Welcome to the GM guide, make yourself at home!

If you're already comfortable running fiction-first RPGs and don't feel like going through one amateur designer's extended manifesto, then just read the #Running This Game section and then be off on your merry way to your game table. Most of this game's rules are player-facing, but there's still a few things in there that you'll need to internalize if you want the intended experience.

If you're an inexperienced or first-time GM looking for advice on running RPGs in general, you like the design of this game enough that you want to see more of the philosophy that informed it, or you're just morbidly curious, you'll want to read the longer portion of this chapter. Most "running the game" chapters, in my experience, don't actually do a great job of teaching new GMs what running a game involves or how to do it well, so I'm trying to correct for that here in whatever small way I can. It's going to seem like a lot at first glance, but don't be intimidated - it's mostly just taking time to break down and draw attention to things you're either already doing automatically or that will become automatic very quickly once you start getting some experience under your belt.

I'm not going to pretend GMing is trivially easy, or that it's right for everyone, but it doesn't have to be some scary arcane incomprehensible art passed down through secret rites and oral tradition either. I ran my first game after only having played a single session in my life, that used a completely different system than I ended up running, and basically fumbled my way through it and figured out what I was doing as I went along. And it was still a great time! Your players are right there in the trenches with you, and as long as there's mutual respect and compassion between everyone at your table, then even if you get every single rule wrong and have to pause every ten minutes to figure out what happens next, you'll be fine. Don't sweat it - your next session will be better. And so will the one after that, and the one after that. If this chapter helps one person to hit the ground running with more confidence and understanding of what the moment-to-moment craft of GMing actually involves, then it's done its job.

If that sounds like something worth reading, then once you're finished the Running This Game section, move along to the header that I'm sure won't be controversial and couldn't possibly result in someone out there printing a copy of this just so they can physically throw it at me: #You Are Not A Storyteller.

Running This Game

Setting Opposition

When improvising an opposition target, DEFAULT TO ADEQUATE (1) unless there's a strong reason not to. Don't go above Great (3) unless it's a truly exceptional circumstance (or a truly stupid idea that really is that close to impossible). This may sound low as a default, but remember that it only affects passive opposition. This game's most intense moments usually involve characters actively opposing each other, which will naturally produce opposition numbers all over the ladder.

Masterful (4) and Superhuman (5) results are designed to require the players to use stunts, invokes, or both to achieve with anything close to reliability. The dice can still spike high on their own, but the players will need to position themselves well, set up leverage, and use resources before they can reasonably expect to hit those targets. That's why most of the things that Fate usually assigns +2 bonuses to have been cut down to +1, and it's why it's so important to strictly enforce the rule that +2 stunt conditions are highly specific and come at a price: a +2 bonus kicks you almost halfway up the entire adjective ladder.

Calibrating Costs

COSTS ARE NOT PUNISHMENTS. They are the fuel you use to keep the engine of your game running. Without them, failure can grind the game to a halt and leave your players standing around asking "sooo... now what?" Costs ensure that, even if failure is still undesirable for the players, it doesn't have to be boring.

Remember that costs can also apply to NPCs. The players should sometimes be the beneficiaries of an NPC's stroke of ill fortune, and even shape that fortune occasionally through clever narration and deep engagement with the fiction - see Alex's Defend action in 3A Putting It All Together for what this might look like. If a particular NPC rolling a catastrophic failure in the moment really bothers you, remember you have your own pool of fate points for a reason.

How Minor Is Minor?

Lorem Ipsum

Don't Default To Harm

Because strain clears so quickly, harm isn't a good choice of cost unless the scene has other likely sources of more harm. If a character takes harm as a cost once and then is never at risk of harm again until the scene changes, then the cost wasn't a cost at all - and, if there's no other source of harm in the scene, then harm as a cost doesn't make much sense anyway. For example, consider two different high-stakes conversations. If a character's trying to impress a recruiter to get hired and infiltrate a megacorp, it's not clear how things could go wrong in a way that results in multiple instances of harm taken. On the other hand, if that same character is interrogating Hannibal Lecter, harm is absolutely on the table as he picks apart the interrogator's psyche piece by piece - so harm as the cost of an action, perhaps the character accidentally saying more than they should and giving Lecter an opening, makes sense, and the scene has levers that can build on that harm and make it a real consideration that the player has to adjust for.

Severe costs that impose automatic consequences are another story entirely. Consequences are much harder to get rid of, so you should still use this rarely, but for the opposite reason as harm - consequences are likely to snowball faster than you expect if things start going really wrong. I recommend reserving these for when the player takes an offer to succeed with a guaranteed severe cost.

Running NPCs

The beating heart of any fictional world is the people who live in it. Mechanically, this game uses four types of NPCs: Throwaway, Minor, Major, and Weird. The first three scale up their mechanical specificity to match how important they are to the fiction; the last covers actors that, for whatever reason might be narratively appropriate, get to break the rules.

If you want advice on performing your NPCs, see #The Seven Dwarfs Method and Optional: 3-Axis Acting in the universal guidance section later on.

Throwaway NPCs

No name, no face, no stats. These are the people who briefly emerge from the ranks of your background extras when they make themselves a problem or the PCs need something from them, and then probably vanish right back into the crowd. Make them up as you need them, then feel free to never think about them again as soon as they've served their purpose.

NPCs that don't matter enough to have any stats also don't matter enough to have differently-ranked approaches. If you find yourself needing to roll an action for such an NPC, choose the appropriate rank for the relevant skill, then double that rank to form the dice pool. This caps at Masterful (4) for 8 dice in the pool, and even that should be extremely rare - typically, throwaway NPCs should just be Adequate (1) or Good (2) at what they do, with Great (3) reserved for especially tough and/or numerous opposition. Any NPC important enough to have a Superhuman (5) skill is important enough to have actual stats.

This method also allows for representing a group of NPCs as a single mechanical block. For example, if a PC is trying to hide from an entire patrol of guards, you can use the above rules to improvise a Notice rank for the group as a whole and roll it only once, rather than rolling for every single guard in the unit. If harm to a throwaway group becomes a possibility and you want them able to take more than a single hit to represent their numbers, you can give them up to 6 strain boxes with no consequence slots.

If a throwaway NPC turns out to be more relevant to the ongoing fiction than you expected, or if you find that you liked what you came up with and want to make them more relevant, take a minute to upgrade them to a Minor NPC as appropriate. If they become especially important down the line, consider upgrading them again to Major.

Minor NPCs

NPCs who aren't expected to be major recurring characters, but are worth enough attention to have a name and some amount of actual definition. The process of statting out minor NPCs is similar to Lightning Round Character Creation, in that you start with only a few critical pieces of information (one aspect, best skill, best approach) and fill in more of the NPC's details as you discover who they are through play, but with two key differences:

1. Lightning Round for players sets their initial best skill and approach at 3, while for NPCs, that number can be higher or lower as best reflects their role and the needs of the fiction.
2. Minor NPCs get up to 4 strain boxes (if they get any at all; 0 boxes is a valid option), with no consequence slots. If they take more harm than they can absorb, they're simply taken out. Minor NPCs aren't meant to stick around - but if they somehow do, it's worth considering whether to promote them to Major.

Major NPCs

NPCs who become especially important to the story, typically by showing up repeatedly or being at the center of something critical to the PC's goals, should be statted out just like a PC. Sometimes, they should have better stats than your PCs - if someone's meant to be a boss-level threat or some other kind of major obstacle, give them higher skill and approach ranks, more stunts, and whatever else it takes to make them appropriately dangerous.

A word of caution: friendly NPCs should never outshine the PCs. This isn't to say they can't be stronger, smarter, more influential or otherwise more important in the world, but they should never be more important to the story that emerges at the table - don't let them take over situations and solve the PCs' problems for them. Your players are at your table, at least in part, because they want to be the ones to solve those problems and make those choices; letting an NPC do it for them cheats them out of that fun. Remember, the PCs are the stars of the show and the people the game is actually about; an NPC, no matter how big a deal they are, is ultimately part of the supporting cast.

Weird "NPCs"

In Fate, things that aren't characters can still behave like characters mechanically. The Weird bucket includes everything from unfathomably powerful monsters who exist outside the normal character-building restrictions to a horde containing hundreds of armored shock troops to a rapidly-spreading fire to a painstakingly restored '57 Pontiac named Celia and more. If it's important to the fiction, can act on it or be affected by it in some way, and deserves to exist in more mechanical detail than being an aspect in the scene or on another character's sheet allows, then it's worth writing out as a Weird NPC in its own right.

Threats can have whatever combination of aspects, skills, approaches, stunts, strain, and consequences you feel it takes to make them appropriately relevant (typically this translates to "dangerous", but not always). Break the rules. When you determine their stats, focus your attention more on how this "NPC" might create interesting decisions for the PCs than on strict conceptual accuracy.

Advancing The PCs

Unlike some games that use experience points or other systems to track the player's progress, power increases in Fate are entirely at the GM's discretion. That means it's your responsibility to make sure they happen often enough to satisfy the players, but not so often that the characters get too powerful too fast.

The 2 Character Creation#Advancement rules say that approaches and refresh only go up "If the GM feels a major plot development has concluded and it's time for the characters to power up:" I can be more direct here: you should feel a "major plot development" has concluded roughly EVERY THREE SCENARIOS. This is partly about keeping your player characters on a steady power curve, partly about giving the players that sweet sweet dopamine hit of seeing their numbers go up, and partly a matter of narrative pacing - frankly, if you're regularly going more than three scenarios without something major changing in the fiction, either directly because of something the PCs have done or because the world is pushing back against them, then you should probably step on the gas.

Story Details

The 1 Core Rules#Declaring a Story Detail section of Core Rules outlines the guidance for when to allow the use of that option and when to veto it. Below, you'll find a more detailed extended example that didn't fit into what was supposed to be the go-to mid-session lookup document.

You Are Not A Storyteller

You are the FACILITATOR of a conversation between yourself and the other players, guided by game mechanics, that GENERATES a story.

According to legendary designer Sid Meier, "a game is a series of interesting decisions." Your first duty as a GM is to continuously tee up those decisions for the players to make, usually in the form of a PROBLEM that demands some kind of response, an OPPORTUNITY that needs proactive action to seize, or a STEADY STATE that the players can freely interact with - and that will interact right back if pushed. The process of prompting player decisions, adjudicating their outcomes, integrating their results into the fiction, and using that changed fiction to prompt new decisions is THE LOOP. The story of your game EMERGES naturally as a function of you and your players repeatedly iterating through the loop.

Your second duty as a GM is to MANAGE ENERGY AND TONE of the world and situation, and it's a critical process that occurs throughout execution of the loop. This is where you shape the kind of story that emerges from play. It's an art, not a science, and there's no one objective best way to do it. The more experience you get, the more you'll learn about what works well for you and your group and what doesn't. I call the process of making these continuous judgement calls and adjustments RIDING THE FADERS.

If you've ever run a game, in any system, you have already executed the loop and ridden faders. Nothing about either concept is revolutionary; this is fundamentally descriptive, not prescriptive. I'm breaking them out this way because I believe it's the clearest way to organize my advice on how to execute every step of the process, and because it fits the process that this game and the loop itself rely on. The loop is what you're doing; riding the faders is how you're doing it.

THE LOOP

Running a role-playing game, in nearly any system that uses a GM at all, boils down to iterating through this loop of questions:

1. What's going on in the fiction right now?
2. What are you trying to accomplish?
3. How do you try to accomplish it?
4. Resolution:
   4A. Do mechanics take over to resolve uncertainty?
   4B. What could explain this result?
5. What are the natural and/or dramatically appropriate consequences of what just happened?
6. Integrate 5 into the fiction, then return to 1.

Let's break it down.

What's Going On

#TODO "And I said heeeey-ey-ey-ey-ey, heeeey-ey-ey. I said hey, what's goin' on?" - He-Man, Placeholder Quote

This is the broadest step in the loop, covering nearly everything about the current state of the shared fiction you and the players are all operating within.

Your narration should focus on the immediate situation at hand and the currently available information, since that's what will matter to your players' decision making. But "What's happening right now" is not limited to "what's happening immediately in front of the players right now." It can include:

• Things that have already happened and things that could happen
• Things that are definitely true and things that are only provisionally true
• Characters in the scene, characters not in the scene but who are relevant to it, and characters waiting in the wings
• Ticking clocks counting down to something that will interrupt a scene and turn everything in it on its head

and more. Think of this as a complete snapshot of everything RELEVANT TO THE DECISION you're about to present to the players, whether it's a known factor they're weighing or an unknown one that still affects the stakes and consequences of what they do (e.g. a bomb under their table silently ticking down that they haven't discovered yet).

I realize I'm making this sound completely overwhelming, but in practice, you'll almost always be working with just a small sliver of the full world state. Most of the time, this is as simple as: "The PCs come to a fork in a tunnel. I know that the left path leads down to the den of a cave bear, and the right path leads up and out to the surface but is home to a colony of roosting vampire bats. I need to present the information the players can glean from their current position about their choices. Therefore, I'll describe the smell of wet animal and rotting gristle to the left, the chittering of the bats and the faint air current to the right, then ask the players what they do next." When they answer you, they trigger the next step of the loop. There may be much more happening elsewhere in the caves right now, or all kinds of drama happening on the surface, but none of that is relevant to the players' next decision, so unless and until it becomes relevant, you don't have to worry about it.

The world shouldn't just react to the player characters. The PCs are the stars of the show, but they're not the star the world orbits around. To make your game feel like it takes place in a living, breathing world, and to make it meaningful when the players push against that world, THE WORLD ITSELF MUST ACT and prompt new decisions: a man with a gun bursts through a door; a character receives a desperate panicked phone call from a friend that cuts off right as they're about to explain what's wrong; a messenger arrives bearing a formal invitation to a noble's gala to reward the party for their heroism; an infamously petty teacher singles a character out for humiliation in front of their class.

Whatever's happening, always remember the ultimate purpose of this step is to set up the players' next decision point: here's the situation, now what are you going to do about it?

Prepare To Improvise

"You cannot plan the future. Plans can break down. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers." -Terry Pratchett, Making Money

You may already be familiar with Ernest Hemingway's "Iceberg Theory" but to restate it in brief: The words on the page are like the top eighth of an iceberg, floating above the water. The unspoken truth informing those words is the vast unseen mass of the iceberg, hidden beneath the sea, that the reader feels the weight of without ever needing to be directly shown.

A similar concept applies to game prep: don't prepare plots or sequences, PREPARE FACTS. Those facts will, together, add up to a SITUATION. Place your players inside the situation, and they will come to learn its shape one interaction at a time as they poke and prod at it - or, as the case may be, as it pokes and prods at them.

A prepared situation is flexible and resilient in ways that a planned sequence can't be. A situation doesn't rely on the dice landing the right way, doesn't require any particular order of events, and, most importantly, is immune to the fatal knife through the heart of your idea that occurs any time the phrase "and then the players will ____" appears in your notes. By establishing the facts of the situation and then working outwards from those facts, you gain the ability to respond to the players, build in the direction they're already moving, and have an answer ready to any action they take, no matter how insane or out of left field.

Don't just dump a complex setup like "Lord Paxton is a vicious warlord who subjugated this region five years ago and brooks no dissent" on the players all at once - they probably won't care, since that information has no emotional hooks, context, or stakes associated with it yet. Instead, let them discover it for themselves, one puzzle piece at a time, through lived experience. Have the greasy, sinister guard at the city gate demand a hefty toll to enter, in Lord Paxton's name. Have tax collectors bearing Lord Paxton's livery extort a merchant in front of the PCs. Have a parent cut down in the street without mercy by Lord Paxton's troops as they forcibly conscript their teenage child. Have an old woman a little too deep in her cups complain a little too loudly about how "none of this would've happened under old Duke Thorne" before the other frightened townsfolk desperately shut her up, and the innkeeper politely but firmly asks her to leave, their fear plainly visible to anyone looking. Have someone respond too quickly, too enthusiastically, through a sweaty brow and a fake, too-wide smile when the PCs ask about this Lord Paxton fellow, eyes darting all over as though he's sure someone, somewhere, is listening.

Critically: this situation does not care how the players engage with it. It doesn't assume they'll ask someone about Lord Paxton, expect them to take a stance on Lord Paxton, or demand they interfere to save the conscripted teen. But if they do, or if they do something else, you're already prepared for it, just by knowing "Lord Paxton is a vicious warlord who subjugated this region five years ago and brooks no dissent." By setting up facts this way, you have a baseline that you can use to respond to your players, no matter what they do or how they choose to handle the emerging situation.

Further Reading: The Lazy GM's Resource Document by Mike Shea (especially) the section on Secrets & Clues - if you like it, buy his book, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Flexible Truth

"They made their campaigns as one might make a splendid piece of harness. It looks very well, and it answers very well, until it gets broken, and then you are done for. Now, I made my campaigns of ropes. If something went wrong, I simply tied a knot, and went on." - Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

THE FICTION ESTABLISHED THROUGH PLAY IS TRUE.

Whatever you improvise, you have one absolute constraint: you must maintain the integrity of the story that's already emerged at the table. Otherwise, the entire framework that enables your players to make meaningful choices collapses, since the baseline against which they make those choices loses its stability.

As a direct corollary:

UNLESS AND UNTIL IT IS ESTABLISHED THROUGH PLAY, NOTHING IS TRUE.

The map is not the territory, the prep is not the game, and your notes are not the fiction. Your prepared notes are provisionally true, but they're best thought of as the strongest and most interesting explanation you've come up with for the current state of the fiction.

You should respect your prep, but you don't need to be wedded to it: if a better idea comes as a bolt from the blue twenty minutes into your session, and that idea is entirely consistent with the established fiction so far, then, if it still passes the consistency test and holds up after careful consideration, go with the better idea.

If your game has a mechanic to allow players to inject details into the fiction that exist outside their character's actions, like Fate, Blades in the Dark, Fabula Ultima, the 2d20 system, and many others do,

Knowing when to commit to the bit and when to pivot is one of the harder parts of improvisational play. The more experience you get, the easier it will become to make the call. When in doubt, trust your gut.

What DO YOU WANT TO ACCOMPLISH

"There is only one story in the world, and it is: somebody wants something badly and is having trouble getting it." -Guy Sclanders, How To Be A Great GM

This question is really about defining WHAT SUCCESS MEANS in context. When Allenby hits someone in the face, is she trying to provoke them? To knock them out? Specifically to break their nose and disfigure them? To snap them out of mind control? Something else? Every single one of those answers can have drastically different effects on the fiction, even if Allenby's actual behavior and action is identical across them all. The GOAL is what matters in this step, not the method.

Everybody Wants Something

This applies to your NPCs just as much as it does to the player characters, but it's worth remembering as more than just "the loop also works for NPC rolls." Everybody wants something - from the archvillain who wants to conquer the world to the stormtrooper who wants an excuse to crack some skulls to the wilderness explorer who wants to find a safe place to shelter for the night to the barista who just wants their shift to be over already and to never have to make another venti soy pumpkin spice latte with extra splenda and foam art in the shape of a trout again in their life. NPC goals are the pull to your players' push, and neither work well without the other to press against. Drama emerges largely in the places where multiple characters' goals push against each other, against the world, or against themselves.

The fiction is in constant motion, and so too are goals. Most of the time, what matters most is what a character wants right now - as far as the loop is concerned, that's the only thing that matters. We'll talk more about letting NPC goals drive the fiction forward when we get to step 5 and talk about integrating results and changes into the fiction. For now, remember: If a scene is starting to stall, look to the characters' goals as the spark plugs to restart the engine.

The Seven Dwarfs Method

If you need to sketch out an NPC in a hurry in the middle of the session, and can't figure out what this person wants in this moment, Taliesin Jaffe's "Seven Dwarfs Method" is a great jumpstart. Choose one of the seven dwarfs from Snow White - Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, and Sneezy - as the defining adjective for the NPC. Each of these names stands alone and instantly evokes a single strong, defining trait that offers a clear cue for what the NPC might be pursuing right now.

If you want to further distinguish this NPC, go to #Optional 3-Axis Acting.

How DO YOU TRY TO ACCOMPLISH IT

Drill down. SWEAT THE DETAILS. What is the character actually, physically doing in this moment? We don't need Allenby to improvise a full paragraph every time she throws a punch, but we do need to know that she is punching, as opposed to kicking, or swinging a baseball bat, or a sword, or shooting a gun. And, IF IT COULD MATTER, we need to know how she's punching. Is she keeping her guard up and deploying tight, well-practiced jabs while leaving few openings for a counterattack? Is she throwing wild, untrained haymakers? Is she darting about and sneaking in pinpoint-accurate blows to joints, nerves, eyes, throats, and other weak points? Is she throwing caution to the wind and unleashing pure berserk aggression? Something else?

The extent to which detail matters depends on the rules you're using and the nature of the action. If you're playing in a system that abstracts combat more than this game does, then you don't really need to know whether a player is slashing or stabbing; it's the same roll either way. In contrast, if you're exploring an ancient lich's tomb, with intricate deathtraps around every corner, the minutiae can be a matter of life or death - are you lightly tapping the ground ahead of you with that pole, putting your weight on it, or something else? Are you pushing or pulling on this wall section you believe contains a secret door? Are you touching that altar with your bare hands? Which eye, exactly, do you use to peek into that hole in the wall?

"Or Something Else"

When prompting players for a decision, if you lay out multiple courses of action they could take, then wherever possible, add "or something else?" at the end, as seen above. This sounds small, but it's important. Offering the players a few options to choose from comes across as presenting a menu from which they may only choose something you've presented; adding "or something else?" leaves the door open for them to come up with something unexpected and preserves the intended effect - you're naming the most obvious (to you) actions available in this moment, not the only actions available.

Resolution

#TODO Bifurcated step

Do Mechanics Take Over

MOST OF THE TIME, the mechanics don't need to kick in for you to declare the result of an action. If there's no meaningful uncertainty or resistance in the fiction, then you shouldn't apply mechanics that inject that uncertainty or resistance artificially.

This applies in both directions - you shouldn't make the player roll for anything that has no chance of failure, or no chance of success. For more on impossible rolls, see The Limits of Rolling.

If there's no uncertainty for the mechanics to resolve, proceed to #What Follows the Result. Otherwise, follow the appropriate rules for whatever's happening, then move on to the next question.

What Explains The Result

"There's particular GMing advice that we give, which is to be a fan of the players. When something goes wrong, it's not because you're incompetent, it's because something bad happened or you're trying to compensate for something." - Sean Nittner

"TELL ME YOUR NAME, HORSEFUCKER!" - Gimli's player embraces a critically failed diplomacy check, DM Of The Rings

If the mechanics took over after the previous question, then you need to explain the result that those mechanics imposed. Since success is often self-explanatory once the player has established their goal and their method, this typically takes the form of "what went wrong or changed about the scenario that kept the PC from achieving their goal with the stated method?"

As the GM, you should avoid narrating failure as a result of player character incompetence (though if a player chooses to lean into that for themselves, as with the Gimli example, let them). "You just screwed it up" often undermines the identity of the character and, therefore, part of the fun of playing them. Instead, it's best to figure out why the window for whatever was being attempted closed. Did something go wrong around the PC? Was it bad timing? Bad intel? Dumb luck? Something else? Or, if you're struggling to figure out something that fits, you can pass the narration back to the player and ask them to explain to the table what went wrong.

Besides preserving the fantasy of the player characters, finding other reasons why they failed often results in new sources of tension or drama in the scene - this way, failure becomes a new problem to deal with on the next run through the loop, fuelling the fiction instead of closing it off.

What Follows the Result

"If the words 'And Then' belong between [your outline's] beats, you're fucked, you've got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat is either the word 'Therefore' or 'But.'" - Matt Stone & Trey Parker

#TODO Therefore / But
#TODO integrate into fiction state, integrated state becomes new step 1.

Further reading: Hamlet's Hit Points by Robin Laws

THE FADER BOARD

"Fader" is the proper name for the large slider knobs you see on a sound mixing board. Throughout a concert, a sound engineer constantly adjusts - "rides" - the faders to make sure the music as a whole sounds the way it should. Sometimes these adjustments are drastic, sometimes they're subtle. But together, they're the central control board for the entire experience of the show.

Every decision you make while running a game is, in some way, riding the faders - if you've ever run even a single session, then by definition, you already have experience with this. You've made judgement calls, decided how your NPCs act, described your world in your words. Different fader-riding choices are why first-time GM A's Lost Mine of Flapdoodle can feel completely different from first time GM B's Lost Mine of Flapdoodle, even though they're both using the same source material. This is where all the micro-decisions that collectively form "your style" live - it's the bucket containing all the things that make your game uniquely yours.

So I'm not going to pretend I can tell you "this is the correct way to ride the faders at your table." I'm just going to do my best to explain how I do it.

Everything Is A Fader

Faders I commonly reach for include, but are not limited to: tone, mood, atmosphere, consequence type and severity, difficulty, environment design, nature of challenge, npc design and behavior, player spotlight, pressure, speed of play, stakes, transparency, vocal performance. I can't speak to every fader, since again, every single decision you make at the table counts as fader-riding in some way, but I can elaborate on some of the more frequently-needed ones on this list.

All of the prior advice in this chapter has already been about how to do this within each step of the loop. What follows is valid no matter where in the loop you are, and can also apply across multiple steps and iterations. It's important to understand that none of these are completely independent variables - adjusting one of them inevitably has some kind of effect on most, if not all, of the others. This also is far from a complete list - again, these faders are just how I conceptualize what I'm doing when at the table. Yours might vary wildly.

Tone, Atmosphere, & Mood

"Oh ho ho, on a pennyfarthing bicycle I ride through the sky - NO! WAIT! NOOO! Don't you think this is a sharp deviation from the tone?!" -Brennan Lee Mulligan, NPC in a whimsical adventure who's about to be shoved headfirst through a spinning propeller, Dimension 20 Cloudward Ho!

TONE is the thing you'll be adjusting the least often, but also the most important fader to keep in mind - it's a filter that will affect every subsequent decision you make. Tone exists at the highest level and defines the feel of your entire campaign. It can and should change over the course of your game, sometimes quite drastically, but it tends to change slowly, through a series of small adjustments over time.

Instances where something radically changes the tone of the entire narrative in a single moment are enormously impactful, and should therefore be executed very rarely and with caution (I recommend only doing this once in a campaign, if you do it at all - most campaigns don't call for or benefit from this kind of seismic shift).

MOOD is how you want your players to feel right now. You'll modulate this more actively on a scene-by-scene basis. Most scenes will maintain a single dominant mood throughout (e.g. funny, relaxed, gloomy, intense, terrifying) with only minor adjustments, but mood can also shift drastically within a scene (e.g. surprise reinforcements instantly turn a battle from a grim last stand into a triumphant victory; a surprise reveal recontextualizes a lighthearted scene as something horrific).

ATMOSPHERE is related but distinct. It's the external expression of mood. This is where a lot of your moment-to-moment execution lives. It primarily derives from the wording and texture of your narration, but also includes things like character voices, music choice, handouts, and ambient lighting, if you're into that (personally, I enjoy doing voices and need music at the table to put myself in the right headspace and dedicate a lot of time and effort to picking out the perfect tracks, but for most people that's complete overkill - and I play primarily online anyway so lighting and handouts are a non-factor).

Optional: 3-Axis Acting

I am not an acting coach or a director, so I'll parrot someone who is - once again, Taliesin Jaffe. Once you have an NPC's personality and immediate goals worked out (see #The Seven Dwarfs Method in a pinch), if you'd like to go the extra mile and inhabit the character as performance, the easiest way to distinguish them is by making two or three snap judgement calls, each of which can be High, Medium, or Low.

First, choose a posture - the actual, physical posture that you hold your body in while performing the character. High posture - straighten your back; raise your chin. Medium posture - however you normally hold yourself. Low posture -hunched over or curled inwards. Again, you should actually change your body language and adopt the posture once you've selected it. If you're not used to it, it might sound stupid, but I promise it works.

Second, choose a pitch. Again, High, Medium, or Low. Combine this with posture and you have nine starting points for your performance; combine those nine points with the Seven Dwarfs method and you have 63 base performance templates ready at a moment's notice.

If you'd like, you can add an even-more-optional third axis: sophistication. Once again, High, Medium, Low. This primarily affects word choice, but that can have an enormous effect on how the character comes across. A rich, successful, and somewhat snobby lawyer might be High posture (arrogant and snooty), Medium pitch, High sophistication (well-educated); that lawyer's mob enforcer sibling might be High posture (Also arrogant, less snooty, more I-can-kick-your-ass), Medium voice, Low sophistication (speaks in street slang and didn't get the scholarship their sibling did). Combine these with all of the above, and your template choices jump from 63 to a whopping 189.

Scope

#TODO How closely are we zoomed in? GURPS 1-second combat rounds: extremely. BitD long term project roll: not very.

Pacing & Speed

#TODO Pacing = information / detail density per loop iteration. Rapid pacing = high density, slow pacing = low density. Speed = real-time duration per loop iteration. Longer descriptions, "uuuuh sorry still figuring my turn out" = low speed.

stakes & Pressure

"When everyone's super, no one will be." - Syndrome, The Incredibles

#TODO Stakes = scene stakes and dramatic question, why are we spending table time on this instead of something else. Pressure = narrative weight riding on each decision. To increase pressure, slow down the loop and take the time to establish the consequences of the decision.

The Quiet Around The Thunderclap

#TODO Breathing room and Ma (active stillness). Related concepts, but distinct. Contrast matters. Surround your big moments with small ones. Slow down before and after something important happens to give it weight.

Progress Clocks

I'm about to spend a lot of words explaining why numbered progress tracks are a good idea and how to use them. This may sound obvious; it isn't. Clocks are among your most powerful tools for managing pressure, especially in systems that mandate complications on certain rolls as opposed to just suggesting them like this game does.

#TODO There's some debate over whether or not clocks should be player-facing; I take a very strong stance: "it depends"

#TODO sometimes advance per scene, sometimes advance with in-fiction time, sometimes advance only when there's a complication, sometimes when the players put in work to advance one, sometimes all, sometimes none

In games that have mandatory complications on some rolls, like Blades in the Dark, the game that popularized clocks as a concept, clocks can serve as a hidden way for GMs to bleed off excess pressure. When the dice demand something go wrong, but the scene, session, or even the game as a whole would suffer from a complication happening right now, you can defer that complication by starting or ticking a clock. #TODO build up to pressure cascade later, clocks are discretionary and if you don't really want to you don't have to ever advance ones that aren't serving a purpose

Difficulty

#TODO multiple types of difficulty that have nothing to do with each other. Setting difficulty numbers and opposition targets is a system-dependent GM-facing math problem - how often should the players be succeeding or failing? Other type is fictional difficulty - what obstacles are standing between the players and their goals, and what is the absolute minimum "golden path" required for them to overcome those obstacles? Don't @ me osr people, this applies to you too, "get to dungeon, avoid traps and handle random encounters in dungeon, get filthy lucre, schlep it home" counts as golden path -typically a fairly difficult one.

The Golden Path

"Golden path" is a game design term for the absolute MINIMUM REQUIRED STEPS to complete an objective. These steps flow out of the fiction as a natural extension of whatever objective the players are currently working towards.

This isn't the same thing as planning a story sequence the players must follow. When you determine a golden path, you're not trying to decide what the players will do. Instead, you're examining the situation to figure out how it answers this question: "if the players decide to do this, what steps would it take for them to succeed?"

It doesn't matter how these steps are dealt with, only that they are dealt with. The story of your game comes from your players supplying the "how." Often, that "how" will come with its own prerequisites. Through this process of solutions to existing problems generating new sub-problems, a single objective can become the center of an entire complex scenario that's still driven by proactive player action.

It's important to think through whether something is truly a REQUIRED PREREQUISITE for the fictional objective, or just an OPTIONAL OBSTACLE - some things that might sound required at first glance actually turn out to be optional when you examine them closely. For example, if the players want to steal a painting, and the painting is currently hanging on the wall of a museum and protected by an advanced security system, then the "get into the museum" is a necessary prerequisite for "steal the painting." It doesn't matter how the players get into the museum, but unless they have some way to get at the painting without being anywhere near it, they do need to get into the museum somehow, so that's part of the golden path. "Deal with the security system," however, is not a mandatory step - the players can steal the painting without addressing the security; that just means the security will activate and they'll have to suffer the consequences.

If you realize the situation you're setting up lacks enough prerequisites to be interesting, you can adjust the unestablished facts to add more. Continuing the painting example, you could decide that instead of being on the wall in plain view and ripe for the plucking, the painting is currently in the museum's secure archives, and it's in some kind of crate nestled among many other crates and containers. Now, the prerequisites have expanded from "get into the museum, steal the painting, and get out" to "get into the museum, get into the archives, locate the painting inside the archives, get the painting, get out." Notably, the order of this is as flexible as the methods are: there are any number of ways the players could locate the painting in the archives, many of which could theoretically be completed well before actually entering the museum to perform the heist, or after entering the museum but before breaching the vault itself. You can also insert additional optional obstacles the same way - you'll get a sense for your preferred balance of how tough to make these obstacles and how many to use as you get more experience.

Sometimes, the players will surprise you with creative solutions that bypass prerequisites you didn't expect to be bypassable. ENCOURAGE THIS. If they pull this off, then an easier task is their reward for engaging with the fiction deeply, treating it as true, and creatively using the tools you've given them - they've earned it. For me, these moments of unexpected player brilliance are the greatest joy I ever experience behind the GM screen, and a huge part of why I love running RPGs.

Transparency

#TODO How much do the players know about the situation and the factors influencing / effects of their decision? Maximum transparency: full explanation of everything going on and what will happen if you do X before you commit to X. Minimum transparency: Tomb of Horrors.

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4 Challenges, Conflicts, & Contests