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Nice evasion. Adventure was just one of the things. The important part, which is the part you are avoiding, is the part where you name a single RPG whose design is to create boring lives for PCs. Name one of those. There aren't any, because the point of RPGs is fun and excitement for the...

Because the term is a lie. The characters are not having a boring life, whether or not the advice is followed. The advice isn't false, the term is. It's not paranoia. It's the actual implication. I could just as easily say, "Oh my God, would those designers stop creating names that don't...

Step one: Attempt to pick the lock and fail. Step two: The lock fails to open, which is the only direct result of the failed check. Step three: The cook is in the room to hear the noise(which means she is there to hear the noise on a successful attempt since she's not quantum). Step four: The...

No. It suggests that the attack roll is for the attack, like it literally says. If the roll representing the attack fails, then the DM comes up with a reason like it was avoided, blocked or whatever. Now here's 2e... "At the heart of the combat system is the attack roll. This is the die roll...

There's also It Came From The Late, Late, Late Show where you play B actors in B movies. On page 8 it goes into great detail about acting appropriately stupid. For example, you're at a resort where some psycho has been knifing people to death and you walk into a room where you see a trail of...

Name me one RPG who if you play it, results in characters who have boring lives. Who never adventure. Who never encounter monsters and neat places. Who never have any kind of excitement. Just one. I'm fairly confident designers don't make games designed to be boring. Offensively named...

Which is why it's such a stupid and bad term. If the principle is make decisions that will be interesting, that's what it should be called. Don't call it something that if false on its face. That's the implication of the term, though. When applied to other games like it was earlier in the...

Why do you think that something that you set up as a standard in your head for your character somehow isn't a standard or something you can be faithful to? Like if I set up in my head that my character will never harm a child, and he doesn't for his entire career, how is that not 1) a standard...

We understand the mechanic. It's a nonsense phrase when applied to RPGs, since characters in RPGs already don't have boring lives. They flubbed it when they picked the name for the mechanic. Beyond that flub, the implication when applied in discussions about other games, is that if it isn't...

If it made sense to them that PCs who already didn't have boring lives needed that phrase and technique in order to not have boring lives, there was something wrong with their understanding of language and RPGs. That phrase is nonsense in the context of RPGs where the characters never have...

Sure, but to be fair, he's said more than once that when he says that he's talking about directly connected/related. If I decide I want ice cream, get in my car, drive to the store, go into the store, buy some ice cream, leave the store, drive home, scoop out some ice cream, put the rest of the...

I'm saying that 1) those games are wrong if they attempt to appropriate a term for their exclusive use, and 2) other people are wrong when they say that we can't be faithful to our portrayals of character. The term isn't owned by those games. Faithful has meaning as a word. I can be...

And as I addressed, it's a very bad term. The characters' lives won't be boring whether you do that or not. Why not use a term that's accurate like, "Make the moment interesting" since it's all about what's happening in that moment and has nothing to do with rescuing the characters from a life...

I don't have to alter the setting to do it. If they are heading to a city and I have to prepare some things, I'm not going to prepare stuff that they would find boring. There could be a thousand things going on in Waterdeep, but the ones I'm going to focus on are the ones that 1) I know the...

No, other factors matter. If they are in a hostile city that is in high alert or something, encounters will be more common. They aren't on a scale of minutes, though, which is what searching is. Unless the players search coincidentally coincides with encounter timing, it's not going to be a...

My goal is for everyone at the table to have fun, not be bored. To that end I run the game that best fits the style of everyone at the table. Currently that's a more traditional style game. Not completely traditional. I improvise a great deal, reacting to what the players do in the game.

Game play is a huuuuuuge indicator. Backstory is a huuuuuuuuuge indicator. What the player has told the group about his character is a huuuuuuuuge indicator. Alignment if used is a moooooooderate indicator. After not too many sessions, everyone at the table will have a solid read on...

4e took that from 3e. The only real difference was that in 3e it wasn't stealth, it was hide and move silently vs. spot and listen.

Why on Earth would being faithful to it not be called faithful? How is this not One True Wayism. Someone doesn't have to tell someone else about something before he can have faith in it or be faithful to it.

I have it happen a couple of times when the party was in a dungeon fighting. They were caught between a lock and a hard place and needed to retreat.