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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5576594" data-attributes="member: 51942">I think minions are actually only tangentially related to this issue.  Below-level encounters with below-level monsters quickly become trivial.  You could do hundreds of such encounters with hardly any risk - possibly even without extended rest, though that depends on the details.  And that is where minions come into it - minions actually let you run many combats before dieing of old age.An encounter five levels higher is about 2.5x the XP - but it's way more than 2.5x riskier (a somewhat nebulous concept, to be sure).I've been toying with the idea of removing the 1/2 level attack bonus scaling to mitigate this.  You can do that entirely on the DM side of the fence, too: monsters just get an attack+defense modifier equal to PC level/2 - Monster level/2 (round before subtracting).The second part to this story is a fundamental mismatch between play difficulty and XP-gain: encounter size.  If you take a hard encounter and split it in two, it still represents the same XP; but it's probably much easier. It might be worth considering scaling back XP from below-level encounters; e.g. XP gain = DMG-guideline * min(1, 0.8^(PC - enc level)).  I'm not sure it's a good idea to address this, however, since it's partially up to PC strategy to avoid getting mobbed in a big encounter.</blockquote>