I guess that depends on how many combats you typically engage in before you complete a major quest.
With a couple of exceptions (around the tier-progression levels), the number of XP required to advance a level in 4e is equal to 10 times the number of XP you get from an equal-level encounter.
So 10 encounters per level is the default.
The DMG suggests that some of those might be higher than equal level, making it 8 to 10 encounters. (In my own game, most of the combat ones are higher than equal level, making it more like 6 to 8.)
But the DMG also suggests one major quest per level, which is the XP equivalent of one of those encounters, bringing it down to 7 to 9.
The DMG also suggests that minor quests should probably be the equivalent of one encounter per level (roughly: one minor quest per PC per level), bringing it down to 6 to 8 encounters (4 to 6 in my case, given that I tend to use higher-level combat encounters).
A further complication that the DMG doesn't note is that many skill challenges will be of less than maximum complexity, and therefore less than one level-equivalent encounter. So in my game, of those 4 to 6 encounters per level, it's probably more like 3 to 5, plus another 3 or so less-than-maximum complexity skill challenges, per level.
I've found the XP part to be rather minor for most players. But things like, "I'm a wizard with 12 hit points at 5th level, and darned proud to have those," "my wand of magic missiles will run out any day now," "this is my third wizard character in two months, Bob A and Bob B RIP," and "the green slime just dissolved our thief, Fred"--those tend to push away from Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, big hero style play.
You put starting over at 1st level, XP issues, spell access limits, etc. on top of that, it tends to compound.
Exactly this! And for even more compounding, add in encumbrance rules, ammunition tracking, effects that depend upon, and therefore mandate, detailed time keeping, and the like.
I don't need the rules to tell me that magic items might be handed out by friendly NPCs. There are tons of examples out there in the literature the game emulates and will likely inspire me to play in the first place.
No doubt. The example I mentioned, for example, is actually in the Foreword to the rulebook.
My point is that the rulebook not only gives no guidance on how to run a game in which that item is handed out, but
actively discourages it, with its references to "rewards being commensurate with challenges" and the like.
items must be earned and appropriate. And if a character's destiny or previous actions earn him the Sword of McGuffin, which he will need in the Great Crunchberry Quest, then it makes sense to give it to him. The point is the awarding of the sword is well considered and logical and appropriate to the situation and not a cheap giveaway.
How does one "earn" something via one's destiny? Where was the challenge - all the player did was write some malarky down on his/her PC sheet about "dragon tyrant", "destiny", "found as a child in a bed of reads/at the doorstep of the monastery/etc", "mysterious portents", blah blah blah.
I agree that the handing out of the sword is not
arbitrary. But the rulebooks don't say no
arbitrary treasure. They see no
unearned treasure; no treasure that is not commensurate with the challenge.
The contrast with (say) HeroWars could hardly be greater - which tells you exactly how to build into your PC mysterious items that relate to your as-yet unrevealed but portentious destiny.
But saying that something has thematic content doesn't say anything about the specifics of the theme. That's why saying "thematic content" really doesn't say anything valuable, particularly when trying to imply that wandering monsters are a waste of time and focus.
I didn't say that wandering monsters are a waste of time and focus. I said that they're a waste of
my time and distract focus from my priorities for play, which include thematically engaging situations for the players to deal with (via their PCs).
I've got nothing against time, and the pressures of time and its passage, being the thematic focus of a game (although personally I don't think I would want to run it). But I wouldn't use wandering monsters to do that. Wandering monsters don't make time a thematic focus. They make operational pedantry a focus of play - as the players (who, at the table, have all the time in the world, however much or little time is passing in the fiction) work out techniques for optimising their dungeon exploration relative to the likelihood of meeting dangerous wanderers.
A time-and-motion report is very concerned with the use and passage of time. But it is not a work that evokes time, and its passage, as a theme.
A concrete example was provided by [MENTION=16786]Stoat[/MENTION]'s excellent Tomb of Horrors thread. On that thread, a fairly strong consensus emerged that the way to tackle the ToH is to play "bomb squad", "flying-thief-on-a-rope" D&D. Search everything carefully. Use 10' poles at every point. Always rope together, but never send more than one PC into a room at a time. Etc.
That is the sort of play that I am not interested in. And that is not a mode of play whose theme is caution. It doesn't have a theme. It's not a mode of play that is about evoking an aesthetic response, or an aesthetic product, at all. It's about something quite different. Trying to identify the theme of that sort of ToH game would be like trying to identify the theme of a game of chess. It would be a category error.
Your concrete example, I'm sorry, isn't offering any help in explaining what you mean. Is the damage range of a sword somehow related to the theme of the campaign?
A system in which damage, in combat, is mostly a consequence of weapon sizes and properties has action resolution mechanics (for combat) that do not push in favour of thematic play and, depending on the details, may push against it. Because the focus of play may instead become the mechanical details of the weapon rules, and their mathematical optimisation.
Conversely, a systrem in which damage, in combat, is to a significant extent a function of the emotional relationship between the protagonist(s) and/or the antagonist(s) is pushing in favour of thematic play, because it is making thematic content - human relationships, in this example - forefront to action resolution.
You are framing your question in terms of "what theme" as if every episode of RPG play had a theme. My contention is that this is not true, that much RPG play has not thematic content, and that whether or not it does is not unconnected to the mechanics in use. (Which takes us back to the examples that Crazy Jerome gave in the post I quoted - these are the features of classic D&D play that push against thematically rich play.)
