Do You Think Encounters Should be Difficult?

I think that encounters should be meaningful.
You can have an encounter that is "difficult" WRT opposition stats and is not meaningful for the adventure, but just a stat block dumped there to provide a generic challenge, although out of the storyline: as a player I feel it boring.
I'm happy with encounters that are first of all meaningful for the storyline and important for the roleplay, and then if they are difficult under the technical (stat blok) point of view as well it is not an issue at all.

pemerton said:

I've been taking seriously that this thread is in General, not D&D.

Though even in AD&D there have been rules for duels of honour - Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures had these, under labels like vanquishing and subdual.

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Oh, I agree. But, OTOH, this forum (AFAICT) is mostly populated (and thus informed) by D&D "heavy users". Thus, I think that informs the common responses even to questions in this subforum.

I mean, if you're playing Blades in the Dark, you generally want to avoid unnecessary killing because bodies increase the Heat you take on the score. (Naturally, assassinations are the exception to this.)

When I DM'ed Tiamat, I used the published encounters and made up some of my own. I looked at the encounters' intention. Many fights were easy romps (when I wanted to show the players that their PCs were becoming more powerful and the general population looked up to them to solve problems). Some were "equal fights" with a non-combat goal to achieve (keep the merchant wagons - well, most of them anyways - from being burnt / stranded). A few were deliberate attempts to kill the PCs: a dragon attacked in its lair, assassination attempts. The players appreciated hard fights with some outside goal interspersed with oughta-be-easy fights highlighting a tactical challenge .
The players' interest stayed up because neither the nature of the challenge nor the difficulty was the same every time.