I’ll be DMing some more 5e soon and I want to take the opportunity to try some different ways of playing (I’ll post my own suggestions as comments so they can start their own discussion threads). What alternate rules have you tried that you thought worked well? They can be larger changes to the game or little QoL tweaks (though if you can respond to the suggestion with “at this point just play [different game] instead” then that’s probably more than what I’m looking for!)
I do not use CR to build encounters, and I use milestone experience, but in 4e, a minion was usually worth 1/4 to 1/2 the experience of a monster with equivalent stats.
Cheers, the actual XP is less of a concern, I’m more concerned that I throw the right number of them at the players to be challenging without being fatal!
I found long ago that trying to balance my 5E encounters in any way, shape, or form is just a hopeless endeavor.
I just throw things at my party and kind of let 'er rip. Some end up hard, some end up easy, after a while you get a general gist for what they tend to be able to handle.