When It’s Not Working

When a Rule Feels Wrong

Try ignoring it first: play without it for a session.

When Fights Feel Too Easy, or Too Hard

• Too easy? Check the budgets: are you actually spending the round budget, and is the boss’s Tough sized to the threat budget? Are your telegraphs aimed at stakes and clocks, or only at Armour? Add a stake the crew can’t ignore.
• Too hard? Run the next scene as a breather. Give the boss an obvious weak point. Make sure every threat that matters has something driving it, so fighting isn’t the only way through.
• Too long? Count the keeps-it-going tags. Four on every threat is a slog. Cut them, or make them findable.

When a Player Is Checked Out

• They’ve got nothing to do. Build them a scene.
• There’s nothing they want. Rewrite their Aspiration.
• It’s something outside the game. Listen.

When the Campaign Is Losing Steam

Go for a hard reset. Kill an NPC, give the crew what they wanted, break the Goal, move the campaign, or skip ahead in time.

When a Mechanic Is Being Exploited

• Make it good fiction. If the thief rolls a spare d2 every round for Aura, ask what she’s doing with that die. It’s always doing something.
• Make it cost something. Aim a telegraph at the thing they keep leaning on.
• Talk about it.

Some things look like exploits and aren’t. Farming Aura with small dice is a strategy the game wants you to use. So is straining a thread for Resolve, and the thread keeps it honest: pull it again before it’s mended and it snaps (see Playing the strain). Answering a telegraph by taking out its source is the best way to answer it. And finding the weak point in round one and ending the fight is exactly what weak points are for.

The Last Word

If it still isn’t working, end it. Calling time on a campaign is a legitimate ending.