1. Random Disaster
Just when all seems lost and at its bleakest, when your doom seems certain, you may be tempted to narrate something like “Suddenly, an earthquake collapses the building in around us!” or “Without warning, a meteorite plows through the sky and hits the tank!” or “A blinding flash on the horizon is the first sign, and witnessing the mushroom cloud gives us only time to realize we’re dead before the concussive blast atomizes us!” You can’t shoehorn in random environmental chaos just because you’re frustrated.
2. A Massive Change of Heart
If the Contessa has consistently forgotten your character’s name, mocked him, belittled him and dismissed him as a threat, you can’t suddenly have her declare that she’s madly in love with him. Okay, some GMs may allow it, but be ready to withdraw the suggestion if challenged. The inner lives of GMCs are somewhere you can rearrange the furniture a bit, you but you can’t start tearing down load-
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bearing walls and ripping out the wiring. If the GM has introduced a character, especially in an antagonistic role, there’s probably a plot arc planned there. Suddenly editing the character’s motivations in a jarring and fundamental way screws the GM.
3. New Unsuspected Abilities
Let’s suppose you’ve located the King of Diamonds in the Smear. Your declared action is “try and get the helicopter flying.” When your King lets you narrate, can you then start flying that whirlybird? Well, it depends.
If you were a pilot in your old life, or have dropped heavy hints about taking flying lessons, or you have a Spatial Orientation Boost, or you’ve otherwise established that your character can approach this by doing something more productive than randomly pressing buttons then yes: You can fly the helicopter. But even a King of Diamonds amped up by pursuing both what you’re For and Against is not sufficient to let unearned specialty knowledge bloom in your character’s mind. High cards don’t mean success at everything. They mean success at reasonable things. That’s why there’s the prohibition against contradicting what’s established. It applies to implied ignorance as well as established knowledge.
4. Success at an Entirely Different Character Action
On one hand, conflicts are dynamic and constantly evolving. On the other hand, you have to declare an action or there’s no way to know which Factors engage. So, to high-five the first hand, you can change your actions a little. But to firmly shake the other hand, you can’t change them a lot.
So, for example, what if you declared you’re going to shoot Kenny, and before you get a chance Kenny runs behind a truck? You might be able to reorient towards Filbert, if it’s established that Filbert was standing pretty close. On the other hand, if you declared you were shooting, you may not be able to abort that to perform first aid on a buddy or jump in the truck and run Kenny over. It may help to think of it this way: Your declared action commits your body to a certain set of movements. You can do other things that use the same movements (like aiming and pulling a trigger) but not radically different movements (stopping and hiding instead of running full tilt). However, see “Panicked Self Defense” on page 105.
5. Another PC’s Feelings
All the reasons you can’t narrate what a GMC feels apply sevenfold to doing it to a fellow player character. You can narrate something that should provoke a certain feeling (“...spraying you with your only son’s brains…”), if it fits the narrative flow and doesn’t contradict anything else. But it’s up to the player to decide between appalled shock, icy vengeful wrath, or depraved indifference.
6. Goofy Stuff
This is a catchall category to recommend against puerile humor where the antagonist slips on a banana peel at his moment of greatest drama, or decides to settle matters with a cream pie duel. It’s easy to put down hard rules to protect the character integrity (you can’t give people radical personality rewrites on a whim) or the flow of events (you can’t contradict what’s already established) but tone is a lot harder to protect. So I’m going to fall back on your good nature and suggest that you pick up the vibe your GM and other players lay down, and not deviate too far from it.
7. Unearned GMC Death
Let’s suppose your stated action was “I dodge behind the waste bin” as a pair of drug-addled gangsters open fire. You get a high card and you want to narrate something like “I duck to safety behind the heavy steel dumpster just as one of the gunmen misjudges his step, slips off the loading dock and catches his temple on a loose brick, instantly dying!”
While narrating a few bad judgments on behalf of the bad guys is kosher, you can’t just write them into their coffins when your character did nothing to make them suffer. If you’d flung down a bag of marbles before you dodged, you could certainly wipe that dope fiend out. But since all you did was duck and cover, you can’t be rid of that pesky assailant.
8. Bill & Ted’s Preparations
If you’ve established that you carry a bag of marbles with you everywhere, it’s fine to attack by flinging them, shooting them from a slingshot or coshing someone with the sack. But if you aren’t carrying marbles, you can’t use marbles. That’s reasonable, right?
Narrating that you have the exact perfect object for the crisis of the moment can break plausibility. Now, if the exact perfect object is a credit card or ring of car keys or the spring from a clicker pen, then that’s plausible for just about anyone. But something like “I just happen to have an iPhone with a high speed connection to cloudsourced decryption software and the attachment for feeding it to keycard readers” is probably beyond the pale.
Note that ‘probably.’ I’m going to suggest mild exceptions for some mods. GMs ought to loosen the straps a little for characters with coprocessor mods: Making unlikely predictions is their whole shtick. I’d suggest that a coprocessing character can pull out a useful object once per scene as long as it’s (1) cheap, (2) available and (3) something he could easily carry without it being visible. So a 3/16” hex wrench is clearly fine, but a giant ten-pound plumber’s wrench? That’s going to leave a bulge in the pocket. Similarly, unless he’s recently gone on an extremely vague spending spree he’s not going to have a diamond ring or a thermal-imaging rig. But stuff like magnets, penlights, spraypaint, superglue, aspirin, vaseline or a coil of light-weight rope? Why not?
For the Pattern Matching boost, I’d let the mad creator type pull out a “new device” about once per episode. (That is, his right to introduce a new gadget is refreshed every time roles are drawn.) This ain’t Batman’s cellular radar panopticon, either. Think something that an electrical engineer today could bang together with Radio Shack parts for under $200. Also, even if he has the okay to bring up a surprise, that permission doesn’t negate continuity. If he has climbed up the building with no problem and snuck through a two-foot square water drain, it can be presumed that he’s not carrying a home made harpoon gun that he “just forgot to mention.”
Spatial Orientation is just the same, except it’s only good for strictly mechanical, non-electronic devices and tools. Needle-nose pliers, vise-grip, teeny-tiny screwdriver? No problem. Jackhammer, circular saw, conduit bender? Problem.
9. Backstory
You can’t change the past, and you can’t create new pasts for GMCs or your fellow PCs on the fly. “Because he was tormented by rats as a child, the villainous Baron Von Bildungsroman squeals and cowers at the sight of the rodents.” It’s very similar to producing unexpected changes of heart, only instead you’re
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producing unexpected reasons for previously hidden emotional responses. It’s a bad idea for the same reason as #2. The other way this gets used is to provide some kind of skeevy unearned advantage to the PCs. “Jonah the Reeb sneers and says, ‘Ha ha funny human Jonah owner promised many dollars for Jonah capture and none hunters catch yet!’ just as the net trap falls on him.” Nice try, but leave the rewards up to the GM, please. She’s got a game to pace.
10. Premature GMCs Death
Before the Tipping Point, GMCs are as protected from death as PCs are. So if you keep warding off the Point, you’re going to see your nemesis Baron Badnews again and again.