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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rothe_" data-source="post: 5049445" data-attributes="member: 84765">Few pointers: 4e combat is centered around party vs. group of monsters, more than party vs. one monster.  Old adventures used to have more encounters with just a couple of monsters vs. the party. You can still keep them almost as they are written (Flavor wise) but sometimes you need to convert some monsters to elites and solos if you want to keep their numbers down (for story reasons). If there is no need to have only a few monsters, try to make the fights with the 4e guidelines: about 5 standard monsters, although you can replace 2 with an elite or one with a bunch of minions etc. You can also replace some monsters with traps. Try to avoid lone solo monsters, even though the name suggests to use them "solo". Instead, you should always have weaker supporting monsters and/or terrain elements that make the fight more interesting. Pacing is also one thing that changed. You'll need to avoid having only a single encounter per day, especially if the players can guess that this is the way it will be. These situations lead to PC nova effect where they will use all daily powers and that will just require a ridiculously tough encounter to challenge them.  You can make these kind of tough encounters, but I recommend having such an encounter in waves (with more than 5 monsters) instead of raising the monster level really high. Raising monster level will slow the fights a lot since their defenses get to be too high. Making a single fight in a day using waves and adding in a possibility for short rest in between is workable, but you have to plan for it. Minions are a nice tool for the DM to represent all those low level enemies in the old adventures. For xp, I recommend halving it (or reducing it by 1/3), since minions are bound to get killed easily and very rarely 4 minions are equal in threat value to a single standard monster. Still, minions are tons of fun for the players - use them, the players will like you for it. Minions also work really well in encounters with "waves", since you can even make some encouters with endless waves of minions coming until the PC's kill their leader, or disable the doomsday device or whatever.</blockquote>

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