The latest excerpt from WotC is about minions. The idea behind minions are to simulate crowds of faceless opponents without a name or role in like a movie or a game. The Stormtroopers in the Star Wars movie is perhaps the iconic example of this.
Many games have tried to simulate this in different ways. Most of the time the solution is to make mooks go down after one hit, or to make them deal less damage etc. The problem with this, as I see it, is that mooks in fiction and mooks in games have two very different effects. In the movies the mooks often serve as a chance for the heroes to shine, and possibly to wear them down a little before the final battle.
In games, however, there is a big risk that the main effect of minions is having to roll more dice without any particular purpose.
What to do about this then? Unless you have a particular purpose with playing the combat out, just let the character describe how he pushes past the guards and focus on the main fights. If it's a particularly nasty fight, you can hand out damage or remove some resources, but other than that, just move on to the main event.
This would make it not to far removed from the ideas I presented on investigation a couple of posts ago. The idea was more or less stolen from the Gumshoe system. But in this case, instead of not getting stuck because of not finding clues, you prevent the game being dragged down by pointless fights.
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