My reaction to this is, frankly, astonishment at the effort you manage to put into this. The reason is very practical: I certainly understand the value in all your encounter design goals, and I certainly see why it's a great idea, and how attractive such an encounter is. But it seems a nightmare to actually deliver this, time and again.
4e is great because designing encounters can be very quick - very easy to balance; very fast to prepare monster stats, and even modify them. But add to this basic things like preparing the terrain, its features, basic relationship with the plot, tactics etc... in my experience, for a weekly game featuring 2-3 encounters, plus every thing "in between", that's already quite enough work!
Now add novel mechanics, full plot integration, when all of this has to be balanced outside of the more usual combat mechanics, my head hurts! Even worse: alternatives - that means thinking about several outcomes, balance them, even though they may very well not arise.
So while I do this kind of things myself, that's pretty rare.
Of course, one may say that "if you don't make your encounter interesting, you might as well not run it!".
So my point is actually: the good thing about 4e is that straight fights are already interesting as is - notably more that pretty much all games I know. Hence, developing them much further seems certainly awesome... but not that crucial!
AND because 4e has a strong internal logic/balance, it is more work to add these elements to a 4e fight than, say, a AD&D fight. This is why I would normally tend to expect this kind of prep for other games. (you may recognize this argument from the Trash Mob Fight thread)
So to sum up: great idea, but I cannot see myself doing this every time, at least IF this has to be pre-planned, AND preserve the internal encounter balance. (this is why I was asking you whether you improvised these things or not).
4e is great because designing encounters can be very quick - very easy to balance; very fast to prepare monster stats, and even modify them. But add to this basic things like preparing the terrain, its features, basic relationship with the plot, tactics etc... in my experience, for a weekly game featuring 2-3 encounters, plus every thing "in between", that's already quite enough work!
Now add novel mechanics, full plot integration, when all of this has to be balanced outside of the more usual combat mechanics, my head hurts! Even worse: alternatives - that means thinking about several outcomes, balance them, even though they may very well not arise.
So while I do this kind of things myself, that's pretty rare.
Of course, one may say that "if you don't make your encounter interesting, you might as well not run it!".
So my point is actually: the good thing about 4e is that straight fights are already interesting as is - notably more that pretty much all games I know. Hence, developing them much further seems certainly awesome... but not that crucial!
AND because 4e has a strong internal logic/balance, it is more work to add these elements to a 4e fight than, say, a AD&D fight. This is why I would normally tend to expect this kind of prep for other games. (you may recognize this argument from the Trash Mob Fight thread)
So to sum up: great idea, but I cannot see myself doing this every time, at least IF this has to be pre-planned, AND preserve the internal encounter balance. (this is why I was asking you whether you improvised these things or not).