Minions and Masters

[Context: HL Kit … Basic Concepts and Terminology … Structural Building Blocks]

Many game systems involve the creation of actors that are secondary to a character. For example, hirelings and henchmen are a common situation. In the d20 System, wizard familiars and druidic animal companions are tied to the character in a secondary relationship. In Mutants & Masterminds, sidekicks and minions are purchased out of the character's available power points.

To support these various situations, the Kit provides a generalized mechanism to create and maintain a hierarchy of actors. This hierarchy consists of "masters" and "minions", wherein an actor is the master of any actors beneath it in the hierarchy and a minion of any actor above it.

In the same way that an entity can be defined and associated with a thing, so can minions. The key difference is that minions are always actors, and HL already knows how to create an actor, so there is no need to define a separate "minion" element. All that is needed is to associate a minion with a thing and specify any special characteristics for the minion. Whenever that thing is added to a character as a pick, a new minion is automatically created and customized appropriately.

The actor hierarchy does not have a maximum depth. This is necessary to handle situations where a character has a minion, and that minion has its own minion, etc.