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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 4541328" data-attributes="member: 3586">My Castle Greyhawk campaign has recently been investigating RJK's module, "Dark Chateau". It's definitely one of RJK's more lacklustre efforts, and the maps are truly awful. When you have ten goblin skeletons in a 5'x5' room, you begin to wonder a bit.In the first days of 4e, as I was planning my Castle Greyhawk (Zagyg) campaign, I went through the Mouths of Madness and Dark Chateau and converted all the encounters to 4e. This wasn't actually that difficult; in all, about 5 hours was spent on the two modules, which has given us many sessions of entertainment. However, given I was doing this without playing 4e previously, there have been a few blunders. I happily wrote down "10 skeletons" for the aforementioned encounter, not realising what 10 3rd level soldiers would actually mean for a party of five 2nd and 3rd level characters...Yes, 4e handles large groups better than 3e, but you don't need to increase the encounter level by very much to get to a very difficult encounter indeed. When I came to run this encounter on Friday night, I suddenly realised that I was looking at a TPK, which was not the intention. (In AD&D, it would have been a tough, but survivable, encounter).So, in came a concept I'd heard suggested before: that of halving the monster HPs. I've been calling the resulting monsters "quasi-minions", because they have some of the features of minions, whilst being more of a threat. The combat ran, the PCs had a tough time of it, but were eventually successful with only one PC being knocked unconscious. (No leaders in the group at present, and it was the lone paladin that was KOed).I'm very pleased with the result. I halved the XP award as well, and that seemed to be fine.I just wanted to note a problem with some of the official adventures I've been running recently: they tend to not use minions at all, and are often 5 vs 5 encounters. There's something of a lack of variety in monster numbers.Also, soldier types are just too difficult to hit most of the time; they slow the combat down into long, grinding, attritional affairs that aren't that much fun. The skeletons were going down in 2 or 3 hits, which was fine; but it would have been about 5 hits each if I'd played them as written; too much given that there's only about a 30% or 40% chance of your frontline fighters hitting them most of the time.In the Sunday session, we had a fight against some brutes and they had ACs about 7 points under that of the soldiers of the same level, and the resultant combat was so much more fun as the chance of hitting was good.Just wondering what your experiences with similar situations have been, and whether you've been using half-hit point monsters (quasi-minions?) as well!Cheers!</blockquote>

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