Congratulations. Having high level characters and well rounded players does make everything smoother. If you've had those, I envy you. But not much.
I've managed a couple of games but I always made my plots to willfully accomodate chaos. I like to reward stupidity and recklessness. After a couple of disastrous events, the table tends to settle down and the mood tends to loosen up.
I'm fairly comfortable saying we have different approaches to playing and play directing. Which is good.
Are we playing a campaign or renacting the Lord of the Rings?
Live for the chaos and mayhem. Expect it. Thrive from it. And tell the players that if their precious avatar dies, it's on them, exclusively.
A campaign should be built around goals, capable of being moved around, delayed or put ahead of schedule as needed.
The players are walking in the campaign blind. It's not their concern if a random action - that may be completely in line with their character - ampers, deviates or collapses the entire campaign.
Set wide goals, expect mayhem, have fun. Anything more than this is wishful thinking.
DnD is no more just dungeons and dragons. The moment it becomes an open world, the players roam around and do mischief.
If you want to play out your dream campaingn, write a book. It will never play as you expect or want. Unless you have the play fully scripted, with fixed roles and outcomes, it will derail.
I made a promise to myself that no matter what, I would love my children. It's not my life, it is their life to live and find happiness and fullfillement. And if my children are happy, I am happy. Nothing more, nothing less.
I work in an environment where not having one would be very unwise but even before I've used screen protectors. It became standard practice from the moment the usable screen area became too large to not being worthy of protecting by my own means and efforts.
I've used those flexible anti scratch protectors, the hard, glass like, and the new generation gel films. I personally prefer the hard, supposedly tempered, screen protectors.
It is a learned skill to apply a screen film properly, I'll admit, as I will admit I have ruined my share of it. I used to just buy it in bulk to allow for mistakes.
There are quite affordable vaccum machines that do wonders for those who are less apt at applying those films. Only work for hard glass or flexible; the gel ones have to be precision cut.
If you wear a lot of films, it may be a reasonable expense. Applying one protecting film can cost me anywhere between €8 to €20. The machines I've seen cost around €60.
I live in an area where fires are frequent and aerial cables plentiful.
Once in a while, a crew comes around and picks up all the broken cable. But considering these are mostly glass, non insulated cables, I'd risk it just becomes another inert part of the soil.
Hopefully, there will be a retrieval plan, after all the madness ends.
That's Easter. But since you mention it, there was a time when coal was to be given to the bad kids, which by default were all the non-white and not poor kids.
Bigoted enough for you? I grew up still listening echos of that shit.
My keyboard doesn't have that many symbols.
I concede.