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Generally true, but it's still often worth thinking about how you could have done things better.

The general case of this appears to be pretty straight forward - we are having fun with friends, but some mistake leads to us having less fun than we could have had - a frustrating diversion on a road trip where we don't come away with a funny story would be a simple example. For an RPG...

Could you give an example of one of these? I'd be very interested in a worked example of the kind of thing that handles this well

Right - Dawn Treader could be fairly easily recontextualised as a series of modules chained together within a wider campaign arc, where those modules don't have a lot to do with each other in detail but are brought together in theme.

Right - I had an example from another thread about this Let's say we're playing 5e and the rule is that characters can move stealthily, with the DC being determined by the passive perception of any relevant NPCs. Consider a PC attempting to sneak up on an NPC that is standing facing away from...

"Balancing encounters a touch" by adding additional foes is exactly "spawning in" enemies. If it's being done to "balance" the encounter, it's almost definitionally to keep the game interesting (a trivial encounter would be found by most groups I expect as not interesting - a somewhat...

Right - the "Lawful Good Rules Lawyer" is something I think a lot of us have heard of as a concept.

4e's disease tracks - lots more customisable and was an extensible framework for a lot of different effects

Right, and I admit to the same in that thread. It's still fudging though, even if done in favour of the characters

For precise figures, no, but unless the sample is completely unrepresentative it suggests fudging is not uncommon

We can certainly survey it - D&D 5E (2014) - DMs, how do you fudge? This seems to suggest that a good portion of GMs will admit to fudging at least sometimes.

Right, which is why suggestions of "cheating" or "get-out-of-jail-free cards" is irrelevant to this discussion. Something done following the rules of the game cannot be cheating, by definition.

Surely this only makes sense as a concern in terms of challenge base play? All play changes the narrative and the current state of the fiction. I hope you'd agree that the runes could possibly be helpful for one of many reasons - creation of fiction that makes them so is not implausible. If...

The script used by the builders of Moria is explicitly called runic in the text. The Book of Marzabul is written in at least two different scripts, one of which is explicitly runic. Most of the Fellowship couldn't read it, and I don't think Gimli could read Tengwar. We know that Gimli was...

And we pretend these falsehoods are true, for the time we pretend to spend in that world. Otherwise there would be no reason to suspend our disbelief.

Or the visitor was a long time ago and was writing in something readable for their time. Or the original builders put the map in place before it was overrun by whatever haunts it now. Or it's not a map, but instead some information (such as the name of a chamber) that can be cross-referenced...

That our fictional worlds exist, that we have characters that inhabit them?

For a "War" RPG, would that be something like the MechWarrior RPGs, Lancer and the 40k war based rpgs?

Not really. Neither I or the 30 year creator are required to incorporate fiction arising from the game into their world.

For this case in particular, no aspect of the world is under threat. Even if the GM/Author runs a game in the setting, they are under absolutely no compulsion to incorporate the events of the game into it. Even if the characters slay Tredorar the Terrible, it still exists in the notes and the...