PHILOSOPHY

I think it is instructive for new players to understand my philosophy on gaming and storytelling in general.

The fiction trumps mechanics

This likely goes without saying, but the overriding guide here is what makes for a great story. I will steer the narrative towards personal conflict, growth, and those little nuances that make for fun stories. There are no rails here or storyline to follow. I mostly create the world as you explore it, with interesting characters with their own motivations and other fascinating things to hook your attention - but there is no script.

Proactive, competent, and dramatic

As a protagonist, you are all competent, even against things far greater in skill and supernatural scope. You can accomplish anything. Unlike in other games, I'm not trying to defeat you. With that said, the greatest challenges shouldn't test your abilities, but your priorities and values. Get used to the idea that narratively speaking you can do anything but not everything.  So the question at play in difficult scenes is not "will they succeed" but...

...At what cost?

You will succeed at whatever you put your mind to, but nothing will come for free. Success can and will bring up further complications, compromising your values, or cost you something in the process. On that note, most rolled failures will likely have the option to succeed at a serious cost, even if you roll abysmally. I love messiness and further hooks, because again, it's about the journey.

Conflicts are pacing, not winning and losing

Most good stories involve loss or failure. Bond gets caught. The Joker gets away. The girl becomes humiliated in front of the entire school. But because you're a proactive, competent, and dramatic character, you won't lose many battles unless you want to. And if you never concede, as the story ramps up to the climax you're going to get into the really important stuff and not possess the resources to win as easily as you might have. So think of failure as pacing - the highs and lows of a good story.

However, for most players, losing doesn't feel very good. In most RPGs, loss equates to failure. As I've said, that's not the case here. When a roll doesn't meet some sort of threshold, it doesn't mean you've failed, only that the story took an unexpected turn, which in some cases can be even more exciting than success.

Story branching

Most scenes in other games work off of gated challenges. You have to roll higher than a certain number to get past a gate, whether it be a guard, a trap, or a boss battle. Scenes in this game work best as a series of possible branches. They're not challenges to be overcome. If there's a 95% chance of success at no cost, there's no real point in having a scene.

Instead, it's a fork in the road. It's a place where the story can go one of two (or more) places, and you don't know which one will happen. So the roll becomes less about "do we pass the challenge?" and more about "how does the story progress?"

Player Versus Player

This isn't meant to be a player versus player game. I expect that players will be rolling very little against one another. However, conflict is inevitable where two or more viewpoints gather together. In those cases, conflict between the characters is natural and inevitable, but behind the scenes, players should come together and discuss and collaborate to find what makes for the best story overall.