The whole pointlessness of this discussion is what is 'win'. A fight that derails the game, even if the players thought it was awesome would not be a win if it irritated the heck out of me. I am playing the game too. A fight that causes someone to waste time making a character instead of playing is not a win. Wasting half a month of play time because someone died and that has to be fixed somehow is not a win.
On the other hand, with my players, hacking up a bunch of orcs is alot of fun. They dont really need, and in general dont even want, to worry about dying. They dont want every fight to be a right on the edge life or death struggle. Their 'win' is a room full of dead monsters and a bag full of loot.
That dosent mean that there isnt the struggle at all. I save that for climactic stuff. Go up against the BBEG in his evil temple, poke your nose in the lab of the mad Wizard, break into the vault of the Overlord, and at least once you are going to get a fight where you have to pull out all the stops.
Lucky for me, I have very predictable players. Dont get me wrong, my players are predictable cause we have been playing together for nearly 20 years. That means I can have a very light touch with fudging cause I usually know how the players are going to behave. More than half my fudging is more along the lines of 'if this hit isnt a crit, they will have enough surges to go to the next fight and finish the adventure' than of the type 'if I dont have the deathbeasts act stupid they will kill the party in two rounds'. Not only that, but the only TPK I have done was where it was a new campaign and my deathbeasts were a homebrew that the party couldnt damage quickly enough to survive. This may have also made me a bit predictable to my players too, so they know how to survive my fights.
It just comes down to what do the players (including the GM) want. Mine want to kill monsters and loot treasure. They dont want to have to worry much about dying, unless it is a dramatically appropriate moment. That is what I like to run, too. So it works out for us.
That dosent make my way any more or less appropriate or correct than yours. It dosent even mean I wouldnt play your game, or you wouldnt automatically not play mine. It just means that one of the great strengths of an analog RPG is that it is infinitely tailorable to the players involved.
For me personally, I prefer all parts of the campaign to be exciting/climactic/insert-choice-of-word-here. I agree that some fights are (as far as a story arc and consequences are concerned) more heavily weighted with importance. However, I do not like the idea that the rest of the campaign -when you're not interacting with the BBEG- is viewed as unimportant.
For me personally, I think those small battles and small scenes are important. They are important because they are part of the story which has been created by the players. If the players decide to take interest in a certain aspect of the game, I do not feel it is my place as DM to push them back onto a road toward what I -as an out of game entity- feels they should be doing.
None of this is meant to suggest I never nudge the game in a certain direction. However, nudging is not fudging. What I meant by giving a nudge is that I might plant a plot seed. Though, in recent years, I'd say I've even gotten away from that somewhat. I view my role as DM as an out-of-game entity; as such, I prefer that the NPCs, BBEGs, and other moving pieces of the game world to act in a manner which is natural. From those natural movements, I believe plots will naturally grow.
The movements of the player pieces (their characters) will (I believe) also have a hand in how the world and the story is shaped. Sometimes these movements will cross paths with the movements of other pieces. However, it's also perfectly fine if some pieces don't cross each other. I prefer for the world to not remain static when the players are not around.
How this relates to the topic is I'm saying that I do not necessarily believe some encounters are more important than others. From an in-game perspective, some 'pieces' may be more important than others. As far as what's important from an out-of-game perspective, that's something that I prefer to emerge from playing the game. As such, I strongly prefer to not use my power as DM (again, an out-of-game entity in my view) to artificially impact the natural progression of the in-game world more than necessary. As such; as said, I do not feel a need to fudge* through a fight with minions; whether or not that encounter is important isn't entirely up to me.
I feel your way is perfectly fine; if it makes you and your group happy, that is what is important. My views are simply different.
*I have done something similar, but I'm not sure that I'd call it fudging because I did it out in the open. Long story short: the players were obviously going to win a combat, but we ran out of time to complete it during a session. At the next session, we could not remember exactly where we were in initiative and other such details. So, as DM, I allowed the players to decide what happened in a very narrative way. I went to each player around the table and told them to describe one thing; then the next player did the same, and so on. Occasionally, I would call for a die roll (for example, one player described that a hover bike had exploded, so I had some of the nearby players make a roll to avoid damage.)
I felt it was a fun way to get the story moving forward, and the players enjoyed it. If I were going to fudge, I'd prefer to do it out in the open like that and allow the players to participate rather than doing it behind a curtain (DM screen.) I strongly prefer an honest relationship with the players at the table, and I also felt it was more fun to allow the players to be creative rather than have them slog through a fight using die rolls which had little or no meaning.
