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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4923236" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I don't actually entirely agree with you on the subject of minions. They MAY not be as good as 1/4 of a normal monster, depending on the situation. OTOH I've had some minions that returned far more value than that in a fight. I also think a monster with 1/4 of normal hit points and otherwise full powers is probably worth a good bit more than 25% of a normal monster. Maybe as much as 50% or at low levels even more.I'm not 100% sure I agree with you about the discrepancy in combat encounter lengths either. I think its true that simpler encounters in 4e tend not to be as easy to resolve really quickly. More complex ones may be a bit slower in some cases, but nothing like a factor of 10. Maybe more like a factor of 33%. A well run 4e encounter should take at most an hour. A key 1e or 2e encounter would rarely be resolved in less time than that. The thing is a lot of the more trivial encounters in old D&D really were just that, pretty much trivial. While there can certainly be fairly trivial 4e encounters, the game just wasn't designed with a lot of them happening in mind. So maybe you might find your proposed method feels a bit more like old D&D, but then again it may not. But the main thing I'm not convinced of is that reducing monster HP even that drastically is going to necessarily make combat suddenly massively faster. 4e encounter speed is slower partly because everyone has a lot more meaningful options to think about than before and actually carefully setting up terrain and opponents matters.I guess basically try it and let us know how it goes. I wouldn't mind if combat WAS faster at times.</blockquote>

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