>>2750706Personally, I much prefer the latter option for any game I play, especially since I play tabletop a lot. Never put the player in a lose state while he still has freedom of action, instead, keep making victory less and less likely until you overwhelm them.
Learned the lesson the hard way when my played were trying to bypass a deathtrap in an old castle while playing D&D. Thief stole all the gemstones instead of thinking on the puzzle presented beforehand (I had made a short writing that mentioned every gem (By color) the players weren't supposed to pull out by describing bad things that happened to those that did, metaphorically), so not just one trap, but ALL traps triggered at once, and so for about five minutes the players were running around trying to figure out how to stop things when there was no actual solution anymore.
It didn't make things more thrilling, it just made them frustrating. So always provide the players with a possible win condition or just outright kill them.
