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[Badwe]

Raven: It's my belief that, while the PCs are smart enough to choose the challenge level that works best for them, going too far above or below item progression can create strange effects. Absolutely you can deviate a good deal, you're deviating every time you don't give out a parcel in one encounter and give out 3 the next. It's just possible that you risk trivializing encounters, and trivial encounters can destroy the illusion of meaningful challenge/danger, which is the key to the fun "tension" that makes a delve exciting. That being said, I'm willing to bet you can get away with a LOT of deviation. Heck, I usually end up giving away an extra parcel in gold every level by all the small things my PCs do (haggling, pick-pocketing, etc.)

Crash: regarding creating a sense of attrition. The overarching goal is you must be gradual. When you are going somewhere with the idea, the PCs need to be able to see that it's escalating so they can make a decision on when the cutoff is.

For resources, nearly all encounter powers will be used as quickly as possible (ie: maxing advantage) each encounter because they recharge. When those run out, the players will have to decide weather the remaining monsters are easy enough to slam down with at-wills or if they need to dip into their dailies. Alternatively, when players have decided they will definitely rest, they will usually burn as many dailies as possible to end the combat quickly. Healing surges will, however, be used periodically as damage is taken. In many ways, actual healing surges function like the HP of old, in that they run down over the course of the day. The actual HP, however, is like a threshold, wherein the PCs can refill it many times over, yet need to be cautious not to take too much at once without healing or risk getting knocked out.

So, dailies and healing surges. If you don't use up any of these (a rare situation except if the group is clever), you've effectively created a speedbump. In order to force the use of these, a single encounter must become more difficult. Easy enough encounters can be handled entirely with encounter powers and incidental healing (a warlock's temp-HP, inspiring warlord's giving HP on use of an action point, etc.).

This goes back to my suggestion earlier in the thread of wandering monsters effectively tacking themselves onto an existing combat (ala munchkin, actually :-P ). Mike mearls also suggested that, rather than having monsters show up as an extra encounter, roll 1d20 and on 19+, have the wandering monster group show up while the players are looting the bodies, not enough time to recover encounter powers. This is a particularly clever implementation because it destroys the illusion that encounter powers are "use-em or lose em" and also can potentially eat up some daily powers until the lesson is learned. Also, for anyone who has experienced a double encounter like the two wave kobold fight in Keep on the shadowfell, It's interesting in that while it's MORE difficult than facing two encounters cleanly, it tends to be slightly LESS difficult than facing all of the monsters in a single wave, as the XP will indicate a hefty encounter level.

That's all I have for now. Liking where this discussion is going :-D

Edit: missed raven's most recent response. Death is already slightly penalized, but it's more like World of Warcraft's "Have to walk back to your corpse" than it is like Diablo's "Lose all of your stuff". The party already has to pay 5,000 gold per tier, a nontrivial sum, and if I recall correctly the raised person takes a -1 to all rolls he (and the party, really) gains a level. If that's something that's not in the rules and that I made up (work would not take kindly to me pulling out the PHB when they think i'm doing something useful) I suggest you do that as a way to penalize death. If you need it to be more severe, raise the penalty to -2, decaying to -1 at the first level up and back to normal after the second. If you want a stiffer penalty that decays quicker, use gaining of action points from milestones instead of levels as a time for the penalty to shrink.