Jefe Bergenstein
Legend
Then why arent more people running it that way? WOTC has admitted as much.It’s also great fun for a significant number of people.
Hey kids, keep digging through the crap and eventually it gets fun!Just because an individual encounter is short and easy doesn’t necessarily mean it’s boring. Players have fun handily winning an encounter with only a few hp and maybe a low-level spell slot lost. And after a few of these, they stop being quite so easy. Eventually, they become pretty challenging. That’s good pacing! Now, not everyone enjoys resource management games, and that’s fine. That’s why the game gives guidelines for what an average group can be expected to handle, instead of restrictions on what a DM is allowed to run. If you don’t like the baseline parameters, they’re easy to change, and the game works just fine. But, again, it’s silly to complain that the game is too easy when you’re significantly undershooting the recommended difficulty.
This was a case where 4E had it right. Treat encounters as memorable set pieces and handwaive the "there's 2 kobolds in a 10X10 room" cruft that takes as long to setup as play out. But during the playtest WOTC was sadly in divorced dad mode, desperate to bring the grognards back, so any good lessons learned from that edition had to be jettisoned.