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[Lacyon]

Originally Posted by Badwe

I think the treasure parcel system is too integral to balance to throw out..

In a game environment where the PCs have power to choose (directly or indirectly) the level of threat they face, it's simply not true.

To put it another way: the balance point that WotC suggests and endorses is not the only possible balance point. If the players are aloud to do so, they will over time naturally gravitate towards a balance point that suits them. This may mean "overlevelled" and "undertreasured", the reverse, or something in between, but that doesn't matter, because they'll learn to gauge their actual strength (and that of their foes) and adjust accordingly.

Originally Posted by Badwe

4th edition is not designed for inter-combat attrition. The fact that, given only a few minutes to rest, the party can reheal to full, you can't plink away at HP totals as easily as in earlier editions. This is to say nothing of the fact that a night's rest will restore all resources to the party, standing in stark contrast to older editions where a night's rest would provide, at best, a few hitpoints and of course the spells to heal some more of it back. The only resources that can be reliably drained over the course of a day are daily powers and healing surges, and those only force a rest. Of course, getting caught while trying to rest for the night when you pushed yourself to the limit could put the fear of death back into your party, but doesn't quite attain the feel you mentioned of being a penalty for wandering around.

In general, this shouldn't be terribly hard to deal with - it's part of the game to locate and secure safe rest areas (starting with "outside the dungeon" at first). You just have to make sure the "safe" areas are far enough apart (and sometimes not as safe as they initially appear), so that
the party has some encouragement to try to avoid less rewarding encounters (or at least avoid spending limited resources on them) on their way to and from safe areas so they can push further before having to turn back.

Someone above mentioned that Wandering Monsters have very little treasure - if you go that route, you might consider having them also be worth very little XP (that would have happened automatically under the old XP for GP systems, now you'll have to adjust it yourself).