Thanks to @caitmayart for this art piece!

Taliesin was right: character death makes the other characters gun-shy. The Mighty Nein have be considerably more cautious since the Glory Run Road, taking time to plan, discuss, revamp their plan, discuss, confirm their plan, discuss, etc. far more than they have in the past. As we discussed last week, their mission is five-fold, but foremost among those goals is their own: rescuing Yasha, Jester, and Fjord.

To that end, they took the measured risk of seeking out the aid of one of the strangely regarded clerics outside of the city, who ended up being Caduceus. Luckily, he was more than willing to leave now that he had traveling companions. Upon reaching The Sour Nest again, TM9 elected to forgo one risk: asking a Tasker to aid them in infiltrating at the risk of someone in the town potentially connecting them with the Marduns. By forgoing that risk, they opted to take another: breaking into the stronghold with six people.

This is a great example of an encounter whose difficulty changes entirely based on decisions and actions made by the players. Rather than present this solely as a combat encounter, it’s easier to think of the infiltration as a whole, with combat as a subset and potential consequence. Being a skill challenge, there is a fair amount of luck involved, and all actions are a gamble. To paraphrase Taliesin from this past week’s Talks Machina, the game is not whether or not something can be done, but how likely the thing is to be done.