Adjudicating the game: GM responses

The GM adjudicates how the adventurers’ actions impact the world. To this end, GMs are armed with the following four stock phrases:

• “Yes, you can do that.”
• “Say more about what you’re doing.”
• “Draw to see if you can do that.”
• “No, you can’t do that.”

These phrases (and their variants) are the four basic responses that a GM has for answering a player when they ask, “Can my character do…?”

“Yes, you can do that”

The player describes their adventurer’s actions and the GM simply describes what happens. If there’s nothing preventing the adventurer from succeeding, they simply succeed.

• “It doesn’t seem that the door is locked. You open the door slowly and carefully.”
• “Sure, you can climb the tree. There're plenty of handholds.”
• “You know that it will take a few minutes of hard work and it'll make a shit ton of noise, but of course you can use your felling axe to hack down the wooden door.”

Players portray members of the unfortunate caste called “adventurers.” As such, they have the skills and abilities that you’d assume adventurers would have by default.

In practice, this means you ignore all the uninteresting parts of adventuring. You never test fate to see if an adventurer knows how to kindle a bonfire—they’re competent travelers. Don’t worry about what weapons an adventurer is proficient in—they’re competent fighters.

Even difficult tasks can be resolved without a test of fate as long as:

1. there’s no interesting risk;
2. the adventurer has plenty of time;
3. they have the appropriate tools.

If one of these factors is missing, it’s time to move to one of the other responses.

If an adventurer's actions would incur some sort of penalty, the GM should make that clear and give them a choice.

• If an adventurer’s actions would take a long time to complete, the GM should make this clear. If the player elects to spend the time, the GM draws on the Meatgrinder table to represent time passing; similar to the Moving carefully rules. Draw from the major arcana—torches gutter on a result of I-V.
• If an adventurer's actions would create a lot of noise, the GM should give that info. If the player elects to risk the noise, the GM draws on the Meatgrinder table to represent an interested predator investigating the disturbance; similar to the Loud noises rules. The GM draws from the major arcana—a random encounter occurs on a result of XV-XX.

“Say more about what you’re doing”

Sometimes it’s not exactly clear what actions the players are describing or what their intentions are. In these cases, the GM should ask for clarification.

• “How exactly are you searching for traps?”

“OK, because of the Linguist talent, you definitely speak the myconid language, but you know that their language is expressed entirely in the medium of spore bursts. How do you intend to communicate with the fungoid?”

• “How can you read the text if you don't have any light?”

Sometimes there is a miscommunication in what the GM has described—the GM might be picturing one thing but the players have understood something very differently. Sometimes there's ambiguity in what the player is trying to do. Asking for clarification keeps the shared hallucination of the game consistent by syncing information between the GM and the player.

The GM can also ask clarifying questions about the tactics that the character would be employing. A player’s statement that they want to “Perform a coup de grace on the vampire” might be more successful depending on the precise methods employed—the GM may want to know what weapons are used, what exactly is done, etc.

Once the GM has achieved clarity with “Say more,” they can then shift to one of the other three basic responses.

“Draw to see if you can do that”

When an action is fraught with danger or its outcome is uncertain, it’s time to test fate. For an overview of tests of fate.

Tests of fate should be relatively rare and relatively tense. Don’t call for tests of fate for inconsequential actions—only when something of importance hangs in the balance.

• “The door is locked. If you have lockpicks, you can test Pentacles to try and pick the lock.”
• “OK, you grab the portcullis before it slams down.

You’re straining against it as the mechanism’s gears

“No, you can’t do that”

Sometimes, actions are not possible or will automatically fail based on the logic of the narrative world.

• “No, you can't really try and tame a dangerous wild beast with a single test of fate. Something like that would need to be done by breaking it over the course of several weeks. You can try and capture it, though, if you want...”
• “No, if you don't have any tools, you don't have any way to pick the lock. There's not any, like, bits of wire just lying around your jail cell.”