It’s a weird dance, honestly. I start with the skeleton of the siege—real siege engines, the weight of a trebuchet, the physics of a battering ram—because those feel authentic. Then I test a handful of iterations, seeing where the pacing stalls or feels too linear, and that’s when I tweak things: maybe add a hidden catapult that only works at night or give the castle a secret tunnel that lets a player sneak in. I keep the core mechanics true but let the fun bits slide in where the story needs a bit of magic.