Noble class – Taskmaster and minions

For my friend’s noble class creation, he introduced a martial controller with minions. As far as I know, this is the first character class (official and otherwise) in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition where a player has minions to command. So far minions are all in the enemy category.

The noble has a special feature called the House Retinue.

The noble will always have a retinue of bodyguards who will function as his allies in combat. Nobles will always have a number of slots worth of allies who function as minions in combat.

For the first 4 levels, your noble has 4 minion slots. This means you can take up to 4 normal minions. You can choose from 3 minion types at the beginning:

• One-handed weapons and shield : Add +2 to AC, +2 to Reflex.
• Two-handed weapon : Add +2 to damage
• Missile weapon: Gain missile (Ranged 10;standard;at-will) attack with same attack and damage characteristic as melee attack.

There’s a base template for friendly unit minions, and the additional effects of the minion type you choose are added onto the base template. For example, at level 1, you can choose 2 minions armed with a sword and shield, 1 minion with a two-handed sword, and 1 archer minion.

So what’s a minion?

A minion is basically a unit with only 1 hit point. This means, if you hit a minion, it goes down. They are designed to create those battle scenes where heroes fell enemy troops by the bucketload.

Your noble’s minions follow the same guideline. If the enemy hits your minion, it goes down too. No damage dice rolls needed.

“Wait, won’t that cripple my noble quickly? One good fire blast will take out all my minions.”

Yes. But the minions are controlled by you. They have sentience. They have direction. They have a purpose in life (even if it’s just to die for you).

And for the purposes of differentiating targets, a noble’s minions count as allies. This means, if your friends execute a power which benefits allies, your minions are included too.

Alright, I know that’s not encouraging enough. But there is a new status called “defeated” for minions.

Being defeated

When a noble’s minion is hit, it is reduced to 0 hit points and lies prone, but is not removed from the battlefield. Think of it as a character being reduced to 0 hit points, and is stabilised (so don’t have to roll death saves).

There are ways to revive a minion, such as utility powers for a noble to get his minions up on their feet again, which keeps the noble in action. And for extra assurance, my friend created a veteran minion, the taskmaster.

The Taskmaster

A taskmaster is a veteran minion which takes up 2 minion slots, and gains the at-will power “Get up and fight, you filthy cur!” Yes, that’s verbatim from noble class’ documentation… (my friend had the pirates in mind when he thought of this). In case you’re interested, the flavour text is:

Your taskmaster motivates your minion to come back and fight on your behalf.

Basically the taskmaster gets a defeated minion up on his feet with 1 hit point. So as long as your taskmaster minion stays on his feet, you can revive other minions with him. That leaves your noble free to do other nasty stuff, like executing a flawless Venomous Blossom on the enemy troops.

Personally, I would call it the combat medic. I prefer not to shout insults at someone down on the ground to make him get up. Maybe minions are masochistic…