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If you make someone's experience worse, that's harm. It doesn't need to leave them bleeding on the floor.

At which point, as I've largely done at this point you just--stop.

That's their problem (well, and the problem to some degree of the people they insist on it from). But it doesn't change that you can't talk about why you use the GMing style you do without taking the time to think about that.

I can see some arguments there's a certain degree of distance in parts of PF2e, though I don't think its as severe as the 4e version in that it usually does describe what's going on in a fairly concrete way. Now, the way it describes it may seem--odd--or over the top--or overly specific, but I...

And there's why sometimes all you can do is walk away.

While I get some of what you're talking about, IME there were only a very few 4e builds where you could just "click the buttons" without reference to the situation and what other PCs were doing. Most of them were very much interactive. (I did find them overly abstract in some cases, but that's...

I could actually see it happening with a long city campaign in a fairly corrupt city.

Its not impossible to have a murder mystery that involves at least some reasonable player agency--but the more its set up to do that, the sloppier or more full of bad luck the murderer has to be, because otherwise the routes to useful information will be pretty constrained.

Self-analysis--which is what Lanefan talked about--is not automatically "jargon-filled game theory". It still requires introspection, and if you're not willing to do some of that, I'm hard pressed to think you actually know why you're doing some of what you do. People don't in any other field...

Let's say you're correct in you assessing your own abilities and style here. What in the world makes you think this is at all common? All evidence is that most people are really bad at both recognizing they've made a mistake and being willing to do the heavy lifting to fix it. By this point...

That would require someone to come in and be soggy about the conversion of a pretty good pair (well, in the original) of SF adventure books with some heavy Native American themes being converted into a mediocre fantasy franchise, and no one would want to do that... (Yeah, I'm still bitter.)

At some point, if you're going to talk about them at least, they kind of do. You don't have to want to do that, of course.

And I've explained the difference. If you don't accept that, you don't; my repeating it few more times is unlikely to change your mind.

I'll try this one more time: in my view, this isn't protecting against intentions; its protecting against judgment. And I do, indeed, think you somewhat need to read the GMs mind to know how good the latter is. I don't know why its controversial that someone can have the best of intentions and...

Do you think that's the primary purpose of guardrails on a road? If so, you're mistaken; the primary purpose is to reduce damage when misadventure occurs. Same here. Purpose of guardrails is to help protect against mistakes and make it easier to prevent them in the future. See above.

At least you can assess them up front; you don't have to try and read the GM's mind.

Unfortunately, the hobby is full of people who have been taught to either be defensive about that being done or outright offended. I'd be willing to bet some of them are in this thread.

Again, this isn't about people who are deliberately using power against players; its about people who make mistakes and aren't good about acknowledging and fixing them. One is malevolence, the other is human nature. So, yeah, I think everyone with extra ability to harm or help should have some...

But that's not what you did; you posted a parallel with combat and acted like it proves something, and people who don't consider combat and social encounters parallel have made that abundantly clear before, so this does what? My post to Micah was noting that his actual objection was too broad...

That's why I said in OD&D they were indirectly factored in.