Minions: 1 HP Monsters
In the last post about using waves of enemies I mentioned minions a few times and I realized there's a chance not everyone knows what that means. We're not talking about those weird one-eyed yellow guys from Despicable Me, though if you want to throw them into your game go for it. Maybe you think they're adorable. Or maybe you want to kill a bunch of them. Anyway in DnD terms: A minion is an idea from fourth edition, and to put it simply it is a monster with 1 hit point.
This is a great tool when there are going to be a lot of enemies on the field, whether they'll be coming all together or in waves. Take your standard goblin, or orc, undead are great for this, maybe ogres at higher levels, take almost anything really and remove the need to track their health. They do the same attacks and damage, and they have the same AC so they're just as hard to hit, but if they get hurt, that's it, they're done. The way I play it for an area of effect, if they make their saving throw they live, even if they would have taken half damage. I might make exceptions if there are a ton of little things running around and its a big spell. If somebody crits maybe I let them take out a couple targets, cleaving through the first one with enough force to skewer the second, killing both.
As you can probably see already, this gives the players an opportunity to feel really powerful, to plow through or mow down a lot of enemies quickly. Remember that goblin patrol that nearly wiped the party at level two? Well here's the whole tribe coming at you at level 12, why don't you show them how much you've learned. We Dungeon Masters can spend so much time cooking up interesting ways to challenge our players that we can sometime lose sight of the fact that our job is actually to make the players feel awesome. Give them have a giant easy fight for once and let me know if they have a good time.
But minions aren't just for easy fights. I don't care if you are level 12 if I send in 30 something goblins at the same time and play them with good tactics we might have a real fight on our hands because of the action economy. But even if this is a real fight, I don't want to track the health of all of those monsters and keep tabs on which one is which, especially if these waves of minions are mainly there to bolster a big bad with a bunch of spells, abilities, and lair actions, that I am trying desperately not to forget about in the heat of combat. It keeps it simple for the DM. I don't want to worry about how much this particular skeleton has left, if he gets hit he's back to being a pile of bones until next round when the necromancer summons up d6 more.
You can also treat these minions as swarms instead, like in the back of the Monster Manual. I find this can be a good model for companies of archers or other squads of ranged attackers, but it is putting bookkeeping back on your plate. You can also mix and match these techniques with vanilla monsters to suit your needs.
