When I was first reading through the 4E monster manual I had to do a double take at the minion entries. What the heck was a 1 HP monster? It took me a while to wrap my AD&D mind around having low HP monsters that were literally fodder. Slowly I began to get an understanding the role of minions. It wasn’t necessarily a new idea. I particularly always thought Mutants and Masterminds had a clever idea using mooks (basically one shot minions) for their superhero D20 game.

For a while though, I struggled to use them. They were very squishy and seemed to drop too fast. I had some difficulty using them as an effective screen for other important creature types in fights. I could never get any reasonable positioning with them around the PCs. In short, I never felt my group had a challenge when I used a fair amount of minions so I started to shy away from commonly using them in encounters (just a filler of 2-3 to round out the XP budget). After a while though, my perspective changed.

I use minions quite frequently now. They are a perfect way to add a lot of bodies in a room, and not completely overwhelm the characters. Yes, they do drop like flies. However, that does  go well with my group. I think the players enjoy getting to feel powerful hacking through 4 to 8 guys before getting that evil wizard. Minions do work, but I found I needed to rethink how I used them.

Use their role – Check the DMG (pg. 54-55) and read up on monster roles. Starting with MM2, WotC has now started including this information in their monster stats. When you are thinking about setting up and running encounters, take this information into consideration. Most minions fall within the skirmisher role followed by brutes, but a few fall into other roles. This does have a small impact on how you run them, so keep it in mind. Also be sure to use your minions to support the other monster types in a fight. Positioning is important not to mention the following point…

Use Aid Another and Combat Advantage – Most PCs forget about aid another (PHB pg. 287), a DM shouldn’t. Get 3 minions adjacent to a player. Have 2 make a melee basic attack at AC 10. Odds are with combat advantage that 3rd minion that can now add a whopping +6 to his attack roll. Aid another is a great way to add some teeth to a minion’s bite. And if you’ve got your minions supporting a brute in combat, watch out. With aid another that brute will likely get a big bonus to his heavy-hitting attacks.

Use a lot of them – The 4 minions per standard creature in the heroic tier is a great yardstick, but I don’t consider it a hard rule. I usually will add another 1-2 to the entire encounter if I’m using minions. The group will make short work of them (and they should!) but you can hamper the group’s movement with a threat of attacks of opportunity, and generally providing a shield of bodies to the more important monster types. When using minions, be sure to not quibble with their numbers.

Throw waves of minions at the players – I used to have just about all my monsters out on the map the start of a fight. Sure I would have terrain and cover strewn about, but the players ended up having a good grasp of the battlefield right at the start. A simplistic view could be seen right depicting a smaller room. The group enters the south part of the room with a mix of monsters like artillery, brutes, and minions (M) ready to face off against them. In this situation, the players see all the opposition and can quickly plan out maneuvers and coordinated attacks. A worse case scenario, the group’s controller aces a initiative roll and splatters most the minions in one shot (note the room is a bit smaller than what I would use for a standard 5 player group).

I stopped doing this when I have a fair amount of minions in the mix. I now usually keep a least half in reserve for the first turn. I get the players out into the room and see the general position of everyone, then I commit the rest of the baddies. One thing I have really strived for now however is to have multiple pathways to the same room (illustrated below). Here the player’s have to worry about additional creatures coming in from different directions. I can push the minions to pile through one entrance, or spill into the room from 2 directions. Even if the players turtle up down in the south west corner (in the below example), they are cluttered together for effective blasting by the artillery/controller types.

This really keeps my group on thinking on their feet. Definitely start to consider using your minions in waves. Avoid committing everything at the first initiative roll (lurkers work well keeping them back also). I also heartily suggest creating encounters where the players have to worry about multiple routes of attack. If the players have to face off to other directions, it ramps up the excitement and makes the combat more dynamic.

These are a few tips I have for using minions. I’d love to hear other tricks on how DMs have been using them.

To jump on the bandwagon from a Questing GM, he is graciously hosting this month’s RPG Blog Carnival Question, ‘How to be a better GM.’ There is a lot of thoughts I could add to this. I’ll bring up 2 things I think are the key though.

Communicate and listen – At the end of each session I say, ‘So what do you all think? Are you having fun?’ So many folks will point out that reading your players, knowing your group, understanding what your players want, all are important for being a good DM. Maybe you are a master at poker and can read your group’s enthusiasm well. Do yourself a favor and make sure your impressions are right. Give them all an opportunity to talk about the game with you, and do it frequently. Most importantly, be sure to listen to them.

Guess what? You are going to make bad calls. You are going to find some players bring interesting characters, while others are sort of dull, and this might make yourself slip towards favoring one player over another. You are going to make both game and personal mistakes. Give your players a chance to tell you about it.

Don’t let a player sit and stew about it for weeks on end. Eventually bad things are going to come to a head and things will blow up. Get people comfortable talking about the game. Don’t get defensive. Don’t get upset. Find out how they feel. Did I mention you should listen to the group?

If you are doing a good job, your players will realize that yes, you made a bad call. You flubbed understanding a power or whatever, but you are all there to have fun. It’s a game. The DM is not out to torture or punish anyone, just trying to make things challenging. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But reinforcing the idea that everyone should be having fun, and more importantly, communicating that idea to the group helps smooth things out immensely.

You will learn things. Maybe they absolutely loved that stupid NPC you quickly made up. Maybe they felt the combat wading through lava was too tough and simply frustrating. The combat on an airship was cool. The fight on the ice sheet against trolls was tough, but they enjoyed the challenge. You will learn the things your players like and dislike, all giving you ideas to make future sessions better. Again, make sure you listen to your group.

Play games – First off, you should spend a little time in the player’s seat. You should get a chance to see how other people DM. You should find out new tips and tricks. You should experience someone making things engaging and exciting. Or experience a heavy handed jerk, making your group suffer (and learn it is not fun). You will get better ideas how, or how not, to run a game. I cringe when I hear some guy cackle that he has never played D&D as a character, has always been the DM, and has absolutely no interest in ever being a player. That guy is missing a big part of understanding D&D.

Play different games. – Lots of them. You will learn by exposing yourself to different game designs how they work. What things are engaging and fun. What things are tedious and boring. You can port these aspects to your game, and doing so you’ll learn how to be a better DM.

Maybe you’ll find that intricate paperwork keeping track of game effects is serviceable, but having simple tokens makes book keeping interesting. Maybe you’ll realize that having events every other turn is predictable and boring, while making it somewhat random is more interesting. Maybe you realize penalties that make you sit out the game for several turns is frustrating, and that having some other mechanism to keep the player engaged is more rewarding.

Play lots of different games. Communicate and listen to your players frequently. These are two things (in my simple mind) that will make you a better GM.

Sometimes you might have this happen. Some NPC spills his guts dropping off some key information to the party. You get one guy that grabs a D20 and says, ‘I’m gonna see if he’s lying with Insight.’ Nope. Hold on. Back up there, buddy.

See I don’t buy insight acting like a default lie detector, where players wave their hand an automatically read untruthful thoughts. Insight is also about reading social situations. Great insight allows a person to recognize the two people chatting civilly over in the corner really cannot stand each other. Insight allows a player to hear the slight strain in an NPC’s voice saying things are fine, and recognize that subtle shift of their eyes to some burly thugs nearby.

Want to go all out with insight being a BS detector like Christopher Walken in True Romance? I’ll be rolling a bluff check against it. As a DM you should always be rolling bluff checks to counter the ‘insight = truth meter’ that players pull out. If they blow it, I say they believe them. If they beat out the bluff check, I rarely say, ‘You think he is telling the truth.’ I always try to obfuscate the result with, ‘You think he’s holding something back’, or ‘You see him lick his lips and give a smirk.’ I rarely ever give a black and white answer to passed insight checks if they are just seeking a truthful answer.

To me, insight is more about reading the subtle body language of people. I like to frequently give clues to the NPC’s mindset more than if they are simply telling the truth. Does the person have a pleading look in their eye when they beg the group for help? Do the player’s see the Duke slightly roll his eyes when he thanks them for dispatching the orc marauders? Does the group see the inn keeper tense up when they approach?

I use passive insight checks a lot to allow a group to read an NPC’s motivation. Sometimes it is a much more effective hook having a NPC say one thing, but his body posture or mannerisms give a completely different impression. I find it frequently sparks that investigative process where the players slowly poke around an NPC through dialog. It is much more interactive than just having a PC roll a D20 and see if the NPC is BSing.

I also allow insight to get clues on other skill checks. Sure some PC might ace the diplomacy check, but he just successfully made the flunky patrol guard allow them to pass. It’s the seasoned sergeant of the guard that really decides who gets into the king’s court. Insight is the key skill to walk into the room and assess who are the likely people with some authority, seem knowledgeable, or are well respected by others.

When do I have PCs use insight for a yes/no answer? Illusions. Yup, most folks forget insight is the key skill in disbelieving illusions. Since the players have a tool at their disposal to counter illusions, don’t be afraid to pull them out. In a magical fantasy setting, there should be plenty of opportunities to pull out the illusion card. It doesn’t necessarily have to be diabolical either. Maybe a merchant uses a simple illusion to make his wares look plentiful. How about an enchantment to give an elder noblewoman a slightly youthful appearance (think of it as gnome magic botox)?

So the next time a player quickly rolls a D20 for an insight check, don’t just respond with a yes/no to queries for the truth. Tell the player he thinks an NPC is holding something back. State the NPC appears to be sweating profusely as he stumbles over his words. Get away from treating insight as just a lie detector.