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The problem with asking permission is that a) it gives people far too much opportunity to deny said permission and b) ruins the surprise of whatever you're cooking up. Not me. I'm in the camp of do it till something makes you stop. And depending on the action in question, why wouldn't it be...

In a situation like that I might try a different approach such as booting the door in.

No, however my means of gaining entry to my house are - for the time being - no longer going to involve the front door. I might try getting in through the garage, or an open window, or go to the neighbour's and ask for my emergency key I left with them years ago. That the house is on fire...

Sure. Your milk example is a stripped-down version of the "butterfly effect" where one minor thing leads to another until something major happens. "The lock doesn't open and that's it" isn't the only possible consequence but by itself it should be a possible consequence, where nothing else...

I'd like to think we're playing people who could be real in a world that could be real given the parameters under which the setting was designed. In other words, I'm playing a real Elf in that Elf's real world. With the prevalence of healing in most settings the terrible scars and permanent...

Which could be reflective of their characters' feelings - some want to keep trying, others want to give up. Eventually it might take those who want to give up actually walking away (in the fiction) and leaving the others to it. This is one of those instances, though, where my go-to response is...

I expressly don't look at it from the perspective of the story, because for these purposes I don't care about the story. Instead,I look at it from the perspective of the characters in the fiction (and by extension, the players at the table) and whether or not they are making progress toward...

For me, if stalling out would sometimes happen were these characters real people then stalling out happening sometimes in the fiction is perfectly OK. I'm not that bothered by fail sideways or fail backward, i.e. the task is still failed and something tangential happens as well be it due to the...

They don't? How dare they market these games without including the friends they promised in the advertising! :)

To a point. The placement of oceans, islands, volcanoes, rivers, and other geography doesn't give a flip about the rule-set you're using; nor does the astronomy or calendar or weather. It's only when you get into populating that world with species and cultures etc. and then tacking on a...

I guess I'd better repeat: that riddle-door situation only happened once. Most of the time we solve puzzles pretty fast (sometimes disappointingly fast for the DM!). :) When I'm the DM I'll put puzzles in, for sure, but they're usually either a) hard-to-solve mazes involving teleporters or b)...

The agency to play my character in the way I want to play it is the only type of player agency that matters. Without that, no other types of player agency (if indeed there are any, I'm not sure on that) can functionally occur. It depends, also, on how attached one is to playing the character...

Depends. If one approaches the whole game as more or less a puzzle of exploration, trial and error, and discovery (in both the immediate and long term), then it fits right in. The situation I have in mind is that the other PCs would be waiting, as instructed by the scout, for the scout to...

I thought there'd be several, but no luck.

I'm playing a character - or maybe more than one, depending on situation - and that's it. That character is, I hope, an individual free-thinking inhabitant of its setting who maybe does or maybe doesn't consider itself bound by the internal laws of that setting or elements within it (e.g...

Oh, I'll gladly admit to being a chaos gremlin. :) Not with every character, but certainly with some. And I'm far from the gremlin-iest in our crew. Never mind that sometimes two well-intentioned players just end up with otherwise perfectly decent characters who, when put together, instantly...

Which is also fine, as different people are going to have different "tells" if-when they are lying and each listener is likely going to be differently attuned to those tells. For example, the bartender keeps glancing over his shoulder while talking to you. One person might correctly interpret...

Quick google check finds no town, state, or country by that name. Should I expand my search to check planet names? :)

To me they're exactly the same thing, and if playing the character true leads me to doing something nasty in the fiction or to leaving the party or whatever then so be it: it's what the character would do. Let 'em fight, says I.

Once a character's been played for even just a few sessions, it usually becomes fairly obvious what to expect from it to the point where you can almost predict what that character is going to do in amost typical situations. And yes, this includes those characters whose usual modus operandum is...