When the Gamesmaster Gets It Wrong

Claude is a good Games Master and it is not a reliable one. It will, over a long session, do all of the things in this chapter. None of them are your fault and all of them are fixable in one sentence.

The single most important thing to know is this: say so immediately, out of character, in plain words. Do not play around a mistake, do not try to correct it from inside the fiction, and do not wait to see whether it fixes itself. It will not.

How to say it

OOC — at the front of a line means out of character, this is me talking to you, not my character talking in the room. Use it for anything about the rules, the numbers, the pacing, or what the Games Master just did.

OOC — what about my augmentation?

Square brackets are for directions about how the scene is being run rather than about what happens in it.

[keep going until something happens]

Asking is never cheating. What am I rolling? Against what number? Can this kill me? You are owed a straight answer to all three, every time.

And ask it to write the correction down. If it is a mistake you think it will make again, say make a note of that — it can record the correction so the next session starts with it.

The failure modes

What it looks like	What to say
A number is wrong, or it forgot your passion, your knack, your equipment	OOC — what about my augmentation? / You’ve dropped my knack on that roll.
It announced the result before saying what you were rolling against	OOC — what’s the difficulty? Say it before the dice.
You are reading beautiful paragraphs and have not done anything in a while	[nothing’s happening for me to do] / [keep going until something happens]
It is explaining at length something you cannot act on	OOC — cut to the chase.
It wrote dialogue for your character that you did not write	I didn’t say that. Give me the line back.
It told you what somebody else is feeling or thinking	OOC — don’t tell me what she’s thinking. Show me what she does.
It contradicts something established, or refers to a thing you never did	OOC — that didn’t happen in this game. Read the journal before continuing.
Every character has started to sound the same	OOC — they’re all talking like the same person.
A phrase has turned up three times in an hour	TROPE: “nobody has ever asked.” Please stop using that.
Four adults are solving the problem while you watch	OOC — what can I do about this right now?
It went quiet on the mechanics and you cannot tell what is at stake	OOC — show me the roll.

The four worth understanding

It stops handing you decisions. This is the commonest one and the easiest to miss, because the prose is still good. The test is mechanical: has anybody rolled anything in the last two exchanges? If not, the game has stopped and turned into a novel being read at you. Say so. The whole of this campaign is written against that failure.

It speaks for you. A direction you give — tell her what we found — authorises your character to do the thing. It does not authorise the Games Master to write her speech. If words appear in your character’s mouth that you did not choose, take them back. They are yours.

It hands you conclusions. A good Games Master gives you facts and lets you work out what they mean. When it starts telling you what somebody really wants, or which person you can trust, it has stopped running a world and started summarising a story. Ask for what you can see instead.

It loses the thread on a long night. After several hours it may start misremembering your own history — crossings you never made, people you never met. The campaign keeps a journal, and the journal is the truth, not its memory. Read the journal before continuing is a real instruction and it works.

If something has gone properly wrong

You can roll time back. Say where to: take us back to the start of the day, before the door started acting up. The campaign can retract what happened and re-run it.

Two things to know about doing that. Anything your character learned in the retracted stretch, they no longer know. And the Games Master is likelier than usual to leak the cancelled version back in for a while, so if it refers to something that no longer happened, say so again.

The thing that is not a mistake

If the dice go against you and your character gets hurt, or something you wanted does not happen, that is not a failure mode. That is the game. The difficulty was declared before the roll and the roll was made in the open, and nobody at this table — human or otherwise — is permitted to quietly change it afterwards.

That rule protects you far more often than it costs you.