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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8688031" data-attributes="member: 6877472">It's a good question, that.  I don't really have an answer, because I've been too focused for a long time on "what could go wrong" and trying to adjust for it.  When I run a game, I spend a lot of time planning sessions.  I go over the monsters, I compare them to the party's abilities, I try to make encounters memorable, throw in a few non-combat challenges, weave an interesting story about the area they are adventuring in, and generally, spend more time planning than actually playing.When things go wrong, it's not usually a little wrong.  Like, oh, we might have to skip an encounter or whatnot.  It's usually catastrophically wrong, and it always irks me when I say "this happened to me" and other people are like "lol, impossible".No, it's not impossible, and it can happen.  I've had a player up and leave my house when they died in the middle of a challenging encounter, realizing that they weren't going to be able to play their character for the rest of the night.I've had good campaigns that I'd been running for over a year suddenly crash and burn, with players all of a sudden going from "we should play this weekend at the last minute, bonus session!" to "uh, I'm too busy at work, I can't play this week" all over a session that went horribly south.There's a limit to what kind of abuse a lot of players can take, I've found, so it's all this careful balancing act to make sure that I know what they can handle, and just have to hope they know what they can handle.  Personally, I think part of the problem in communication is that, in games where you're actively trying to challenge the players, the players are probably better at strategy and cooperation than my usual pack of misfits, and probably have more optimized characters as well.My groups are...a mixed bag.  I've yet to have a successful session zero, for example.  For 25 years, I've tried bringing the players together to plan their characters as a group.  Nope.  Best I get is "whose the Fighter?  Who is healing?  Ok."Then they all make their characters independently of one another, and you better believe they are all at different power levels from one another.And the guy who said he'd play a Cleric comes in with a Storm Cleric who wants to blast enemies to bit with thunder damage rather than heal (imagine that!), and the Fighter is a janky dual-wielding Eldritch Knight with 12 Constitution...And this is what I get to run for, lol.</blockquote>

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