A great role-playing game experience depends on many things, not least the attention and skill of the gamemaster (Guide, in Sentients). This skill is learned one way and one way only—through experience. Unlike Sentients, humans can’t upload new knowledge directly into their cortices (for now). Experienced gamemasters will already carry with them the general idea of how to run role-playing games, but if this is your first time, never fear.
The Guide is a kind of referee for a conversation, sometimes helping determine its direction, at other times letting the players run free. The Guide may also adjudicate disagreements, deciding in the end what happens in the story.
This chapter is like a toolbox, comprised of various different implements to be used at different times for different purposes. You are welcome to select one and discard another as it fits your game.
Here are some “rules”—scare-quoted because the first rule is that the rules can be bent or broken—for achieving the best experience.
The purpose of this book is to provide the raw materials for the Guide and players to construct new stories about self-aware anthroids. To this end, the rules are only a scaffold: they should never suffocate what would otherwise be a fun experience. You are free to determine that a rule can be bent or handwaved for the sake of the story and the players’ entertainment.
The players should always have some idea of what to do next, no matter if it’s right or wrong or on- or off-track. It’s not generally fun to have no idea at all what to do next and waste time floundering. Note however that it is perfectly acceptable, even expected, for PCs to have discussions in order to identify goals and make plans. This should preferably be done in-character.
In order for the Guide to achieve this, they must stay aware of what the PCs know and don’t know, and where necessary, drop new clues or hints. They should be ready to improvise such clues even if the scenario doesn’t specify them. Entire books could be written on the delicacy of this approach, but suffice to say that there’s nothing wrong with nudging your players, as long as it’s not so heavy-handed that it takes the players out of the story. Clues or hints or nudges should be believable and a natural part of the current flow of the game.
For instance, if your PCs are exploring an office they broke into, it would be entirely believable for them to find a note hidden in a filing cabinet that gives them the perfect clue as to where to look next (and yes, in the setting of Sentients, many people do still use paper and filing cabinets).
On the opposite end of the spectrum, having an NPC they’ve never seen before suddenly appear and tell them exactly what to do would be an obvious deus-ex-machina deployed by the Guide. Players would know that their Guide was trying to “railroad” them, taking them out of the world of the story.
Many have defined a game as a series of interesting decisions: which of these many options do I choose? What will the pros and cons be? Which will best get me to my goal—or which goal do I strive for in first place? Central to many of our most memorable stories is a dilemma, in which the protagonist must choose between difficult—even seemingly impossible—choices.
Obviously it can be tough to present the perfect dilemma to the players in the improvisational environment of a role-playing game. The goal is to create situations with multiple potential solutions. The need for this is especially apparent in cases like Perception checks to find an important clue—failure shouldn’t just grind everything to a halt. Instead, success should add something more. More on this below.
A hallmark of compelling stories is the “reversal of fortune.” If a character is doing well in one moment, they should be facing challenges in the next, and vice versa, throughout the story. Once you understand this simple idea, you start to see it everywhere in TV shows, movies, and novels.
Now, being that this is a game where many situations are resolved with dice throws, nobody is truly in charge of the story in the way a novelist or screenwriter is. Nonetheless, the Guide can use the idea of reversals of fortune as a basic principle for what to throw at the players next: if they are suffering now, they’ll need a win next, so perhaps make the next challenge easier than you might otherwise have, or add some additional bonus to success.
Simply put, the end of the mission, story or campaign should have greater stakes—bigger challenges and bigger consequences—than the beginning. You’re likely already so used to this that it would seem bizarre if the “boss” of a scenario occurred at the beginning and not the end.