ProfessorOwl_PhD

One time I got back from annual leave only to find out that my job had been done away with by the board over a year beforehand and my manager had spent the last year submitting fake timesheets claiming I was working a different position, so I could do the parts of her job that the assistant manager wasn't already doing. The company had assumed I knew about it as they couldn't get in contact with me when they discovered it and came down on the manager (my job was only the beginning of her fraud), but I was in the middle of nowhere and had no signal, so the first I heard about it was when I walked into the office and one of my coworkers went "what are you doing here?".

I used to think fudging Vs not fudging was a stylistic decision, but as I've played more I feel it's a system issue. If you feel a need to fudge rolls, either to raise or lower the stakes, to force desired plot points or avoid unnarrative deaths, or to fix broken challenge ratings, you're probably using the wrong system for you and your group.
Think about what issues you're actually trying to avoid by fudging, and then look for systems that are structured to avoid those issues. If the rolls get in the way of your narrative, switch to a more narrative system. If you're fighting against the system to build satisfying combat encounters, switch to something more tactical.

It'll always take a couple of sessions to get used to a new system, but learning one is always a lot faster than continuing to waste time trying to force a system to do things it wasn't made for.

Really accurate tape measure.

It's always difficult finding the balance between in character and out of character knowledge. I recently had to explain to my players that their characters definitely knew about a major historical event in the setting, because while it happened 10,000 years ago it's important to the origin of several gods, so is a widely known story.

US banks won't even issue chip and pin cards because their customers would find entering a 4 number code too arduous and complicated.

Where do you want to start? The player mechanics are way outdated and overcomplicated for what it wants to be, the GM mechanics are functionally nonexistant, the lore is cliched at best and still incredibly bigoted in many areas, the better adventures are just rehashes of 2e and 3.x adventures and still need entire communities dedicated to making them runnable, it's unbalanced until you get to about level 10 at which point it becomes unplayable, and without pirating it's incredibly expensive.
Trying to strap every possible setting and mechanic onto a fantasy rule system was one of the issues 3.x ended up with, and 5e hasn't been designed to solve that.

Are you sure they're not saying "you're whale cum", because that's what I do.

It's amazing just how bad at lying some people are. My players were investigating a building for the mayor, and attracted attention when they just tried picking the lock on the front door. Instead of just saying they were there on the mayor's behalf the bard decided to try to convince the guards it was "just" a piece of performance art.
I was just tryinbg to give them an in game reminder that there was a back door that would be easier to pick or force, but instead they talked their way into being dragged back in front of the mayor 15 minutes after being given the task.

Is this really a normal amount of prep for 5e? With Paizo adventures I've only ever read the adventure in advance, collated some bits of information that are spread through the adventure so I can forshadow them, and made some brief notes on NPC accents. I can't imagine a group of players for whom prewritten dialogue would help me in the game, and I just use the book/pdf for actually running rooms and events. This is closer to the level of prep I do for adding in extra content or doing entirely homebrewed adventures.

Israel is a state, not a country.

Palestine is a country, not a state.

It's tragic, but that's what happens when your state primarily defends itself with human shields.