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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5985568" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.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.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.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.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.)</blockquote>

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