I worked in a highly regulated environment, I used Exploratory Testing. My tests passed the external audit. By the way I did not use test plans.
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I loathe test cases. When maintaining the things takes more time than exploring and testing the software in question, they are dead weight.
The test cases I do write tend to be more scenario-driven and hardly ever involve detailed step-by-step instructions.
Test steps are usually where I put the scenario permutations - so I’ll have one “test case” for logging on, with steps of “Valid credentials”, “invalid password”, “invalid username”, and so on. Maybe I shouldn’t assume that those who come after me will be able to follow my scenarios, but I tend to believe that testers are generally intelligent people who are capable of figuring out what “valid data” means in context.
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I get why people are addicted to them. I don’t mind extremely detailed test procedures if they are necessary.
A test case is one particular instance or variation of a test or test idea. I usually come up with loads of variations… Why waste so much time documenting all these when I can have a theme/charter/scenario and simply test those variations? I usually think of more while testing. What do I do then? Stop and document new test cases? No way - I continue testing and taking notes 
Learn to take good test notes and they will be sufficient documentation for all variations and all of the actions performed during testing.
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@katepaulk - agree. Maintaining test cases is a huge pain, especially when the team wants to document trivial things like button color or font in the test cases, and keep updating those changes. But, test cases also serve as documentation. So, would it be a good idea to only maintain a few tests or docs only to show how a feature works, especially for crucial/high usage features?