If you kill a PC with a recreation of the Boromir death scene, you might be able to hit all three at once!
Susaga
And we played the first thing that came to our heads
Just so happened to be
The best song in the world
It was the best song in the world
They were being kind and assuming there was a miscommunication.
I wasn't a good DM either. But then I learned. I threw encounters at the players I thought might be fun, and I missed the mark almost every single time. But my players had fun, so I don't see the problem in getting those encounters wrong. And every failure taught me so much more than every success.
If you fail, but you keep it fun and learn for the future, what have you lost? Only your pride.
But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others. Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others. Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.
If you could devise a system to assign monster complexity based on every scenario you can imagine that monster being part of, then either that's an astonishingly small number of scenarios or an absurdly complex calculation to force on anyone.
I think it's mostly cowardice, personally. People don't want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren't as good. It's better to use someone else's decisions than risk your own pride.
Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don't know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren't something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.
"You will reunite with a friend"
"The bad times will be over quickly"
"A sudden windfall will come your way"
That's bollocks. Whoever claimed that people used to draw dicks to ward off evil was talking out of their ass to make a dick pic seem classier. They were just embarrassed that their submission in an archeological journal was so similar to what they carved into their desk in school, and I'm damn certain the school desk isn't protected from evil either.
I find it funny that you directly quoted wikipedia to write that (exact wording from the paradox article, I checked), but ignored the sentence immediately before it (...or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation). Also, the linked articles at the bottom include the unexpected hanging page. Maybe read the entire wiki page before citing it?
Also, in case wikipedia suddenly isn't enough, here's an article on wolfram to back me up: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/UnexpectedHangingParadox.html
My dude. The paradox doesn't change based on whether or not the judge knows the truth, or even if the man dies.
The truth is the man was made not to expect a thing by his own logic proving he would always expect a thing. The paradox is based on his own prediction being wrong because of his prediction. In this instance, his prediction was what his emotions would be.
A horse walks into a bar, and the barman says "why the long face?" I haven't said how they remove the horse from the bar, so does that mean I didn't tell a joke? Or does horse removal not actually matter to the joke?
You have understood nothing.
Neither statement can be true OR false. If statement A is true, statement B is true, which means statement A is false. To simplify, if statement A is true, statement A is false.
"This statement is false" can be neither true nor false. That is the most basic paradox there is.
"He's at the Hilton!" "Well then, let's go there!" "I dunno, it doesn't sound great. This guy only ranked it 2 stars, and apparently it really hates cops."