How do you run games, /tg/? How do you like them ran for you?
A) I make the party to win. They basically can't lose.
B) I plan for the party to win. They can 'fall forward' into victory as long as they don't do multiple obviously dumb things.
C) I don't really plan that far ahead.
D) My players fail more often than they succeed.
E) Other. Probably some kind of bullshit like "My players come out ahead with a little clever planning but would otherwise fail, yet inexplicably always succeed."
>>46073030
I go all out first session and then lose interest and make a token effort the next two, all the while praying the players realize I've lost interest early on.
>>46073030
I make my games fair and balanced. I play with my players not against them. I just make the way to victory challenging and interesting. If they rush ahead or do something stupid I will punish them, if they role-play well and solve the problems clever I reward them. In the end I'd love to see them win but if they fail - they fail. No fixed rolls or sudden saves.
In the end a lose can be the opening to a new adventure.
>>46073030
Probably B. I mean, it depends on the game, but I generally plan for the party to win, and failure is usually just success delayed.
>>46073030
The world is the world. Not everything in it is balanced to be a moderate challenge then be overcome by you. If you fight something way out of your league, you may be defeated or have to run away.
Naturally PCs tend to win every fight through some combination of luck and brute force anyway. I wish they lost some.
>>46073030
>How do you run games, /tg/? How do you like them ran for you?
Naturally we'd all have to wear collars with leashes.
high risk high rewards, normally i don't punish or kill my players, they earn it by doing stupid things
Between b) and c). I don't really plan ahead very far, but if the PCs fight something, more than likely it's winnable unless they picked a fight with something clearly out of their league. That said, I roll in the open and PCs do die sometimes.
This is how I run my games. I don't deathtrap them, but if they ignore the warning signs (and there are always warning signs) i feel no remorse in pubishing stupidity.
Generally though i run a loose game and guide them towards wanting to complete the plot themselves while watching what shenanigans they get up to along the way
>>46073030
Source on pic?
E). I plan far ahead, but not in terms of whether the players will win. I do not determine if the players will win or not. Whether they win is a matter of their skill and decisions.
How it works is this: rolls are in the open, the players roll all the dice. No fudging, positive or negative. The rules (published and house) are discussed before play, and I try to make my rulings in line with the pattern of the rules. They play by the rules, and I play by the rules. The players win more often than they lose, because four heads are better than one so they usually can overcome the challenges I put into place. However, this is not due to me planning for them to win, but entirely due to them being good at the game. When they lose, they lose fairly. When they win, they win fairly.
>>46073030
I don't plan my games very far ahead, due to improvising a lot during the games, based on what my players are up to. Sometimes I even let them shape the game with their theories and suspicions about thing in the campaign, taking the best out of their ideas.
But I make the game fair and square, rolling mostly in open, unless the characters have really no idea what's going on - and I sometimes do rolls just to fuck around.
The players have a fair chance of winning, depending on their actions, but they also have a chance to fail, especially if they do stupid shit and ignore clues I drop them. Last campaign I ran was a pretty close call, as the good and bad decisions were in balance until the final showdown.
>>46074729
Do you have an open seat in your games?
Other. I don't think 'Winning' or 'Losing' really applies to roleplaying games, at least not in a general sense. Characters might have their own in character goals, but OOC as a group our only goal is to have fun and create interesting stories together.
As a GM, I try to avoid anything that would straight up end the game, but personally I think character death/TPKs are the tools of an uncreative GM. All they mean is that the story is over, and death has little impact or long term consequences. Figuring out how to make defeat matter without just straight up ending stuff is a much more complicated but infinitely more satisfying pursuit.
>>46073030
Somewhere between B and C.
I plan for my group to surprise me, and usually they come up with something clever.
If they get completely stumped, I give them something else to do.
>>46076166
Good stories always draw to an end, anon. While PK and TPK are often done badly(and too often), if you were to scour storytime and screencap threads, I think you'd find that many of the best stories involve a PC dying.
>>46073030
Somewhere between A and B, since none of my players are all that much into tabletop. If they died, they wouldn't want to roll a new character. Too much trouble, not fun.
So my general strategy is that for all intents and purposes they are immortal. No matter how hard they fuck up, they won't be killed. But as long as they fuck up I don't let them win either. It works alright. They get attached to their characters, so that's good. It's just I have to prepare and improvise a lot of failure outcomes.
>>46073030
E) I set up sessions based purely on what has occurred, what the villains have planned, and how much the players have allowed the villains to progress that plan.
It works both ways. The players feel like their actions have an impact, because they really do. But the inverse is true as well. If they ignore something (or simply go after another threat) it evolves and often strengthens in the absence, unless there was a reason it shouldn't.
The threat of an actual session therefore depends on them. If they blindly step up to a major threat with no preparation, failure is almost guarenteed.
That said, I always roll the dice in the open and call them where they stand. I've had miracles happen and major villians get wiped out despite having every advantage in their favor, and I've had a minor pack of kobolds go supreme and kill 3 out of 5 PCs and rout the rest. I immediately made them a modestly powerful villian group afterwards, they cashed in the fame and glory of their success to attract lots of minions to make a move, but the vengeance of the PCs interfered before they got a lot done. But it ended up turning a silly random encounter into something cool and great and several sessions with a driving passion to thwart them and avenge deaths, which made it more memorable than many things I HAD planned.
Planning isn't overrated, but in the end, it's about consequences. If the PCs challenge a blatantly superior force because they have delusions of being plot-immune to failure, in my opinion you have failed as a DM.
Otherwise, PC actions and inaction, intentional or otherwise, needs to be represented in the setting to give it a feeling of being in a living breathing world, or you get something like Skyrim, where the world is just a stagnant pile of adventure hooks to follow up at your leisure.
>>46076166
>but personally I think character death/TPKs are the tools of an uncreative GM
Really? You can't imagine a single instance of a character dying that contributes to the game?
Or how removing the possibility of characters dying at all could negatively affect it.
>and death has little impact or long term consequences
What.
>>46076566
I can, but I think death is a tool best used sparingly, and is often overly relied upon as a crutch.
And it really doesn't. A character or party dying is 'Story over, roll new characters'. It doesn't lead to anything, beyond the immediate drama it has no real impact (without the appropriate context to create it). Overuse of character death in particular removes any potential drama it might include. Having failure involve actual interesting consequences is a much more elegant pursuit, IMO.
>>46076634
>A character or party dying
This is kind of a huge difference dude. A character's death can fuel the rest of the party to go after vengeance, it can drive character development, it can encourage people to be more careful so that doesn't happen again. A whole party dying is entirely different.
I've seen a situation where a reckless PC contributed to a situation in which another PC died (in a rather touching last stand/sacrifice). The end result involved the reckless PC looking back on her actions and trying to change her behavior because of it. How is that no real impact?
I keep them challenged. Usually one person will get into a situation where they are unconscious and dying every time they enter a dungeon, but they rarely die. If they are being way too stupid I'll show them why by letting them get fucked, but in general if I feel like the party is about to get wiped I'll delete creatures I had prepared in fog of war, turn down some creature AC, or ignore a few critical hits I roll against my players.
They're so stupid, wtf. The only person in the party who doesn't do stupid shit all the time is the wizard. Everyone else likes running into dark rooms without any light source and being in the front when they aren't a tank.
>>46076634
Death has many forms and many uses.
If a fighter plays the numbers game and ends up dying in a fight, well, that's what Raise Dead was made for.
If the same guy spits on the King during his coronation and gets executed publicly, well, he transcends being a character and becomes a plot device.
I'll absolutely reward bad decisions with hard, irreversible death, but generally I don't like TPKs, unless the players are absolutely committed to a terrible course of action despite already suffering losses.
>>46073030
Depends on the setting I"m running it in and what the PCs want to play as. It gets harder and easier depending on that.
>>46073030
B and D. The lengths to which these people will go in order to fail even the simplest task is mind-boggling.
>>46073030
I make sure to make sure the tools are available for the party to succeed, but it's up to the players to make use of the tools available to win.
Oh boy, my biggest sin is that the players hardly EVER die.
BUT, every failure leads to something. I break their shit, kill the loved ones, maim, scar, or light up two pips on that Avatar Project. I will always try to find a way to bullshit their survival and If I can't I TPK them, put them few scenes before the fuck up and make them try again.
Depending on how many times they died, I draw the consequences.
It may be a weird system, but It makes the story coherent, players engaged and me sure that they will do as much as they can not to fuck up.
It just works
>>46073030
I give them everything they need, but don't make it obvious. Normally they just end up shooting the people they were supposed to talk to. Admittedly I normally run Black Crusade.
I do ball of string plots but try not to railroad and adjust to what they're doing. I try and gear the story towards the character's individual goals when I can.. I'm a much more "deadly" Storyteller than any of my friends who run, but I'm not a meat grinder either.
C.
I have an outline and some notes about battle stats. I bullshit 90% of everything else. I require at least two beers before playing to confidently pretend that everything is going as planned.
>>46073030
I have a card system in place for dungeon scenarios.
I made a series of cards depicting shit they might encounter for each type of scenario.
It's not just enemies, but also things like treasure chests, traps, pitfalls, etc.
I draw three every room and roll a 20 sided die.
If I roll a 5, 10, or 15, I pick two of the cards that they have to deal with.
If I roll a 20, they need to deal with all three.
Anything else, they need to deal with one.
It works out well as it prevents me from being too predictable, forces me to adapt on the fly and thus improves my storytelling abilities, and in the event of a scenario that's too difficult to overcome, the party can't cry shenaningans over the DM being power mad as it was literally left up to fate what I had available to throw at them.
The only thing that's ever static with dungeons are the theme and the location.
One of my players cry every 2-3 sessions, usually not the same one. Not all of it is my fault, I'd say about 60% is me and the rest is the players dicking eachother over.
>>46073030
DMing is a lie in terms of player agency, but it's a grand lie
If the players 'lose' what really happened is you failed as a DM. When you're playing pretend it's pretty shitty and passive aggressive to just up and say 'you guys suck so bad I'm not gonna DM for you anymore, you're all dead, the end'
The skill lies in 'letting the players win' while disguising it as heavily as possible to make it seem like they overcame odds they shouldn't have.
>>46080582
This is like my system. I roll d100 to determine what's in a room\location. Enemies are always one per character max, cause it's percentile chance to succeed at stuff so... Tanks are not a thing in my world. Level 10 maxed fighting skills? Fuck you, all 8 of those farmers have 30% chance to hit you for 1d10. Each farmer beyond the first adds +1 bonus to every farmer. And your rolls get -1.
>>46073030
Likely B and C, I think. It's a Fate campaign so falling forward is standard fare to avoid stagnancy, as per its rules/suggestions.
But it's not always immediate; after every session, I like to consider something that changed in the world from that session.
It can be something devastating from an action banal or just an amusing detail but I like to feature recurring NPCs to emphasize the players' power on the setting, especially if they choose paths very different from my planned outcome.
You can never ever plan TOO far ahead. That is idiotic granted how many premises the GM assumes versus what the players assume. It is a road of misery to try and shoehorn a plot that cannot exist.
>>46073030
My GM runs them kinda like a cooperative story. The players are the main characters, but they're not the only characters in the setting. There's things going on behind the scenes and NPC's are doing things in reaction to what we're doing, or just on their own according to their own plans (which generally make sense). I've come to like this style, myself.
For example, from my new Pathfinder game, despite us only being lvl 2, my group and I destroyed a city, and killed most of the people living there!
I should clarify though, we didn't do it on purpose. It was the first session and to get things going simply and smoothly (we have a player who's entirely new to RPG's), our PC's were gathered together by a mysterious old guy in robes with chains to deliver a box to a city-state on the other side of the territory we were in. And we did a damn good job delivering it too! We fought off bandits, the Dwarf who was holding on to it went to a bar and passed out drunk and was almost kidnapped by slavers, but my wizard saved him. We made money and allies along the way, and delivered the box in slightly less than the 4 weeks it should have taken us, because we signed on as guards for a high-speed caravan heading the final stretch of the journey.
What we didn't do, was take even 5 seconds to examine the box we were given, to our GM's complete amazement.
I really dropped the ball there, since I was the Wizard and the best equipped to notice something was wrong, though the Rogue didn't bother with it either. And what was inside was a horrible abomination that had anti-magic crystals implanted into it, which grow the more they're exposed to magical energy until finally reaching a critical mass and 'exploding' outward to convert all nearby matter into more anti-magic crystal. Which is exactly what happened when we killed the monster. Resulting in the entire city being swallowed up and transformed. Along with most of its inhabitants.
(cont.)
>>46082860
>If the players 'lose' what really happened is you failed as a DM. When you're playing pretend it's pretty shitty and passive aggressive to just up and say 'you guys suck so bad I'm not gonna DM for you anymore, you're all dead, the end'
I think if the only loss you can imagine is a TPK, then you're the one that's failed as a GM.
>>46074729
You're the real hero.
>>46081811
>Playing with babies
I play a system where loss states dont have to be an instant game over lets roll new characters thing.
>>46085407
I wouldn't even say that, because unless the players push for it, a tpk is nearly impossible. A tpk requires:
Dice rolls (an inherently random odd)
The players to force a confrontation beyond their reasonable odds
The only time I have ever seen a tpk is when the players decided to not run. In essence, they made the choice to stand and die, in the presence of other options which they happened to either not like or refuse to take.
This further goes in to games where the foes you face need not be something you are supposed to be able to take on by rote. For existence, a coterie of vampires on OWoD could choose to seek out and fight a werewolf, or find themselves in the hinterlands where a pack has staked a claim. Werewolves will rip them to shreds by dint of the mechanics alone, and aren't to be faced idly, and both lore and mechanics reinforce that. If the coterie stands and fights, and likely all dies, is it the GM's fault for presenting the world as it is meant to be, not coddling the players or twisting the game so they can win?
>>46085357
Half of the players in our group normally play Rogue Trader with our GM, and we're on a break from it right now. But he wasn't surprised one bit when we literally turned around and 'sold' the city to the empire on the border of the lands we were in (easiest way to describe them would be that they're like the Free Marches of Dragon Age). Meaning we've also set the stage for a war between that empire and the cities of the wastelands, as the former party tries to lay claim to this city-sized chunk of anti-magic crystal, and begin mining operations.
Through a lot of fast talking, and 'fast' thinking (cause what else are we going to do between sessions, but plot and plan?), we were even given medals by the expeditionary force who arrived to 'secure the disaster area'.
But what this also means is we've tipped the balance of power in the world. Because empire A, who we sold the crystal to, is large, highly martial in nature, and relatively technologically advanced (steam power, clockworks, and sky ships), and it has been kept in check in a lot of its expansionist plans by empire B, which has tremendous amounts of magical power at its disposal, but is rather isolated from the rest of the world by seas and harsh icy wastes.
And now it's only a matter of time before the cold war that had been going on between them turns hot.
The point of the game is for everyone to have fun. its my job to host it.
i make sure that winning is not a given no matter what, but i know the player is not my enemy.
>>46085522
>The only time I have ever seen a tpk is when the players decided to not run. In essence, they made the choice to stand and die, in the presence of other options which they happened to either not like or refuse to take.
With a lot of groups, 'fight it until one side is dead' is pretty much the default mode of operation. I always say that if your PCs are willing to run from fights, you should treasure them.
I agree with you, though. When I GM a game - or when I play a game - I prefer the world presented as its own thing, not something warped around providing a balanced challenge for the PCs. If it makes sense for the party to fail or suffer a setback, then they should. Failure and setbacks can be as interesting, or more interesting than success. And it makes it all the much sweeter when through luck and skill, the party manages to accomplish something that should normally be beyond their means. Or perhaps all the more tragic when they fail against something they should have been able to overcome.
>>46073030
I don't plan. I let the dice and planning decide. Hell, most of my players nearly died because they went gung ho and charged into a dungeon without realizing it's filled with undead and constructs after I left some hints and rumors.
This was an all rogue party.
I don't pull punches nor do I go rock falling on my party.
I leave amble hints and rumors to warn my PCs if they're in a dangerous area or not. Whether they listen and prep or not is up to them.
It doesn't help when they do convince me to let up and give them something they always wanted, I sooner or later take it and expect them to put up a fight and not go down like a couple of bitches.
>>46088341
*I let the dice and my PC's planning decide
>>46073030
Like, are we just talking difficulty level? Because my go-to when I'm designing a game is the following:
>Part of my job is giving the characters opportunity to fail
>I need to allow myself to be surprised by what happens
On the first point: role playing games are safe. In real life, you probably don't do daring shit that might get you killed. In role playing games it's par for the course. Acts of heroic, death-defying derring-do are just part of the job. In fact, I think you could make an argument that they're a central part of the hobby: when you're Hogwald the Horse-Slayer, you can do all of the awesome shit you want to do with none of the repercussions.
But those actions need context. More specifically, they need to entail risk. It's hard to value a victory if you didn't fight for it, and it's hard to enjoy an RPG if everything gets handed to you (I'm being hyperbolic but I hope you get the point). Players need to understand that they can fail, and they need to *actually* be able to fail. Hell, I'd say they even *need* to fail sometimes. You can't threaten them with an empty gun.
>>46088593
So, do I try to kill them? No. Do I try to make them fail? No. But, every week, I try to give them at least one *opportunity* for meaningful failure. Not necessarily death. There's a whole lot of things a party can fuck up without getting themselves killed. But failure. I do my damnedest to dangle something in front of them each week--either an actual reward like riches or renown, or a wrong to be righted, or an enemy to be put down--and give them the chance to reach for it, while holding it over the pit of failure. And I make that very clear to them. And sometimes they die, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose, and often it's a little of both.
This brings me to my second tenant: I don't *want* them to fail. I don't want them to succeed. I make a point to purge that stuff from my mind when I'm preparing a game. What I want is for interesting things to happen. They're diplomats charged with making a peace treaty? Sure I set up the situation, but they're driving this ship. I'm not going to bend over backwards to make sure it goes through because I want it to, nor will I do the opposite and sabotage them if they make compelling arguments (or roll well, depending on how the system handles this stuff). I treat the game like a social experiment, not a story. I get my fun from putting them in sticky situations and seeing how they squirm out, not by feeding them a plot I made all by my lonesome. It's not uncommon for me to change my "big picture" multiple times through a campaign based on all the crazy plot-fodder they give me. Seriously, parties write this shit themselves.
So, I do plan. Sometimes I get carried away with it, even. But I don't plan for them to win or lose. I plan the set-up, and I expect them to provide the punchline. And often they surprise me, and take the game in places I would have never thought of.
Hey, I can't do all the work.
>>46076634
>doesn't luke death happening in his games.
It must be so fun for your players to know that no matter how bad their luck is when rolling in a fight, they will absolutely not die, because you want them to live.
>>46076838
Stupidity begets stupidity. If people are stupid, you should punish them harder. Don't be afraid to kill them if need be.
>>46082860
This post makes me very angry.
At the risk of sounding like a tool, I don't run tabletops like a game. I prefer making stories and episodes, whether those be pleasant or dangerous, humorous or sombre, confusing or familiar. Each section of a campaign is a chapter of the story and while balanced level scaling is important for gameplay to feel meaningful it also makes inspiration easy. What makes the story compelling isn't any degree of planning however, it's the way the main characters are going to interact with obstacles. Players make things entirely unpredictable; these people that we've all come to know and love are suddenly on a knife's edge every time they fight. Danger has meaning, plot armor is nonexistent and even the storyteller can't predict what they'll do next. Naturally I plan for my players to win and I'm sure we're all in it for that sweet happy ending, but without the threat of failure looming over them it would simply be meaningless. I will admit that I dread the idea of a TPK as much as my group and would probably fluff my way out of it solely to keep the progress we've built alone the way.
>>46085945
here's the thing though, a world that works independent of the PCs is perfectly fine, it's a great way to design a world that has an inherent difficulty curve as opposed to one that's adjusted in tandem with the PCs, but it's all difficulty determined by the DM. You could make the area your players start in way too hard for lvl 1 PCs, in which case you just fucked yourself because no matter how clever your players are, the raw numbers are gonna fuck them. You could also surround the starting area with stuff way too high level for players to deal with, or really any other bullshit that doesn't provide an actual difficulty curve.
It's the same idea when designing a vidya, as facilitator your job is to challenge the players, but provide feasible challenges. Just because you are setting up a deadly dungeon filled with traps, you're not actually trying to make a feasible defense system, you providing a beatable challenge.
>>46090198
Your job is to present a world for the players to interact in, at a base.
You are relying on video game logic that doesn't even apply to pnp games. For example, in AD&D, the point of a dungeon crawl wasn't to kill all the enemies, but get the loot and fucking RUN, because the creatures may be way to powerful to face, but then again, you didn't need to kill them in order to succeed.
Your examples only matter if other things in the world exist only to be killed by the pcs.
>>46085357
>>46085534
That sounds like it could become a grey-goo scenario of it isn't dealt with really carefully. Good luck with it.
>>46088341
> makes a dungeon filled with constructs and undead for an all-rogue party.
>>46091394
you're missing the forest for the trees.
I made my points in terms of combat because that's 75% of DnD, but for any roleplaying system your goal as DM is to lay out appropriate challenges for the players. If you approach DMing as essentially setting up a bunch of dominoes and then just go through the motions of responding to the players inputs you've made a world no better than a videogame
I always make sure my players cannot die from a bad roll. I will set up several safety nets. For example a player is hanging off a cliff, and he fails a roll that makes his character pull himself up. I'll give the other players an opportunity to grab his hand before he falls. However, I will not hesitate to kill a player if he does something that will obviously lead to death. Jumping into a explicitly described bottomless chasm will kill a player, no saves.
I plan extremely ahead for my sessions. At any time my little DM "notebook" (Actually a folder on my laptop) would have enough content for 6 sessions. I've also planned a Good, Bad, and Neutral ending for the campaign ahead of time. I'm the type to have a "hard" ending. The End, everyone goes back to their daily lives and the character sheets are retired.
I tend to favor some questlines when I write my campaigns. I get upset when the party chooses a different questline instead of the one I spent most time on. An anon a few days ago mentioned that before every campaign he has an agreement with his players that they bite plot hooks and he promises to give them the quests that he spent the most time on and are the well thought out ones. I'm thinking if I should bring this up.
I'm extremely lax with the rules. I'd more often than not just think of a ruling in my head rather than consult a rulebook. I also have the habit of throwing out game mechanics I believe slow down play. Most of my players are normies that don't read rulebooks so most of the throwing out of the rules aren't noticed by them. Because of this, I usually make my own character sheets on Microsoft Word. I also dislike cluttered character sheets in favor of neat Word Files. I retyped the D&D character sheet into MS Word for this reason.
I provide my players with dice, pencils, erasers, index cards, and other things. I also keep all of their notebooks, character sheets and anything else they might need (like maps and tables).
cont...
>>46091524
And I disagree that you are required to lay out "appropriate" challenges, especially if making something appropriate means twisting the logic of the world.
See my WoD example: a werewolf can, and likely will, rip a coterie to shreds, and if a coterie decides hey, we are gonna kill a werewolf, and get ashed in the process, the responsibility does not lay at the GM's feet.
I'm currently in a Dark Heresy game where the warband is finding itself, due to a singularly impressive fuck up, having to take on an entire police station, as they have been infiltrated by cultists.
>there is more to this, but brevity is my goal
Is this an appropriate challenge for the warband, mostly made of noncombatants? No, it is not. Yet, it must still be done, and we have pooled resources and pulled strings to get it done, no matter the cost. Some of us may die in the process, but right now, that is an entirely acceptable loss.
>>46091585
cont...
My players can literally come to a session empty handed and they can still play.
I enforce the house rule of "If you don't know what it does, you cannot do it." It forces the wizards to learn their spells without having to consult a rulebook. I allow my players to write them down on index cards I provide though.
On the subject of wizards and spellcasters, I require them to use an Android app for their spells. It's much more intuitive than opening a rulebook. I also have the same app and have copies of their spellbooks.
I make props for key items. When the party receives a Key for a dungeon, I really do have a cartoony oversized key prepared.
On the subject of physical items, I use a lot of actual items for different things. I use a poker chip to signify if a player has an Inspiration token. I use dice to keep track of player HP. And I use small colored stones for other markers I might need to conjure up.
I pin important tables onto the outside of my DM screen for player quick access.
I roll everything DM related behind my screen and do not broadcast the rolls. Non-hostile NPC's who are helping the party, for example their pet rat, has their dice rolled outside of the screen.
I sometimes roll dice behind the screen for no reason to keep players alerted.
My players are nice people that give me food during sessions but I personally never eat during play. I don't have anything against players eating though. If food spills on any sheet, I ask the player to replace the sheet. (This has happened more than once.)
Since my players are normies, they don't really understand the tabletop dynamic and they sometimes express that they feel kind of bad that they don't pay me. I tell them it's okay and I have fun too.
I'm actually very thankful that I have a nice group. They're my coworkers and we work in the academe so I think they're all pretty competent and polite.
B and C. I'll fudge things in the players' favour if they're obviously struggling, but god it feels good to drop the hammer if they're effectively digging their own graves.
Plus giving them the odd moment where they're actually scared is great fun.
