First thing you have to understand is that everything in the rules and special adventure rules should be taken strictly as a suggested way to play.
If you want about 50% win rate with LoD, you can simply play with no starting treasures and 0 Healing Surges, and you will have a more challenging game variant that would only offend a eurogame-loving rules lawyer.
The strategy in these games involve when to use your one-off powers, which encounters to cancel, how and in which direction to explore (to avoid dungeon layout that is disadvantageous for the heroes).
By removing the certainty of monster tactics, you would actually reduce the game to a complete random mess. The monster tactics make the game a tactical puzzle with multiple elements that I enjoy trying to "solve" in terms of maximizing hero attacks and minimizing monster attacks. Of course you still need to roll for attacks but at least it is only a single source of randomness in combat to deal with.
Even after so many plays, I regularly find myself overlooking some monster's tactic and finding myself "surprised".
Add in a good dose of in-character discussion/interaction and these games really are lite RPGs.
If you want about 50% win rate with LoD, you can simply play with no starting treasures and 0 Healing Surges, and you will have a more challenging game variant that would only offend a eurogame-loving rules lawyer.
The strategy in these games involve when to use your one-off powers, which encounters to cancel, how and in which direction to explore (to avoid dungeon layout that is disadvantageous for the heroes).
By removing the certainty of monster tactics, you would actually reduce the game to a complete random mess. The monster tactics make the game a tactical puzzle with multiple elements that I enjoy trying to "solve" in terms of maximizing hero attacks and minimizing monster attacks. Of course you still need to roll for attacks but at least it is only a single source of randomness in combat to deal with.
Even after so many plays, I regularly find myself overlooking some monster's tactic and finding myself "surprised".
Add in a good dose of in-character discussion/interaction and these games really are lite RPGs.