The disadvantage is that it dies quickly, or may be difficult to hit without assisting. You have to strike a balance. But the interesting result is that the enemy is hard to hit, but easy to kill once you do. It’s a different challenge than a lot of players are used to. Once they’re intrigued by the story surrounding the minion-teaser, you can pull out the real guns in a full-fledge encounter at the end of the session. It also helps the players feel like they accomplished more. It’s hard to do more than one solid encounter in a couple hours, especially if you want to have decent rising action.

Theoretically, you could do this two or three times (not too much) in a full-day session to make players feel even more accomplished. It helps pass along the earliest levels too, if that’s not your favorite part of the game.

I throw 2-hit minions in the fight all the time. The players never know if it’s a minion or a “pseudo minion.”

It’s great.

-Tourq

Whenever I want to make an encounter brutal, I pour on the minions to take advantage of a nasty aura or buff a leader or controller monster gives. Minions can spam leader/controller buffs and effects. It poses an actual interesting decision, withstand the shredding by the minions or take down the leader that’s filling them up with gas? They can also help spam racial things, like gnolls get damage bonuses when they swarm someone. Tough to do reliably without minions.

There’s just so much you can do with them. I try not to use them too often as the fights with lots of minions tend to be the most dangerous. It’s win-win IMO. I get to tighten the screws early on by minion spam and then the players can quickly deal with the problem, moving to phase two of a combat encounter.

If I’m just adding 2-4 minions to fill up the XP budget I don’t bother laming up the encounter with 2 minions. Minions should come in number and/or waves.

http://www.dungeonmastering.com/tools-resources/how-to-make-more-of-your-minions

Priceless.

@Brian, kingworks, Skipper: Nice!

@Kato: The latter–don’t go all the way to the next level, just fill as much of the gap as you can. Also, I’m in favor of transparency, usually in a narrative style, but a pal of mine has made me see a broader spectrum of possibilities. More to come on that.

@ChattyDM: Yeah, to me minions are like solos in some ways. They’re new tech, so getting them right is going to show the evolutionary process of game design.

I like your culinary analogy, so fitting. With monsters/traps as meat and terrain feature as sides

Minions are really a hit or miss if you aren’t careful. Yet after 2 years, I still feel their potential has not been fully tapped. I’d so see minions that combine into standard monsters or Elite monsters collapsing into many minions upon their deaths.

That being said, I distinctively recalled using one of those exploding minions that ended up blowing up my whole battle map through a chain reaction…

@Michelle: I like the idea of minions as fog-of-war generators. Very helpful.

“If you build a solid encounter of the level you’re shooting for, use one or more of the strategies I’ve already mentioned, and then place the minions in the gap, you might find your minions work out a little better.”

So, are you saying that if you are planning say a level 3 encounter, you would spend the XP budget on all non-minion creatures and then buy enough minions to make it a level 4 encounter? Or are you saying you spend the XP budget to build a solid 3rd level encounter with non minions, then tack a few minions on top of that (but not go so far as to make it up to the next level encounter) in order to get the right challenge and flavor for the encounter?

Another question for you: When you DM, do you inform your players that certain creatures are minions, and if so, how? Do you state outright “These four are minions”? Do you try to tell the PCs using in-world explanations only: “These four aren’t well armored and don’t look as tough as the others”? Or do you just not say at all? Or some combination. I’ve tried to hint to my players that some of the enemies are minions without outright telling them, but a lot of times it seems to go over their heads.