Adventures teaches how to run adventures, on the premise that an adventure "is just a series of encounters."
If there is a single inherent flaw with D&D 4th Edition, this is it. This is a flawed premise. A role-playing game session lasting several hours should not be designed around a series of one-hour-long perfectly balanced encounters. Applying mechanical balance to the overall experience has an innate chilling effect on the normal flow of story and passively encourages a DM to turn every situation into either a combat encounter or a skill check. Role-played scenarios, by this definition of adventure, are extraneous. They are not encounters because they are not perfectly balanced collections of numbers and therefore they are not really part of the adventure.
An adventure is more than a series of encounters. If it were nothing more than that, The Lord of the Rings would be 16 pages long. There is much more to role-playing than killing things, and while any group can work around this, the core 4th Edition rules are not designed to aid them in that. You can role-play in World of Warcraft too, but people look at you silly when you do. Because it's Not Meant For That.
Neither is this.
