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I recall that you've previously posted about players hating you, assaulting you (or threatening to assault you), and having had multiple groups and campaigns fall apart because players felt you'd been unfair to them.

Well, I don't say that it can't make for compelling play, just that it's a choice made by the GM and not some inevitable consequence of the laws of cause and effect. If you want the gameplay experience it generates then great, but it isn't inherently more realistic or valid than other methods.

Agreed. The GM can always find a fictional pretext to say yes or no, easy or hard, possible or not possible. 'This is the only logical consequence of the world simulation engine I am running in my head and anything else would be unrealistic' is a delusion.

Hang on. You're saying that if you decide the one thing that will happen, it's an Unlimited Game of infinite possibility, but if hawkeye decides six things that could happen and rolls a d6 to determine which one it is, it's a Limited Game (TM). Isn't that the wrong way round? Doesn't his game...

It's not really 'fiction first' if the GM is also inventing the pertinent parts of the fiction as they go. If it's already been established (in play or in the GM's prep) that the would-be Alarm avoider will take certain measures to try to bypass it, that's one thing. If the GM makes it up five...

I thought so! I remember getting confused when I went there last, after a long gap in between.

Depends on what is meant by rules lawyering. Sometimes it seems to just mean 'expects the rules as written to be in operation' rather than getting into detailed arguments over interpretation of sub-clauses, etc.

Has Leisure Games always been in the same place? Man I remember Orcs Nest pre-refit. And Playing Games by Picadilly Circus!

How can you do fake rolls without also practicing illusionism?

I think the impact of fake rolls quickly goes away and they become hollow. Players come to understand that they don't necessarily mean anything. This idea of the GM as a showman magician whose job is to misdirect and amaze needs to get in the sea. It's much more suspenseful to say what a roll is...

None. I guess I'll be pretty good at overcoming traumatic experiences once the William Gibson jackpot we're in really starts to accelerate.

I don't see pictures in my head and I don't have any kind of inner monologue playing. I can make one, in the sense of articulating a planned sequence of actions to myself, but this is just like speaking silently. Nothing is said that I don't control. In fact I don't hear non-diegetic noises...

Wait, your position is that people who don't hear a constant voice in their head aren't thinking? Thoughts can only exist as spoken words?

Background noise! 🙂

I just look at my bookshelves. I know pretty much what I have (and I have quite a lot). The one exception is MERP, which had a lot of supplements for the same region or that were pseudo-replaced with bigger second edition books. There are also some that I've read but don't own in paper form...

The automatic replacement by consumers of old but loved games with whatever new version the publisher decides to dump out is a plague on the hobby. Most games were best in their first or second editions.

'OK, make a perception check'. Success = you can see an enemy in the bushes. It appears to be stalking you. Failure = an enemy bursts out of the bushes and attacks you from ambush

Everything can always be rolled in the open

Literally none of these are fudging. The essence of fudging is that the players can't see what you've done. A 20 gets turned to a 19 behind the screen, or the monster's hit points suddenly change on the notepad or in the GM's head. All of your examples are bad GMing, sure, but they are...

How does a GM fudge in Apocalypse World? I wrote and published an RPG based entirely around player defined abilities and ran 4 campaigns. Play didn't resemble this at all. The vast majority of the time it was obvious whether something applied or didn't. The few times something was in question...