Should XP awards be adjusted for primarily minion encounters?
If they’re just there to make the PCs look badass, probably. But if they serve a higher purpose, you might adjust the encounter level, but still give full XP. For example, there was an encounter in Mike Mearls’s game where the PCs charged out to stomp minions, and a lurker was able to sneak in and kill the guy they were supposed to be protecting. That would be a greater purpose for minions. Minion-making rules? Look at other minions in the book to start. An easy way to handle it is to just “re-skin” existing minions. Like if you wanted to make a low level Gnoll minion, you could take the Hobgoblin minion and just swap the racial power for that of the gnoll. It’s not like the difference between brutes and lurkers: minions tend to fall very close to their level. (Not a minion, but an example was given of re-skinning a monster: someone used the Gelatinous Cube stats to represent a Sumo Wrestler.) They deal 1 point of damage more per 5 levels, roughly. Attack accuracy is the most important
