This week we once again take a closer look at an area of the rules which have undergone significant improvements during the course of the playtest process. Minions can be a useful tool for many characters, and some are especially well suited to making a smaller party punch well above its weight class. While minions are never given by default, many classes in Realm of Runes grant innate access to at least one kind, and even those classes which are not typically associated with minions have ways that they can access one through ancestry or skill.
The most important aspects of minions, from a balancing perspective, are that they do not totally wreck the expected action economy of the game and that they do not clutter up and complicate the initiative order. Both of these goals are accomplished by having minions always act on your own turn. Even intelligent minions, which are able to act independently of their masters' instruction, do not take separate turns in combat. Mindless minions and animal minions typically require actions spent by a master in order to do things, though they add an action economy advantage by taking two (or sometimes more) actions in exchange for the one used to "activate" them.
This aspect of minions has been one of the most extensively tested areas of the rule. Nearly every playtest group thus far has used a minion in some capacity, whether as a spellcaster's familiar, an animal companion or bonded animal, or magically created or induced mindless minions. As a result of this extensive testing, a minion's place is the mechanics of combat is quite well honed. Even larger groups with multiple characters that have minions bend, but do not break, the challenge expectations. This really helps ensure that making use of minions is never burdensome from a player or GM perspective, and that's incredibly important.
But a roleplaying game is more than just a series of combats, and it's also important that minions are rewarding in other aspects of play. Familiars, for example, are perhaps the least combat-effective type of minion, but they have one of the strongest impacts on other aspects of the game. The abilities that a familiar can grant to itself can make it a more useful and well-rounded contributor to a party, while those it can grant to its master are exceptionally helpful boosts which include temporary General Perks and expanded daily resource pools, like Spell Points or Resonance. And these benefits can be chosen afresh each day, so you're never hard locked into a specific familiar loadout, it will always be helpful to your character in the way you need it to be today.
Whether an animal minion is helpful out of combat largely depends on the minion in question and the tricks it knows. Some tricks like Seek and Track and Fetch are often more useful out of combat than in combat. As an anecdote, one playtest character had an animal companion which could fly, and made clever use of the Fetch command to retrieve other party members and bring them into high places that they might have otherwise had great difficulty reaching on their own. But perhaps one of the most consistent ways in which animal minions interact with the exploration and downtime aspects of the game is through downtime training.
Unlike full characters, which typically only improve while leveling up, animal minions primarily improve their capabilities during play as they are taught more tricks. If a class grants an animal companion, it also has a repeatable class perk which teaches more tricks to over for fast-paced adventures which do not have a lot of downtime, but for those who get access to an animal minion through the Nature skill and for most campaigns, this downtime training is the primary means of expanding your minion's capability. This ability to not always have to wait for a new level for your animal companion to get new useful abilities has proven extremely helpful time and again during the playtest process for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it ensures that your trusty animal companion can get the utility you need it to when you need it without requiring arbitrary milestones first. Second, it also provides those characters which use an animal minion with important things to do during downtime.
This second effect is one of the more interesting as well. While not all parties may ever make extensive use of downtime, except to Extended Rest when sleeping in a safe place, it's important that everyone has something to do when a few shifts of downtime do come up. Training your animal companion while your buddies do other important downtime activities is a great way to get the most out of this scale of play, and will certainly pay dividends during the remainder of play. Better still, there is no hard limit to the number of tricks you can teach an animal minion. The only limit is time and skill, since it gets harder to teach a new Trick based on the number of tricks the minion already knows.
Like animal minions, the effect that a mindless minion has outside of combat largely depends on the minion itself. The most commonly available mindless minion is the one summoned by the conjure creature spell. Since this minion is always custom-designed by the caster, it can be tailored to fit many different situations both in and out of combat. Also, as a Concentration spell, its effective duration is only ever limited by the amount of time you're willing to spend concentrating on it. This makes conjure creature truly a swiss army knife of spells, with utility that only continues to expand along with your proficiency at casting it.
Minions are an important and iconic aspect of fantasy stories, and so it has been important that they fit seamlessly into all aspects of gameplay, without bogging things down or over-complicating them. Whether you get access to your minion through class, skill or simply creating it out of thin air with magic, your minion's ability to help you out of a tough spot makes one always a worthwhile choice, without ever feeling like a mandatory one. Next week we once again introduce another class exemplar, this time for the Rogue.
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