Crystal Heart

That thing, whatever it is, doesn’t matter, we’re not here to abide by the rules, we’re here to use the rules to create an experience.

I’m not sure Nadav even knows what specific issue Guy is talking about – and it doesn’t matter. Because it’s either one of two things:

1. A small thing, like “there should have been a rate of fire restriction on my shotgun”, which wouldn’t have made any relevant difference to the scene, or,
2. A big thing, like suddenly realising that some minor bonus meant that Mac would have stayed standing all along, and never would have dropped to Incapacitation. Insisting on the importance of this issue is a powerful way of destroying the experience everyone just had, so why do that? The experience is better as-is.

Guy is the kind of player that cares a lot about the rules, and that sometimes makes him put a baton into his own bicycle wheel. His reverence for “correctness” can become a barrier that prevents him from having fun. For Nadav, therefore, the only thing of importance in this panel is to give Guy the reassurance that the game is fair, that there’s intentionality behind the breaking/disregard of the rules. Because that means the GM made a decision, and not that we forgot, which is “bad”. Nadav probably should have talked about everything I just explained, to help get Guy into the same point of view, but we only had one panel for this.

This also shows that GM-ing is not just a thing you do during the “active” play, it’s a role you can (and should) keep in mind as long as the game exists, even if you’re not playing it right now. Read more about guiding actions in my friend Uri’s Gamemaster’s Guide to Guiding Actions; note that I’m the book’s editor.

And Lily is simply being a good player by acknowledging all of Nadav’s hard work in setting and running this scene, and doing the same thing he just did – pushing him just as he’s about to baton his own bicycle by being overly self-criticising and ruining his own experience.

On a different matter, we played some Vivid, and then some Microscope, to help with playing more Vivid.