turn for the Director if by initiative roll or other chance all those minions get to act before some of them are killed. We’ve also created an extra deadly turn for the director!

Encounters with minions tend to have be swingier than encounters that only include standard creatures. For those unfamiliar, game designers and gamers use the term “swing” to refer to the range of difficulty a creature or encounter has. If something is “swingy,” it means it oscillates between easy and hard depending on the circumstances. (Note: Swing can also refer to the power level of a player option like a magic item or class feature, but that’s not how we’re using it in this context.)

Most encounters are at least a little swingy. An encounter with more than one enemy gets a little easier after each enemy dies, and an encounter with a solo creature gets less difficult once they’ve used all their villain abilities and encounter powers. Minion encounters have even more swing by design. We might say that five minions equal a standard creature for the sake of encounter-building guidelines, but that’s not actually true in terms of their damage output. Five minions together deal more damage than one standard creature of the same level. The reason, because a standard creature with 1 health remaining has the exact same capabilities on their turn as if they had full health. But five minions that share the same stat block are more effective than two of those same minions. To make up for that fact, a block of minions that counts as one standard creature for encounter-building rules deals a little extra damage when it’s at full strength. It gives the heroes a reason to not just ignore the minions.

A little bit of that minion swing makes their encounters fun and unique. A LOT of that swing means minion encounters go from “way too easy” to “OMG DEATH” if the Director winds up winning initiative. A lot of swing is what would happen if we drastically increased our minion numbers to compensate for how quickly they’re dying.

Too Much Boonage

When minions do get a chance to act, they CAN pack too much of a punch. Our playtest coordinators have been running games with zombie minions with a necromancer I designed that gives nearby undead allies a boon on attacks. Those zombies deal 1d4 damage with their basic attack and each got a boon thanks to the necromancer. Their group attacks were dealing 10d4 damage, which is an average of 25! If the target was also prone or restrained or suffering any number of other effects that would grant the zombies one or more boons on an attack, that number got pumped way up.

Bane Sensitive

Banes are also a problem for minions, particularly 1st-level minions with attacks that deal just 1d4 damage. Giving a group of minions just 1 bane can render them ineffective. If a baned minion lives to take their turn, it won’t be terribly exciting or effective.

Die Too Weird

When some of you read the rules, you might have wondered, “Why do areas of effect also use the damage threshold rules?” It’s a good question. Minions, like most creatures in the game, don’t have a way to avoid taking damage. Without those damage threshold rules, minions stand no chance of survival in an area of effect. Every minion in the area would simply die. That’s no heroic. That’s a slaughter with no challenge. Imagine a high-level game where a hero can create larger areas of effect that just wipe all the minions off the board in a single action no matter what dice they roll for damage. That might make sense if the hero is 10th-level and the minions are 1st-level, but if the minions are also 10th-level, some of them should stick around. We already had the rules for damage threshold for single-target attacks, so we applied it to areas of effect as well.

In a vacuum, the area of effect overkill rules worked fairly well. There are a few things we need to spell out still, like how effects are applied to minions who don’t die in an area of effect (they still get affected), but the narrative made sense for folks … until they used the area of effect damage threshold rules with the single-target attack damage threshold rules. One of our contract testers pointed out that the shadow’s single-target Assassinate ability (which does a whopping 2d6 + 2d8 + 3) can kill more minions than any damaging area of effect. That didn’t feel right. Narratively, areas of effect, like the talent’s Flay, should be killing more minions than the single-target Assassinate, but we also can’t have them be guaranteed to kill every minion in the blast. These minions are already dying too quickly!

Solutions

Encounters with minions were typically too easy, but when they weren’t cakewalks, they were too hard. Neither is a scenario we want to be a regular occurrence. On top of that, the rules weren’t really serving the fiction.

The goal of minions is that they die quickly compared to standard creatures, but enough of them stick around to provide a reasonable (though not suddenly very deadly) threat while acting swiftly in combat. Here’s the two tweaks we made in our last internal test that helped us move closer to that goal:

Kill Single-Target Overkill

Single-target attack overkill rules were designed for fifth edition. While they work well in that game, our game already affords players who make single-target attacks plenty of ways to kill more than one minion on their turn thanks to forced movement and damage to secondary targets. A hero could easily kill three or four minions on their turn without the single-target overkill rules, so getting rid of those will make it so minions don’t die as easily.

Getting rid of single-target overkill rules also means that our area of effect overkill rules now make more narrative sense in the game. Since it’s no longer true that Assassinate is better at killing minions than Flay, the cognitive dissonance is no longer there. The area of effect overkill aren’t going anywhere. Areas of effect are now the best option to deploy while battling minions, which is how it should be.

No Boons, No Banes, No Dice

As we eliminate one minion rule from fifth edition, we bring in another. Minions no longer have any dice rolled for the damage they deal. All their damage is a static number. This helps reduce the swinginess of their damage. Instead of all those zombies dealing 1d4 damage on their attacks, they now each deal 2 damage (which all gets added up for a group attack).

Minions don’t benefit from boons. They’re minions—they can’t exploit an advantage the way other creatures do. Minions also can’t suffer banes. Individually, their damage is already low. It doesn’t serve the narrative to make it even lower.

By not having any damage dice, boons, or banes to roll during a minion attack, we also keep minion turns fast—which is what you want when five creatures are acting at the same time.

Results

The first test with these new tweaks went well. Players didn’t miss the single-target overkill rules, my minions were threatening but still died fast, my minions were able to act quickly, and everyone seemed to have a lot of fun laying waste to them. More testing is required, but we’re on the right track!

Bit of Admin

Hey now that we’ve had some minion fun, I wanted to also remind you that you have until Tuesday January 23rd at 11AM Pacific/2PM Eastern US time to fill out the survey on the first playtest packet. The survey is the BEST way to get us your feedback. I’m not sure when the next packet will be coming your way, but it’ll probably be a few months as we review and implement your feedback and expand the game.

Also, if you’re a member of the MCDM Discord channel, you should link your Patreon and Discord accounts. You can read about how to do so here. Linking your accounts will give you access to our #mcdm_rpg-patrons channel on Discord. It’s a great place to discuss the MCDM RPG!

Thanks!

—James