Would love your thoughts on this.

So I'm going to through myself under the bus with this one: I suck at tactics. I'm great at plotting out an interesting story and challenging social and exploration encounters... But when it comes to combat my players laugh at me. Does anyone have a process to help train me up to become more tactical and challenging for my players? I've run encounters where they stomp on individual monsters that should be a challenge for them. I've introduced a dragon that was wildly above their level and nearly TPK'd them for no real reason (just trying to show how badly I can plan these out). I've currently got a group of engineers and mathmaticians playing ranged attacking characters that sweep the board of any fight I throw at them. I want to get better at tactical combat but don't know where to start. Help!

For my upcoming Night City Daggerheart mini-campaign.

I've watched a very informative video talking about Premises, People, and Pushes (https://youtu.be/mh1Yq592I5A?si=NAhVdyZQiWBp1inK). Out of all the concepts this video talks about, pushes seems to be the one I can find the least additional information about. The creator talks about pushes being events that occur in the world in order to make it feel alive, specifying that these are NOT plot hooks but are instead events that would happen, big or small, in a way that makes sense for the world to feel alive. This includes, for example, a scene where an accident takes place and the push is a news van interviewing a group of students all giving varying accounts of what happened. Are there more resources exploring this topic about how to make world feel alive without pressuring the players down a plot (similar to the advice in the video)? Perhaps the concept is called something else in other books.

As discussed in today's meeting. I'm going to borrow the scene creation images from Blood Sigils (the Vampire: the Masquerade sourcebook), which I can't recommend highly enough. In this case, the social network is the player characters and how they relate to people who are associated with blood magic. Step 1: The coterie (the party). Step 2: Existing NPC relationships that are applicable (either from character creation, session zero, or initial session) Step 3: In this context, they're adding the "sellers" => people who have things that the PCs might want. Step 4: Ditto for "buyers" => these are people who maybe want the same things the PCs want. They might be able to point the PCs in the right direction, or maybe they are competition. Step 5: Add relevant locations Step 6: Add enemies/breakers. This can be done collaboratively as well, or just as a step as the GM afterward, if you want them to be a surprise. Step 7: Name and Trends: trends are subnarratives that start hot (usually at 5) and then tick down more slowly or quickly based on the extent that the players interact with them.