Secrecy

[Darth Ultron]

Say you have an adventure where the players are given the task of defending the village from a raid of goblins. Do you have a plan set for them in advance that they should follow? Or do they need to plan the defense?

In general I have at least three plans, maybe five or more.

Say that the fight starts, and you've made the entire thing to be reasonable challenging given what you know they have in their reserves. But if they don't use the wand of fireballs you provided, they might have a tougher time, but you account for this. How do you account for this? Do you have an outcome where they win anyway or will you just let the dice fall?

As always, the dice will fall where they may.

Say they do not manage to hold the lines and forgot about the wand you gave them. One of them orders a retreat. You had planned a pincer attack by the goblins in anticipation of this earlier. Is the only outcome death at this point?

Most likely. I'm a Hard Fun Killer ''let dice will fall where they may" type DM. If the PCs do anything unwise there is a big threat of loss or character death.

Say they now run into the ambush, get surrounded and finally, with all the villagers dead and some of the party members dead, they remember the fireball wand and use it, easily clearing out the goblins, after they'd effectively failed. Did you account for this? Is this a failure or a success? What do you do to prevent this from happening ever in your games?

Pyrrhic Victory for sure. I don't do anything to prevent this, sounds like a good game to me.