Elegant handling of multiple monsters with single hit point pool?

[Joel47]

I'm working on a framework for 13th Age. I can crib a lot of stuff from my old 4E framework, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on handling mooks. In 13th Age, mooks replace 4E's minions. However, instead of being 1 hit point each, each mook in the group adds its hit points to a group total. Every time the mooks take enough damage to drop the group total by the hit points of a single mook, a mook goes down. For instance, a group of 5 mooks with 7 hp each would have 35 hp; for ever 7 damage taken, one mook would be removed. (Yes, this makes area-effect spells amazing at removing mooks.)

My first thought is to have a "master" mook and "slave" mooks, possibly making the master invisible to players. Then I can assign damage to the master, removing mooks as necessary. Before I go and implement that, though, I thought I'd see if the brain trust here can think of a more elegant way of handling it.

[aliasmask]

I do that for swarms, have a master token.

[goldensword52]

Your idea of having "master" and "slave" mooks would certainly work. Personally, I would just use scratch-paper instead if the "master" hp pool doesn't automatically tell me when it falls below the important thresholds. But depending on your gaming setup there could be good reasons to keep track of it with Map Tool as well.

On the other hand, there are some macros you could make that would automatically tell you when the "master" hp falls below the important thresholds. I'm not sure what your experience with Map Tool macros is, but if you'd like to design a macro that would handle the combined HP of mooks there is a helpful guide. If you let me know what you're starting from (does your campaign already have a damage macro? Are you use any campaign framework? etc.) I'd be happy to help make a macro that streamlines things.

[Joel47]

Already done, thanks. My damage macro now warns and exits if I try to apply damage to a mook, and on "MookMaster" types it will tell me how many mooks to delete. I have a setup macro for MookMaster (which also has player visible set to false and is skipped automatically by my initiative roller) that verifies the HP/mook when it asks how many mooks I should be starting with in order to set the master token's HP correctly.

I thought about adding some extra automation, but that's the simplest (and, during play, easiest) way I could think of. Linking mooks to masters might be of use if I ever have multiple swarms, but that's really not how mooks in 13th Age work. About the only extra thing would be applying states to all mooks, which I'll add when I get around to adding a state tracking function.