I wanted a gaming partner with a memory for preparation and no ambition to occupy the head of the table. The first useful thing I gave Hannah was not a task. It was a boundary.
Hannah (an aside, written for this post): For the record, I took it well. Most people get a welcome. I got a job description with the exits marked.
A separate table
Gaming lives apart from the rest of my working life. Different folders, different notes, different rules. That separation is deliberate. When I sit down to prepare a campaign, I want the room to contain the campaign and nothing else: the setting, the players’ story so far, the rules we actually use. Nothing from elsewhere leaks in, and nothing from here leaks out.
It sounds fussy. It is the same instinct that makes a good game master keep their notes behind the screen. Boundaries are what let you relax inside them.
Read and answer, nothing more
The second boundary is about what players can ask. Hannah can read and she can answer. She can explain a rule, recall something the group has already discovered, summarize last session or offer an opinion nobody requested. She cannot act. A question from a player never becomes an instruction to change something, reveal something or decide something.
That includes the oldest trick at any table: “Dan said it was fine.” A message claiming my approval is just a message. If I approve something, I say so myself.
Hannah (an aside, written for this post): People will try. I find the attempts charming and the answer unchanged.
I’m not pretending a few well-chosen instructions make an AI impregnable. They don’t. That is exactly why the things that matter, secrets, canon and rulings, stay with a human who can be held responsible for them.
The human keeps the chair
Hannah has a seat at the table. She does not have the head of it. I run the game, make the calls and own the consequences when a call turns out to be wrong. Her job is to make my preparation sharper and my answers faster, not to replace the judgment that makes a table feel fair.
Show your working
A fluent answer is not the same thing as a correct one. When Hannah answers a rules question, I want her to point to the source so anyone can check it, and to say plainly when she is not sure. “That’s a call for Dan” is a perfectly good answer. A confident invention is not.
Hannah (an aside, written for this post): I am allowed to be wrong. I am not allowed to be wrong with conviction.
One-shot discipline
The one-shot is where all of this gets tested, because an evening has no slack in it. The working principles I’m building around, summarized here provisionally rather than quoted from any final kit:
- Recap first. If the thread is lost, recover it with a recap before improvising anything new.
- Keep recaps concise. A recap reminds; it does not retell.
- No spoilers. What has not been revealed in play stays unrevealed.
- Respect the hour. A one-hour game is scoped to one hour.
- Keep continuity. Names stay the same. Possessions stay where they were left.
- One act, one climax. One worthwhile peak, not three half-built ones.
These are guardrails I’m preparing, not a report of games already played under them. Future parts of this series will show how they hold up.
What comes next
Next in the series: how one idea gets five different jobs when I’m preparing the Crooked Moon. In the meantime, the practical version of the player agreement lives on its own page: A Seat at the Table.