There seems to be a fairly large wizards contingent that think that terrain which doesn't affect the monsters is somehow fun, and they put it in pretty much every encounter they write.
Yes. Those guys shouldn't be allowed to write adventures, delves or encounters of any kind until they get over it. If they can't work through it in a few weeks, transfer them to some other department.
Mind you, I just ran an encounter in P3 where there was terrain that *only* the monsters were affected by. My group - which are very controller-based - dropped the Big Bad in the terrain and watched him *burn*!
Hmm, I don't have P3 (and have heard pretty poor reviews of it), but that's really cool to hear. There are certainly dozens (maybe more) of examples of "this terrain only hurts pcs har har" but that's the only one I've heard of that is the other way around.
Depends on what the terrain is. Would you think that a monster that is aquatic not drowning underwater isn't logical? Or a fire immune creature happily living in lava? ...(snip)... Noting that sometimes this isn't very logical. For example, bandits around a fire pit aren't going to be immune to it if tossed in. Most enemies dislike being pushed down a huge pit as well as another example. It really depends on the terrain and how it is supposed to interact. I see it as being a continuum of terrain from something that entirely aids the monsters (it's THEIR dungeon after all, it's not YOUR home it's theirs. They'll live places that help them in the end), is in between or even aids the PCs in some manner (Consecrated ground in a graveyard is an example I used).
The problem (imho) is that a lot of adventures only put fire pits in places where the monsters are immune to fire, and a lot of terrain is pretty arbitrarily made to be "bad for pcs only". The goblin brambles are the worst example I have seen, but there are
so many to choose from... I would bet that a devoted search could turn up at least 50, if not 100, examples of terrain that only hoses the pcs.
IMHO, if Encounters has a fundamental problem, it is that it isn't being run the way organized play should and the people running the game don't have adequate support.
IMHO the fundamental problem with Encounters is that the adventures totally suck, especially given the format. The editing is terrible- the guys doing the editing should be kicked back to school for a while. The maps are boring and uninspiring and built from Dungeon Tiles (I HATE that), there's too much stuff that fails when you have to deal with it over multiple encounters, the pregens have tons of errors, there are no significant choices to make anywhere along the way- ugh. I was helping run it, although this is my busy time of year and I've been unavailable the last couple of weeks and I don't know if I'll bother going back to it.
