I find that the ‘structured episodic’ nature of the gameplay (combined with the GM’s instinct for tension) informs those twist vs condition choices far more than the appropriateness in the narrative.

That’s the rub as Michael Prescott so eloquently illustrates above. Its like one of your key responsibilities is to gauge how much ‘pain of the grind’ that your (individual) players enjoy.

I’ve found some peeps will grind their character to death, and take a perverse pleasure in doing so – confronting obstacle after obstacle, spending artha like mad and just hoping on hope they may just pull it off, but if they don’t (and die) they are just as pleased and rave about ‘what a great session that was’.

Whereas other folks HATE having conditions and will focus their gameplay around relieving / mitigating the effects.

I find player gamestyle is the metric for challenge I use: both in terms of both the ‘describe to live’ narrative adage of the obstacle, and the mechanical implications of test failure.