You are the Master but I like to point my opinions. I personally do not like soft GM's that pity the players ^^ IMO fantasy world is full of wonders and danger. Every action should be taken seriously like as if you are really there. Players should feel real fear in those situations. My gf cried when her character died in a battle. Adding personel stuff to the pre-made stories is a good idea to me. Every group is different and every player has different play style. Its up to group to tweak it to have more fun. Why do we play these game? to have fun right? We shouldn't forget the ultimate goal ^^ having a good time together.
Actually it's not like that, at least, not around me. Because, people love to make things with a short way. They like to do stuff "easily"; so, when things getting tighter, they start to think like "GM is punishing us", or "GM didn't let us do that", or "meeeh, this is useless" or something like that. Probably this thought of players kept me away from showing my actual potential on my recent games. And that's another thing I don't like in D&D. You have to tweak stuff to make it good. There are lots of other games you don't need to tweak to make it good. Anyways...