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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blackeagle" data-source="post: 4269331" data-attributes="member: 41120">I don't think you're alone in that.  In fact, one of things the 4e designers talked about in one of the podcasts was that level appropriate encounters in 3e were pretty boring.  An appropriate 3e encounter was one baddie of about your level, two of your level -2, or four or your level -4, etc.  These encounters weren't that interesting tactically since you either outnumbered your enemies or were significantly more powerful.  None of these were particularly challenging, unless this was the 4th or so encounter of the day and your resources were running low.  This gives you the standard 15 minute adventuring day: three easy encounters and one hard one.Since level appropriate encounters kind of sucked, what a lot of DMs did was to up the ante.  Going for a single, more powerful creature could be kind of swingy if you get too many levels above the party level, so most DMs incresed the intrest/difficulty by adding more opponents of the character's level or slightly lower.  From your description this seems to be what you were doing.  This produced an encounter with a lot more tactical possibilities and difficult enough to actually challenge the players without being too swingy.  The problem is that since these encounters are well above the standard difficulty level, they eat up most of a party's available resources, turning the 15 minute adventuring day into the 2 minute adventuring day.So one of the designer's major goals with 4e was to provide interesting, challenging combats with lots of opponents that players could confront several of per day.  A lot of the design features in 4e seem to be related to this: the new encounter design system of course, the way monsters are designed including minions, encounter and at-will powers, the way action points are gained and spent, healing surges and second winds, etc.</blockquote>

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