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Making a Minion ... and a Leader and a Solo
🕑 Added 2023-08-09 16:52:17 +0000 UTCCW: This article mentions a big spider.
Hey everyone! It’s me, your James Introcaso, back with more exciting behind-the-scenes details from the MCDM RPG. Last week I broke down a standard monster stat block. This week we’ll get into some of the nonstandard critters—minions and action-oriented leaders and solo creatures. Let’s get to it.
Minions
If you’re familiar with Flee, Mortals! or 4th edition or any number of games that utilize minions, you know that minions are creatures that attack the heroes in a big, ol’ horde and go down fast. They make players feel heroic, because their characters get to cut down an army of bandits or legion of zombies. But minion encounters shouldn’t be trivial. For the limited time minions are in a fight, they should present a significant threat to the heroes through their strength in numbers. While one minion might not be a threat, a group of them can’t be ignored!
Let’s take a look at one minion, the goblin lackey, and then we can talk about how they work.
Damage Threshold
Minions don’t have Armor, other defenses, or Health. Instead they have a Damage Threshold. If an attacker meets or beats the Damage Threshold with an Attack, the minion dies. Our goblin minion is 1st level and has a low Damage Threshold of 5, which means that most Attacks that aren’t sporting at least one Bane are going to hit. That’s fine—minions should go down fast! In fact, they might go down even faster than one at a time.
Melee Attacks can kill multiple minions (referred to as overkill). When you deal damage to a minion with a Melee Attack, you can kill one minion within your reach each time you meet the damage threshold. So for instance, if a minion has a damage threshold of 5 and you deal 15 damage to them with an Attack, you kill the minion you attacked, plus two other minions within your reach.
Crafty Crowd
Minions have special abilities or Attacks that make them more dangerous in numbers. In the case of our lackeys, they get the Crafty Crowd ability. This means they’re dangerous even when it’s not their turn. This trait also encourages the minions to group around an enemy, which means they’re all within that foe’s reach for overkill. Minions being dangerous in groups and gathering together to die fast is what we want to see!
Basic Attack
Like other creatures, minions have a Basic Attack. However, instead of rolling for damage, minions deal a static amount of damage. Now, you might look at our lackey’s lowly 4 damage and think, “They’ll never get through an enemy’s Armor with damage that low!” You’d be right. Except that minions of the same stat block can make a Basic Attack together in a Group Attack! Up to three minions can join in a Group Attack at once, provided the target is within the range of each minion. Multiply the Basic Attack’s damage by the number of minion’s participating in a Group Attack to determine how much damage the group deals. So if three lackeys make a Group Attack together, that Attack deals 12 damage! Plus that attack might get a Boon or two if the target is Overwhelmed, Prone, or suffering another condition. Minions can be pretty devastating in large numbers, so kill them quick!
Action-Oriented Creatures
Let’s take a look at the other end of the spectrum—action-oriented boss monsters! These creatures are supposed to provide tough, memorable combats typically at the end of an adventure, and they come in two roles: leader and solo.
Leaders
Leaders are encountered with allied standard and minion creatures. Every leader has abilities that make their allies more powerful. Queen Bargnot, scourge of the High Road and goblin boss of the Jagged Edge Bandits, is a leader.
Leader Saves
Here’s a quick primer on what saving throws are and how they currently work in the RPG. Some Attacks impose a condition or other effect on a target in addition to dealing damage. Many of these effects end at the end of a creature’s turn or after the target heals, but some require a save to end. For instance, when a war spider uses their Caustic Web action, a damaged target is Restrained (save ends). When under an effect that can be ended by a save, you can make a save for it at the end of your turn. To make a save, roll 1d6. On a 4 or higher, the effect ends. Otherwise, it persists.
We don’t want leaders to be locked down with harmful effects for a long time, but it would be nice if they lasted for at least a round so players don’t feel like their cool, flashy, debuff Attacks are wasted on leaders. The Leader Saves ability allows the a leader to roll 2d6 on saves. If at least one of the dice is 4 or higher, the effect ends.
We may decide that leaders simply get to automatically succeed on saves, but right now it’s been fun leaving some of this to chance. It does mean a leader could get very unlucky and remain under a harmful effect for longer than a round, but that bit of uncertainty is what makes the game interesting, dramatic, and fun for a lot of folks. We’ll find out in testing if this is the way to go.
Note that Bargnot also gets the Cowardly Commander ability, which gives her another way to avoid harmful effects.
Get in Here
Taken right from Matt’s video on action-oriented monsters, this ability makes Queen Bargnot a great leader because she can bring more creatures under her control into the battle and then give those creatures extra movement and attacks (or use them as meat shields)!
Leader Villain Actions
All action-oriented creatures have villain actions, which helps them leave a lasting impression during combat. Villain actions can be used in any order, but they typically include an opener that helps get the creature get into an advantageous position, an action that helps the creature either get out of being pinned down or reset to a new advantageous position after their enemies have had a chance to mess everything up, and a third ultimate action that leaves the heroes saying, “Holy crap we almost died!”
Leader villain actions are about helping your allies do all those things too! In the case of Bargnot, she gets everyone into position with What Are You Waiting For?! Then after the heroes have made a mess of Bargnot’s plans, she can move all her troops to her side to defend her or towards a vulnerable target (or both) with Focus Fire. Finally, she leaves a lasting impression and does a heck of a lot of damage with Kill!
Solo Creatures
Solo creatures have the same villain actions that leaders get, but solo creatures are meant to fight the heroes alone. Powerful creatures like dragons, vampires, and liches are solo creatures. Let’s take a look at the war spider!
Solo Turns
In order to take the heroes on alone, a solo creature needs a lot of actions, but taking all those actions on the same turn unbalances the combat in an unfun way. If the spider acts first, they get a chance to basically kill a hero or two while the players just watch. If the heroes go first, you’ll wind up with a beat up arachnid who is surrounded and already missing half their health by the time our poor spider gets to make their first attack.
But if we have a solo creature go on every other turn, that solves a lot of problems. The spider remains a threat, but that threat is evenly spaced out, making it more difficult for the spider to focus on a single enemy and bring them down quickly. Plus the spider can move each turn and make saves each turn, which prevents the piling on of enemies and harmful conditions.
It’s possible we may change this to something more standard, like a solo creature gets to take four turns a round, because that might just make more sense. For instance, why does a dragon suddenly get more Attacks and movement because an army attacked them as opposed to a small group of heroes? But most of the time you won’t be using an army (this is a game about small groups of heroes), so we’re trying out what we think is simple, fun, flexible, and will make solos work for a lot of different tables.
Solo Overwhelmed
Even with a lot of turns, it's still pretty easy for a group of heroes to surround a single enemy, so we give many solo creatures the Solo Overwhelmed ability, which makes it a little harder to get the Overwhelmed Boon die.
Solo Villain Actions
Much like Queen Bargnot, our war spider also has villain actions. They follow a similar formula, but instead of moving and granting extra Attacks to allies, our villain actions are all about our spider getting into position, getting out of bad situations, and giving a trample to remember. This spider works alone!
The Work Continues
We’ve got another playtest this week and we’re also gearing up to send our first packet to the contract playtesters. Now that the Flee, Mortals! PDF has been delivered, the design team is really getting to focus on the RPG. Come join us on Discord if you want to talk with other folks about it.
I think we’ll also have a little Q&A action next week!
Ex Animo,
James Introcaso
MCDM Lead Game Designer
Comments
Timo Raivonen
Instead of actions, I implemented a crucible knight (dragon knights form Elden Ring) in 4e by giving it a rotation of reactions. This made it so that it could do many things between the player actions, but was somewhat predictable (always shield bash reaction after shield block, and a larger tail lash after tail lash when bloodied). As per the reference to a video game, it captured the feeling of the boss pretty well, but it also gave a nice chance for the players to figure out the pattern and start to play around it. I'm not sure if this would have been true if the in between turns would have been actual actions and not follow a pattern.
Roman Penna
Love that solo creatures (currently) get to act after every hero. That's so cool!
