In case anyone was still unsure of how minions react to things like a fireball that misses (although I don’t think any of you are really that dense) James Wyatt posted this at WorldsofDnD.com
You can’t kill a minion with an attack that deals damage on a miss.
We tried another way of writing minion hp: A minion dies when hit by any attack.
The thing is that we wanted powers like cleave or the paladin’s divine challenge to kill a minion, and those do damage without “hitting.” That resulted in the current language.
What we wanted to avoid was something like a fireball that’s doing full damage or half damage to everything in its area to be an effective means of dealing with minions, but not automatically kill them all. So you have to hit to kill them.
This is absolutely a case where there’s no simulation going on at all, except the “simulation” of an action movie where the mooks go down in one punch.
Hope that helps!
