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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vayden" data-source="post: 4574555" data-attributes="member: 57791">Exactly. Minions are great cinematically, but not actually all that significant against any group with a decent amount of area attacks. Depending on the scene I'm trying to set up for the PCs, I may throw an entire encounter's worth of minions at them in addition to the normal encounter. To be honest though, I've completely stopped paying attention to the XP budgets in most cases. I've got a good feel for my group's capabilities, and I just browse around for a collection of monsters that feels right at this point. I'll also frequently use the DMG guides to levelling monsters up and down if I find a monster I like that's outside their level range, and of course I re-skin monsters at the drop of a hat.* I'll also frequently adjust monster hitpoints down mid-combat if I initially set it up too hard, and will summon "reinforcements" of new waves of some of the monsters if I made it too easy. It's all about working it on the fly. Calculating the XP doesn't matter because we threw that convention out once 4th Ed showed up - now the party are always the same level, and they level up whenever it's appropriate for the story (usually after they finish a mini-arc or pull off something particularly cool). It's not "by the book", but it's working pretty well. *One of my favorite level-down/re-skins was when they were 5th level and had reached the final room of a ruined monastery they were clearing a tribe of goblins out of. I wanted to have the final, locked room populated by the ghosts of the past abbots of the monastery - looking around, I found the Berbalang (10th level solo skirmisher) - I levelled him down to 8th, turned him and his duplicates into the ghosts of old monks, threw on a quick resist 10 necrotic, and turned him loose. At various points, every single member of the party was bloodied, and 3 of the 5 dropped unconscious at least once, but they pulled through in a fierce melee. 'Twas quite fun. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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