What this means, at least to many (and I think I can safely say most here), is that combat simulation and tactical play is simply a plot device and means to advancing the story. It’s almost a mini-game.

Thus halving monster health doesn’t necessarily take away from the combat. The monsters are still performing the same role and still living up to their expectations and purpose. They are intended as fodder from the start.

This is even more true in 4E. The difference between pitting the PCs against opponents at full health and pitting the PCs against opponents at half health is one or two healing surges. With the way many of their powerful abilities are recovered between every encounter, the former role of attrition that minion encounters played has been lost.

So if the minion encounters have no effect on the final boss battle, then why force the players to slog through a dozen inconsequential encounters just to get to the plot arc?

I’m not saying drop all minion fights or anything like that. They can be a lot of fun and serve the purpose of some realism. But when they cease to be fun and the added realism is causing more harm than good, it’s time to adapt. Halving minion health is one way of doing this.

From my own perspective, I also prefer not using an experience system at all. Players level after a fixed number of encounters/quests.

1: If you halve the monsters’ hp, do they still have the same Bloodied value, or is that changed too? It seems like it would be a bigger advantage to those PCs that get bonuses when opponents are bloodied if all enemies were bloodied at the beginning of combat.

2. I agree with your minion comments. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve also been increasing the number of skirmishers and artillery there are. Soldiers and Brutes, especially soldiers, are the worst for long combats. Knocking a couple points off their defenses is a good idea too, especially if they’re higher level. There’s no worse thing than an encounter where the PCs have to slog through some soldiers in heavy armor after their boss died, hitting a quarter of the time. Yuck.

3. Instead of halving hit points (or in addition to), how about monsters running away more? Chances are these aren’t loyal battle-hardened fanatics. When they get bloodied, it’s completely reasonable for them to want to run away, surrender, play dead, etc. In fact, the Intimidate skill can be used for forcing this exact thing. If their troop is half dead and the boss is taken out, why on earth would the remaining orcs stay and fight? Of course it’s a D&D cliche that PCs don’t take survivors and don’t tolerate monsters fleeing from battle, but at least then it puts that choice in the PCs hand and a skill challenge chasing down monsters is at least a break from the long battle.

Tempest Fighters and Two-Blade Rangers are my first worry. With both of them having an at-will attack that allows them to strike twice, that gives them the ability to burn through any bad rolls faster than other classes. This obviously means that they have the chance of coming across criticals more often. It may make others playing as other classes feel less epic than these.

My second worry is the Avenger class. Having the ability to basically reroll any attack roll makes this class a very appealing class to play. Knowing when you’re going to hit and then having the ability to turn a miss into a possible hit every turn seems almost game breaking for a striker class. Especially since hoarding enemies at them will only provoke them to go for the Censure of Retribution build and throw up defender like defenses for good measure. Heck, if they could only heal themselves they’d be able to pretty much solo half of what you’d throw at them less it be specifically designed to destroy them.

I guess controller classes would be able to burn through bad rolls as well but you don’t really have to worry about their damage output.

Is there something I may have missed that would help even out these concerns?

What I do is think of the creatures in the Monster Manual as monsters at full health – and that’s something which monsters rarely are. They’ll have old wounds, infections and illnesses due to the unsanitary conditions in the dungeon. So, they might only be at half, three-quarters or even only a quarter hit points when the PCs arrive. The sons of the leader, biggest Orcs, etc might be better fed and cared for so they’ll be at full hp, but the rest of the tribe won’t be so lucky.

Hope that helps!

As for my idea: just tried it recently in the first 4E session I DM’ed. 4E stat blocks are nice and compact and self-contained, without referencing obscure or complex rules or spell lists that need to be reviewed extensively ahead of time. I photocopied stat blocks (don’t sue me, WotC, I’m not making money off this!) and lightly taped them on to oversized index cards. These cards are sorted into initiative order along with different-colored cards of the same size for the PCs, whose cards have all pertinent info to DMs (defenses, passive skill values, etc). Small stickies are used to keep track of HP. I’m playing with the idea of using different-colored small stickies to indicate conditions, and tallying rounds on those.

Takes only a little prep time, and saves LOADS of page-flipping between different pages in the Monster Manual.

Another thing I do that’s not necessarily a huge time-saver is drawing out all encounter maps on large grid paper ahead of time. It allows me to have some fun being artistic and gets me really familiar with the maps. I overlay this with plexiglass on which we can note persistent spell effects, changes in terrain, locations of fallen foes, etc. using colored white board markers.

Thanks for sharing your ideas and I hope the ideas above work for you or others.

Optionally, allow the player to spend an Action Point to re-roll their 5 if they don’t like how the dice fell.

Agreed about assigning preset rolls – too non-random. Players like to roll them dice :D