Here is a wall of text to say nothing, at least you're warned I guess.
One preliminary point, I think all enemies and items should be handcrafted, no template, colour thing, champions or whatever, nowhere am I talking about that sort of stuff in case that's not clear, only of some randomisation of encounter composition and placement (and item placement).
If the game lets you save everywhere then it'd better rely heavily on fixed encounters, the challenge is to beat all these encounters. The game can stop there with only handcrafted, handplaced encounters, I had a lot of fun with KOTC2 and Dungeon Rats especially.
That said I don't mind some occasional, randomly occuring encounters (which can be crafted or randomly created) as long as you get good loot from them. The thing with everything handcrafted is that it means you always get to choose from an exact fixed set of options the game proposed, and you can get paranoid when managing your resource, also in the case of the games I mentioned you don't have an insane amount of choice of encounters, for the biggest part you're just trying to beat the next encounter, no more, no less, like you're playing a mission-based game except with good presentation (mission-based games suck, these don't).
I really like to stumble upon encounters I can't beat yet, which is not inherent to random encounters, games like Helherron with their big world and even some harder encounters inside dungeon provide this quite well, but it's a fact that among very direct, even very linear, Wizardry and Bard's Tale clone there can be and there are often some parts, typically the very beginning, when even following the main path you can encounter a group of enemies which is too hard to deal with at that point, you need to sort your encounters, I think that's a big reason why I like those games, while in a linear game with handcrafted encounters that's obviously not the norm (you would not be able to go on), you need to move away from the main path to find unmanageable encounters.
And if there's an utility item involved then it's just there somewhere, you know that if you do everything you'll get it, which is a bit weak. Instead the game should be interactive with a lot of options to deal with obstacles, and you have yours, mostly chosen, but also some found ones and the point is these ones should also not be the same for every party. With some randomness you get to choose if an encounter's worth it or if it's better fleeing, if it's worth using resource, and maybe the next two handcrafted encounters will be easy because you got those flame arrows from a group of bandits and maybe another player won't. Maybe you got a single use flying spell scroll, and maybe you used all your resource to kill the enemy with the flying spell scroll because there's no way to know you would encounter it again. Then you'll manage to bypass a big sequence and it's a bit of your own story since many other players won't because they did not get it. Yet, that it's technically not unique will also mean you don't have to be utter paranoid about using it. Getting something which breaks the game is more satisfying if it was not completely prewritten. It must be the same campaign, the same layouts, etcetera, just that you can get or not get some items to deal with it another way at some point. It adds some extra freedom and adaptation to what items you have, which is not exactly what the game wanted you to have (choose from) at that point.
I still think fixed encounters are better and must be the meat of the game in that case, no random encounter at all is fine but I don't have a strong opinion about whether it's the only legit option.
A game does not need a way to grind, although' sometimes that can be better that some dumb XP system if you still want to keep different ways of playing legit (maybe it's better than giving the same XP for bribing enemies than for defeating them). Also having to actually get stronger to progress is not worse than retarded low difficulty.
Now with slightly limited save (let's say checkpoints) for more overall resource management I don't mind either way. Having to master a sequence of fixed encounters is fine, it's fun. Some randomness and even a lot of randomness can be fine too, I like to talk some enemies out of a fight, flee, use some bombs, manage to rest at least the one time it is critical to do so, retrying several times a sequence of random encounters until I finally manage to enter the dungeon, take what I wanted to take and leave the place safe. In that case, and I know not many games do that and I'm in a minority to want that, I'm for dungeons you can only enter once, where you can't save your game and that you can't leave until you reached the end.
In the case where there are a lot of random encounters and the challenge is for a big part to get strong enough to be able to tackle the next area, one important thing is that the difference of XP and loot you gain from one area to the next is big, if your party is good enough to beat some encounters in the next area then there must be about nothing to gain from an encounter from the previous area. Once again it's about loot and the extra freedom, you've got pistols, got one bomb then rush further to kill the guys with the machine guns with the bomb while underlevelled, take the machine guns and move forward. It feels a bit less like doing exactly what the game wanted you to do if this bomb was not put there exactly for you to do so.
I have got mixed feelings about random loot (not the exact same loot when you beat the same exact enemies), I prefer to get everything from the enemies, you beat a bunch of knights and it's a huge upgrade to your party's equipment, also of course when you beat a boss you want to get its stuff, but on another hand whenever I play some Wizardry/Bard's Tale/whatever I don't completely mind getting one piece of armor or one weapon at a time, occasionally getting a strong staff, one after each encounter, there's some progression among the area from hard to easy, reach the next area, start by replacing your very old stuff (from some previous, previous area) with some currently good one instead of getting everything from the first knights you fight that I kinda like anyway, some games have some absolutely retarded percentage based loot but since I'm OK not to based my opinion directly on those then I am not completely sure that getting everything from enemies everytime is the only legit way, I'm slightly more balanced.
With permadeath, when you need to restart from the very beginning of the game each time you die, then I prefer a good dose of randomisation, the entire point of this game is both to get good at adapting to what's next and sometimes be super happy and sometimes super sad about what you have to deal with based on your character, in particular in skill checks (identify items any way you can, detect traps, travel through a mine as a miner or as not a miner ...) but also during encounters, randomisation of trap placement and items to identify are more critical than encounters but replaying the same exact encounters each time from the very start of the game is not that fun either. But probably even more important, and unlike the above cases, I really prefer that the enemies will never respawn in this sort of game, I hate when you can grind in a roguelike, food should urge me to move forward and the set of monsters should be finite.
But that's a particular kind of games, that's not traditional CRPGs, in traditional CRPGs handcrafted encounters are better, better when the devs don't know what they're doing, better when they know what they're doing too. In practice there's probably an unnatural obsession with random encounters and also with a high encounter rate in the kind of games I like, the worst is when you get dungeon crawlers with random encounters yet you can save everywhere and hard encounters are, at best, some special ones, that just sucks. Beating a roguelike is cool, but these can't work with a party, they lack a party, they're not as cool. However most games with handcrafted encounters totally lack this beginning part where you're thrown in a jungle with all kind of monsters from weak to strong, you're pretty weak and keep fleeing, trying to finally encounter some lonely kobold you can beat to get your first spear or leather armor and eventually gain your first level. While I would at very least not be as unequivocal about later parts of the games, the beginning of The Bard's Tale is infinitely more fun than the beginning of Baldur's Gate to me, and I rarely have as much fun as when I complete a dungeon full of encounters and where I have to flee a lot which is designed so that you have to complete it from start to finish without saving, that's even more cool than a single retarded hard boss battle. So, yes, I don't know.
