No it didn't. Nowhere does 4e say that you have four encounters per day.
Exactly four? No. But it did assume a ballpark of 3-5 encounters in terms of balance. That's how they arrived at the number of healing surges and balanced player abilities. They didn't just pull that number from the aether.
Hence the number of encounters in the DMG adventure, and in
Dungeon Delves and how there was a "break" point to rest every few encounter areas in the published adventures.
Either the encounters in KotB are winnable with decent play, or they're not. (Or is your point that what counts as "decent play" is edition relative? I think that would obviously be true.)
You use "decent play" above, but I actually said "decent
tactical play". Which is a difference. You could "win" many
Keep on the Borderlands adventures by being sneaky or luring enemies into a trap. Using cunning strategic play. You often couldn't win in a straight fight: the monsters had the advantage of terrain and numbers and would slaughter a frontal assault.
In 3e and 4e, baseline encounters were designed so you wouldn't face that kind of unfair fight that required lateral thinking. Encounters were a tactical puzzle that could be "solved" through coordinated use of powers. There wasn't just going to be a room with 17 kobolds hanging around, possibly serving as reinforcements.
In 4e there are no "textbook encounter right out of the book".
Please refer to page 58 and 59 of the DMG. Really, pages 56-59+ layout a by-the-book encounter. Which is what I'm talking about, designing encounters by following "the rules".
Yes, as a DM you *could* continue to design encounters by 1e guidelines or ignore the rules laid out in the book. But that's not the baseline. But that's houseruling the game. And there's no real point in discussing how a heavily house ruled version of the game played, because there's no common ground for discussion.
There are guidelines that tell you (i) how difficult an encounter is likely to be, in mechanical terms, and (ii) how it relates to pacing (via the milestone rules). In my experience these guidelines are fairly accurate, though (unsurprisingly) the higher the PCs' level, the more you can push the upper end of the scale.
Right. And the rules tell you the maximum difficulty for an encounter. If you're playing by the rules, you're not going to put a party against an encounter with a budget outside of their expected level range.
Hence the encounters are "fair". If the DM is playing by the rules, you always have a good chance to win in a straight fight.
As for being memorable: why would being balanced and fair be a cause of an encounter being memorable? My claim is that it is not an obstacle to an encounter being memorable. Which is a denial of your claim that it is.
Straight fights can be fun to play. But there's nothing inherently special with them.
Provided the fight is an appropriate challenge, the difference between a couple orcs in a 10 ft x 10 ft room and two dozen balors in a 100 ft x 100 ft platform is largely numbers. Nothing in a balanced encounter makes it memorable. Nothing in a standard encounter is special. It's just going through the motions. It's fun to play and could have a wide variety or story implications and roleplaying moments, but nothing in a straight fight becomes fun to retell. It's just that fight where everyone rolled expected numbers, used an appropriate amount of resources, and took an average amount of damage. We've all had that fight a dozen times and there's no point in telling that story. It's just not memorable.
What makes a fight memorable is everything else. All the stuff that isn't in the book, that isn't covered by the encounter building rules.
(Or at least, the game design equivalent of an "unreliable narrator." A lot of what he wrote was motivated as much by external factors such as marketing and brand protection as it was by what actually happened at the gaming table.)
