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The first alternate victory condition to discuss is Checkmate. If as a DM you’re going to try to wean your players off of slaughtering everything that moves, try this alternate condition first, since a good number of your players have probably played chess before and will get the basic idea without much explanation. The opposition has one guy – a leader or a boss, let’s call him the King – that holds the opposition team together. If you take the King out of the picture, the rest of the baddies will fall apart. (This may be literally true if the King is a necromancer.) All the PCs have to do is get that guy, and they win. They do have to get him, though. If he escapes, the PCs don’t get full experience, or they can’t take a short rest, whatever – there’s some kind of penalty. The King should be dead or otherwise rendered helpless for full completion. There are several variants of the Checkmate, each with its own specific encounter design.
Standard Checkmate
The Standard Checkmate scenario is pretty easy to set up. You need a somewhat vulnerable King, probably a higher-level Skirmisher or Controller with a Leader subtype and then a bunch of baddies that won’t stay down. The normal enemy subtypes aren’t as important as the King’s. There are several options for how to justify unstoppable enemies.The first one is your basic unending wave scenario. Every round, two or three new baddies will show up to replace the ones the PCs wiped out. Alternatively, you could make the support enemies unkillable or at least seemingly so – the Living Forgotten Realms module CORE1-5 “Touched by Darkness” does this very well, so if you have access to that adventure, see Encounter 5.
It might even be as simple as placing entirely too many enemies on the field and making it obvious that they’re not minions. In any event, you want to cue to your players that this fight is not ‘balanced’ in the conventional sense – they will get overwhelmed if they don’t figure out the trick.Keep the King pretty low-key and inoffensive until the PCs figure out that there’s something terribly, terribly wrong.
The King should also have an invisibility or teleportation trick to avoid getting accidentally killed before the secret is let out. After the PCs learn the gig, the King should fall in maybe two to three rounds and the rest of the troops surrender, die, run away, etc.
Pacifist Checkmate
The King’s cronies are unwilling or somehow innocent. The PCs don’t actually want to harm them. As a DM, you give more experience for a live enemy than a dead or injured one.
To set up a good Pacifist Checkmate fight, you need minions, and I mean LOTS of minions. In fact, nearly the entire opposition team should be minions, so you’re looking at maybe 4-5 enemies per PC. This serves several purposes – first, minions are worth fewer experience points than a ‘normal’ monster so it’s less tempting to just go nuts and kill ‘em all, especially if your PCs know beforehand that they’re not supposed to, either for story or XP/treasure reasons. Second, scads of minions on the field that can take opportunity attacks but are themselves verboten slow your PCs’ movement down and give the King lots of places to take cover from your PCs’ ranged and area attacks. Third, if the King or his non-minion buddies are willing to take down a few innocents to damage the PCs, the players can get very emotionally invested – those are innocents being killed! Or if nothing else, it’s XP lost.
The minions should not hesitate to take attacks against nearby PCs – their lives or loved ones are on the line! – but will probably not be aggressive or move much if no PCs are nearby. They’re essentially mobile terrain features. The King here is either a Skirmisher or a Lurker – once the PCs get to him, he needs to drop. The challenge is not so much defeating him as it is getting to him “safely.” He should try to remain adjacent to at least one or two minions at all times to discourage big AoEs and keep cover/concealment penalties. Smart PCs will use Bull Rush, Grab, Cause Fear or similar non-damaging slide/push/pull effects to clear a path to the King.
Particularly sadistic DMs can include controllers with slow effects, but avoid immobilize. The PCs do have to be able to move to get to the King and you don’t want them to get so frustrated that they turn it into a Rout. Said Controllers may also launch their own AoEs, knocking out a couple minions in the process just to raise player ire. Consider not penalizing the players for minions killed by ‘friendly’ fire.
Stalemate
The PCs simply aren’t powerful enough to stop the King. They don’t have the magic weapon to pierce his armor or he regenerates until you destroy his phylactery or something. Perhaps the PCs would be out of their jurisdiction or social rank to hurt him. All they can do is corner the King, keeping him temporarily contained (grabbed, immobilized, prone, etc) until the cavalry arrives. The PCs should be star of the adventure and this is kind of a deus ex machina, so I wouldn’t use it often. It is, however, a great way to set up a recurring or future villain that the PCs can take on properly at some later time.
The Stalemate is a very different animal from its other Checkmate siblings in that it’s best run as a Solo fight with very few if any side baddies. Grab a relevant Solo Soldier and crank it up two or three levels so that it’s clearly out of the PCs’ abilities*. You’ve at least now created a grind-fest that the PCs will want to avoid. You can also ‘put the fear of god in them’ by giving the King a high-damaging Melee or Close attack with a 5 recharge, but avoid ranged attacks – the PCs need to be able to retreat and regroup somewhere relatively safe. The PCs might be able to simply Rout the battle if they roll well or have some really fantastic power (Grasp of the Grave, I’m looking at you) but more than likely the panic and/or grind factor will convince them to do something more interesting. Finally, drop the King’s save bonus to at least -2. Yes, negative 2; Teach them that status conditions are actually good for this Solo, but not at first. They need to figure that part out.
The Endgame
Finally, determine what the endgame is. Do the PCs simply restrain the King? If so, make sure they have some kind of item that lets them overcome the King’s high defenses to do so. Also, there must a be condition progression of some sort. For instance, their +6 handcuffs of Citizen’s Arrest only work if the King is Helpless, so the PCs have to figure out on their own how to get him to Helpless. Preferably, Helpless should be the eventual outcome of first being Prone and then maybe Grabbed or Dazed or something. Terrain powers are also important since some parties don’t have a lot of status-inflicting capability.
Make sure there is stuff in the environment for the PCs to use (long rugs, falling rocks, obscenely loud horns, whatever) to inflict conditions if they can’t do so naturally. A quicker way is just to put out some kind of hazard or trap that the PCs have to maneuver the King into to defeat him – pits, bodies of water and lava are standard tropes here. They still might need toys to help them move the King around, or Slow him or what have you, but the progression idea is already built in – you can only push him 2 or 3 squares at a time at best. Once the endgame trigger occurs, it’s Game Over for the King, regardless of HP.
An optimized low Heroic Tier weapon fighter for this purpose has an attack bonus of about 1/2 level +8 (+4 stat, +3 weapon, +1 feat), a low Heroic tier implement fighter is around 1/2 level + 6 (+4 stat, +1 implement, +1 feat). Aim for hits on the King by this character on rolls of 15 or higher.
Ryven Cedrylle was introduced to 2nd edition D&D by his father at age 8 and has been hooked ever since. When not out somewhere with his nerd-loving wife, he spends an inordinate amount of time staring at small objects - primarily beakers, stars, books about religion and virtual gaming miniatures. Follow him on 
I like it, but you should add a disclaimer that you need to be very aware of player abilities. It’s true that 4th Edition offers less opportunities than other editions for players to pull crazy combinations that you never saw coming, but there’s always the chance that in a “Kill the king” battle your players could figure out a cheap way to bypass all the other enemies. So, just keep your eye out for that.
I really like the concept of Stalemate battles, they seem like they’d encourage very creative thinking. Cool stuff there. The Pacifist Checkmate seems also interesting, although you’d have to do a really good job of calculating XP according to monsters killed. I don’t know how many DMs calculate XP on the fly, the only DMs I’ve seen do it just calculate based on their preplanned encounter size.