Chapter 13

Running the Game

Everything up to here has been for everyone at the table. This chapter is for the one running it.

What This Game Asks of You

Most of running 20 Below is just running a game, and you already know how to do that, or you’ll learn it the way the rest of us did - badly, for a while, in front of your friends. I’m not going to spend a chapter on that. What follows is the part that’s specific to this system. Five things it wants from you that another game might not ask for at all.

Let it go wrong. The system is built to reward players for letting things go badly. Flaws pay out. Natures pay out when acting on them costs something. Catastrophic failures are supposed to happen and they’re supposed to be memorable. Run this game protecting players from consequences and you’ve quietly switched off half the engine - and worse than that, you’ve made their currency worthless. A Flaw that never bites is just free points.

You are the other half of the consensus. The world holds its shape because everyone in it agrees on what’s normal, and you play everyone. When a player spends Fate Tokens to assert something into the fiction, you’re not the referee of that transaction. You’re the thing on the other end of it - the accumulated weight of a world that had a different opinion. So push back. Not by saying no, but by having the world notice.

Rule fast, and rule out loud. You’ll be making judgement calls all night. Whether that Descriptor really argues for Earth here. What a Kotodama claim costs. Whether that’s a 6 or a 7. Make the call, give one sentence of why, and move on. A table that watches you deliberate learns to stop asking you things, and a table that has stopped asking is a table that has stopped reaching.

No is a complete answer. Players will argue for a different Element, for a bigger claim, for the reading that helps them. That’s the game working as intended - the challenged-Element rule exists to be used. You’re still allowed to just say no, and you don’t owe anybody a paragraph explaining it. The rules hand you the final say everywhere it comes up. This is me telling you to actually use it.

Every Token they spend, you get one. Fate Tokens transfer rather than drain - when a player spends one, your own pool gains one. Which means you want them spending. A GM who quietly discourages Kotodama, or who never lets a Flaw come up, is starving their own side of the table. Hand Tokens out when a Nature costs somebody something. Let the Flaws bite. The economy only does anything while it’s moving.

Session Zero

Before anybody rolls anything, sit down together and work out what game you are all in. This matters more here than it does in most systems, because 20 Below doesn’t come with a world attached. A game with a setting baked into it has already answered half of these questions before the GM opens the book. This one hands you all of them at once.

Say what the game is, in one sentence. Not a pitch and not a plot. A sentence that tells five people what kind of night this is going to be. Cops and cryptids in a rust-belt town nobody leaves. A generation ship where the crew have started dreaming the same dream. If you can’t get it into a sentence, the table can’t hold it in their heads either, and every character they build will be aimed somewhere slightly different.

Set the Everyman list. This one is mechanical, and the Skills chapter deliberately leaves it to you. Every character gets a short list of Skills free at Trained, and what counts as ordinary depends entirely on where and when you are playing. Driving is unremarkable now and unthinkable in 1840. Decide the list here, with everyone in the room, because it changes what every character at the table is quietly assumed to be able to do.

Decide what the consensus is like here. This is the one nobody else’s session zero asks about, and it changes how the whole Fate system feels. How thin is the agreement in this world? In a setting where everybody still believes in the things in the woods, a Kotodama claim about something in the woods is barely a push. In a setting where the consensus has been sanded flat by three centuries of people checking, the same claim is a shove against the whole species. Somewhere in between is a world where something is actively managing what people believe - and the players will feel that long before they can name it.

Find out what your players actually want. Ask them, out loud, one at a time. Somebody at that table wants a fight scene every session. Somebody wants to talk their way past the fight. Somebody built a character entirely so they could have one specific conversation with an NPC who doesn’t exist yet. You can’t serve all of that equally, but you can serve all of it sometimes, and you can only do that if you know what it is.

And the harder version of the same question. Ask what nobody wants. What shouldn’t turn up at this table, what should happen off-screen, what somebody would rather you just didn’t describe. Do it plainly and without ceremony, take the answers, and don’t negotiate about them. This costs you ten minutes once and saves an evening you can’t get back.

If somebody is making the game worse, say so early. Not every problem at a table is a rules problem. A player who argues every ruling, or who steers every scene back onto themselves, or who is quietly making somebody else not want to come back - none of that gets better by being ignored, and none of it gets fixed by a mechanic. Say something, once, in private, kindly and specifically. Most of the time that’s the entire fix. When it isn’t, you already know what the other option is, and the table will be better for it. This is the least fun paragraph in this book and I’d rather write it than have you find out the long way.

When to Roll

Setting the number is the easy half. Deciding whether there should be a roll at all is the job, and it’s the call you’ll make most often without noticing you made it.

Three questions, and then a fourth that belongs to this game specifically.

Is failure interesting? If the answer is no, don’t roll. Let them have it. A locked door with nothing behind it and all night to work on it isn’t a Larceny check, it’s a description of a door that takes a while. Roll when the failure would change the scene, and hand it over when it wouldn’t.

Can they actually fail? A Trained character doing the ordinary version of their own job, unhurried and unwatched, isn’t rolling to find out whether they’re competent. You already decided that when you let them buy the Skill. Make them roll for it often enough and the dice will eventually tell your table that their expert isn’t an expert, which is both untrue and yours to have prevented.

Can they actually succeed? If the answer is no, say no. Don’t make somebody roll to discover that you had already decided. Rolling untrained against a hard Difficulty is a long way to travel for a foregone conclusion, and it teaches the table that your yeses and your noes are both just dice, which is the opposite of what you want them to learn.

And the one that’s particular to 20 Below. Every roll you call for carries a flat one in a hundred chance of a catastrophic failure, and that chance doesn’t care how trivial the task was. Ask for six unnecessary rolls in a night and you haven’t just slowed the game down. You have imported a disaster into a scene with no room for one, and sooner or later somebody rolls a 20 climbing through a window they had all evening to climb through.

That last one is the argument I’d make if the first three hadn’t already convinced you. Rolls aren’t free here. They are the mechanism by which things go wrong, and they should be pointed at the moments where things going wrong is the point.

When a player asks to roll. They will, constantly, and usually they are really asking whether the thing is possible. Answer that question instead. Tell them what they already know without rolling, tell them what a roll would actually be for, and let them decide whether they still want to make it. Half the time they don’t, because what they wanted was the information.

Setting Difficulty

You set the Difficulty for every roll, and the ladder in the How to Play chapter is the whole tool. Pick the row that sounds like what the character is attempting and move on. A game where the GM deliberates over whether something is a 6 or a 7 is a slower game, and the difference is one point on a curve that spans twenty.

What the Curve Does

Two ten-sided dice don’t give you a flat spread, and that changes what your Difficulty choices are actually worth. A target number is the character’s Element plus the Difficulty you set, and this is what the targets pay out.

Target 5 - succeeds one time in ten

Target 8 - a bit better than one in four

Target 11 - a coin flip, and the exact middle of the curve

Target 14 - about four times in five

Target 17 - nineteen times in twenty

Look at the gaps rather than the numbers. From 8 to 11 is three points of target and twenty-seven points of probability. From 14 to 17 is also three points of target, and fifteen points of probability. Same three steps. Half the work done.

In the middle of the curve, one point of Difficulty is worth about ten points of probability. Out at either end it’s worth two. That’s the whole lesson, and it’s why the same adjustment lands completely differently on two characters sitting at the same table.

Which means the ladder does most of its work in the middle. Nudging a Difficulty by one against a character whose target was already 17 is barely doing anything - you’ve taken them from ninety-four in a hundred to ninety. They won’t feel it and neither will you. The same single point against somebody sitting on 11 has moved them from a coin flip to worse than one, and they will absolutely feel it.

So to actually pressure somebody who is good at this, change the situation instead. Disadvantage takes a target of 15 from eighty-five percent down to sixty-seven. That is a real problem arriving, and it didn’t require you to invent a harder version of the task. Bad footing, bad light, no time, somebody shooting at them - all of that is Disadvantage, and all of it is easier to justify out loud than quietly deciding that this particular lock is unusually difficult.

Advantage is worth about two or three points of Difficulty, in the middle. Less than that at the top, where there isn’t much room left to improve. If you’re wondering whether to grant Advantage or knock a point off the Difficulty, Advantage is the bigger gift almost everywhere, and it’s the one that reads as the world helping rather than the task shrinking.

And the practical version of all of this: don’t fine-tune. Pick the row on the ladder that sounds like the thing and move on. If the roll still feels wrong to you after that, the answer is almost never one more point of Difficulty. It’s Advantage, or Disadvantage, or no roll at all.

Ruling on the Fly

Most of what you do at the table isn’t in any chapter. Somebody tries a thing the book didn’t anticipate, or argues for a reading that helps them, or asks what happens when a car hits you. You decide, out loud, in about four seconds. These are the five that come up most.

A player argues for a different Element. This is the challenged-Element rule doing its job, and the condition is the whole of it - the argument has to come out of a Sub-Stat Descriptor they already wrote down, not a sentence they invented thirty seconds ago. Hold that line and the rest takes care of itself, because nobody has an unlimited supply of Descriptors. If the argument is good, say yes and let them roll it. If it isn’t, no is a complete answer, and you’ve already read that paragraph.

Somebody wants to do a thing with no Skill attached. Pick the Element that the attempt actually runs on, set a Difficulty, and roll it untrained. Untrained is a real option in this system rather than a punishment - Difficulty alone, no Element - and it’s the honest answer when a character is doing something nobody trains for. Don’t invent a Skill on the spot. If it turns out to be a thing they do often, that’s what the next Advancement is for.

Something hurts somebody and it isn’t a weapon. Damage is a count of d10 resolved one die at a time against Soak, so improvising it means picking a number of dice, and the weapon tables are the scale you already have. Fists are 1. A knife or a handgun is 3. A grenade launcher or an anti-materiel rifle is 5. So a bad fall down a stairwell sits near a knife. A car at speed sits at the top of the scale and probably past it. A burning room isn’t one big number, it’s a smaller one arriving every round until somebody leaves.

Something costs somebody their mind. Sanity takes dice against Psyche the same way Health takes them against Soak, so improvising it means picking a number - but the scale is smaller, because Sanity is smaller and most people’s Psyche is thin. One die is a bad thing witnessed. Two or three is something that shouldn’t exist, seen clearly, in good light. More than that and you aren’t setting a hazard, you’re deciding to take somebody out of the scene, which is a fine thing to do on purpose and a bad thing to do by arithmetic.

Two rules of thumb. Nothing costs Sanity twice - the second time you see it, you have seen it. And a character who chooses to look should get something for looking; if there is no information in it, don’t charge for it.

Say the number out loud before the dice come out. A table will accept almost any ruling made in advance and almost none made afterward.

There are more enemies than you want to roll for. Don’t roll for all of them. Decide how many connect - two of the six, say, because the other four are in each other’s way - and roll only those. Unnamed opposition is out of the fight at zero, so a crowd of them is a threat that shrinks fast once the party starts landing hits, and the interesting question is almost never which specific guard hit whom. If the fiction says a mob overwhelms somebody, let it overwhelm them and spend your dice on the part the players can still change.

And when none of that helps. Rule in the direction that keeps the scene moving, tell the table it’s a ruling rather than a rule, and write it down if you liked it. A ruling you make twice the same way has become a house rule, and a house rule you can name is worth more than a page of mine.

Named and Unnamed

Player characters and named NPCs are extraordinary. Everyone else isn’t, and the rules treat them differently at exactly one point: what happens at zero.

Unless an NPC has a name, zero is the end of them. A nameless guard who drops is done - out of the fight and out of the story. Whether they’re dead or just not getting up again is yours to decide, and the rules can’t tell the difference: nobody tracks a nameless guard’s recovery. That’s what makes a critical hit decisive against ordinary opposition.

Named NPCs and player characters get the full treatment instead: unconscious at zero, dying below it, and every rule about recovery, Scars and lasting harm applies to them. Giving an NPC a name is therefore a mechanical decision as much as a narrative one. Name the ones who should be able to survive.

Antagonists

The section above covers what an antagonist costs you mechanically. This one is about what makes one worth the trouble.

Give them something they want, and make it reasonable. Not sympathetic - reasonable. Somebody who wants the same thing the players want, or wants something that can only be had by taking something the players need, is an antagonist. Somebody who wants suffering is a weather event with a face. The first kind generates scenes on its own. The second one needs you to keep inventing reasons for it to turn up.

The best ones are mirrors. Take a thing a player character is, and build somebody who is that same thing without the brakes. The Avenger who never stopped. The Caregiver who decided the only way to protect people was to decide things for them. It works because the player recognises it before you explain it, and because every scene with that antagonist is quietly a scene about the player’s own character. You don’t have to say any of this out loud. They will get there.

Give them a Nature. It’s free, it takes ten seconds, and it does most of your improvising for you. An antagonist with a Nature written down will behave consistently in scenes you didn’t plan, because you already know what they do when the pressure is on. It also means they can be predicted, which is what makes a recurring antagonist satisfying to finally beat - the players worked out how they think.

A Gifted antagonist is not just a strong one. They’re a fulcrum, the same as the player characters, which means they can lean on the consensus too. That is a different kind of threat from somebody who is dangerous in a fight. A rival who can assert things into the world is competing with the players over what is true, and the evidence of them turns up as coincidence rather than as violence - records that don’t match, a witness whose account keeps changing, a building the party is certain was on the other side of the street.

Organizations are antagonists too, and the good ones believe in themselves. An institution that thinks it’s doing the right thing, staffed by people who also think that, is harder to fight and far more interesting than one that knows it is evil. The people at the desk aren’t lying to the players. The gap is usually between what the organization tells its own staff and what the people at the top actually want, and the players finding that gap is a whole campaign.

Name the ones who should survive, and only those. This is the mechanical decision from the section above, arriving as a storytelling one. A recurring antagonist has to be Named or the first good critical hit ends them. Decide that before the fight, not during it, and be honest with yourself about which it is - naming somebody mid-combat because you didn’t want to lose them is the moment a table stops believing the dice matter.

Running the Consensus

The Fate chapter tells the players what the consensus is. This is your half of it, and it’s the part of running 20 Below that has no equivalent in another game.

The consensus is something you play, not a rule you enforce. When a player spends Tokens to assert a fact, the transaction is already settled by the time it reaches you - they paid, it’s true. Your job starts after that. The world has just been told something it disagreed with, and the world is the thing you’re playing.

A Shout leaves witnesses, and witnesses are the mechanism. Anybody who watched a locked vault door swing open on its own now believes something impossible happened. That belief doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a small permanent change to the agreement, made by the players, and it’s how a campaign accumulates. Six months of quiet Whispers change nothing about the world. One Shout in a crowded bar changes that bar forever, and everyone who drinks there.

Decide who notices, every time. Not whether - who. Most people rationalize, that’s what the consensus is made of, and it’s why Whisper and Murmur cost so little. But somebody in that room is going to be the one who doesn’t. A child. A drunk nobody will believe anyway. Somebody who has seen this before and went quiet about it. That person is a scene you now have for free, and you didn’t have to plan it.

Pressure comes from attention, not from price. When you want a Kotodama to cost more, the instinct is to raise the number. Don’t. The number is the players’ side of the deal and it’s already fair. What you have is the world - the guard who files a report, the camera nobody knew about, the person who starts asking around. Raise attention and you’ve made a claim expensive without touching a rule.

A place that has been pushed on feels wrong. Where reality has been leaned against repeatedly, it stops sitting flat. Coincidences start arriving slightly too punctually. Two people remember the same evening differently and neither of them is lying. A room won’t hold a memory - people leave it and can’t quite say what was discussed. None of this is a mechanic and none of it needs a roll. It’s the texture of somewhere that has been argued with, and it’s the best warning you can give a table that they have been noticed.

And a thin place is easier to push again. Overwrite the same stretch of agreement often enough and it stops holding its shape - a file saved over once too often, a glitch in the matrix. The consensus there is corrupted, and corrupted things are easy to change. Charge less for a claim made somewhere that has already been rewritten. How much less is yours to decide, and it should follow how badly the place has been worn rather than any number I could put in a table.

Which cuts both ways, and that’s the interesting part. A thin place is cheap for your players and cheap for everything else. Whatever else has been leaning on that spot is finding it easy too, and a neighbourhood where reality has stopped being reliable isn’t a good place to live. Thin places make excellent destinations and terrible homes.

Small claims should feel free, because they are. Don’t let any of this make you stingy. The consensus genuinely has no opinion about whether that door latched, and a game where the GM makes a face every time somebody spends a Token is a game where nobody spends Tokens. Save the weight for the Shouts.

Awarding XP and Fate

Both of the currencies your players run on come from you, and the rules for both are already written down - five XP categories in Advancement, seven sources of Fate in the Fate chapter. This is about actually using them.

Award XP for what you want more of. The five categories are deliberately not about winning. Nobody gets XP for killing the thing or finding the treasure. They get it for showing up, playing the character, taking a risk, learning something, and doing one thing everyone remembers. That’s the game telling your table what it values, once a week, in public. If you hand out Standout Moment to the same person every session, you’ve told the other four something you probably didn’t mean to.

Say what each point was for. Out loud, by name, at the end of the session. It takes ninety seconds and it’s the single best teaching tool you have - a player who hears why somebody else earned Heroism and Risk Faced now knows what that category is worth, and you’ll see it in their play next week.

Three of the seven Fate sources are yours. Nature, voluntary Disadvantage, daily regeneration and the Lucky Number all happen without you. Invoking a Flaw, the Milestone Award and plain discretion are your call, and they’re the ones that go unused when a GM is busy.

Invoking a Flaw is a gift, not a punishment. It looks like you’re making somebody’s night worse, and it pays them a Token for the trouble. New GMs sit on this because it feels mean. It isn’t - it’s the mechanism by which a Flaw stops being free points, and a player who took Short Fuse wants you to use it. Ask them once at session zero how hard they want it pushed, then push it that hard.

Take the Milestone seriously, including the weeks it feels small. One Token to every player, roughly once a session, when the group clears a real hurdle. The temptation is to skip it when the session was quiet, but a quiet session that ends with a decision made is a milestone. Skip it too often and the daily regeneration becomes the whole economy, which is a slower and worse game.

Watch the cap. A character holds at most (Stamina x 3) + 1, and Tokens earned at the cap are gone rather than banked. A player sitting at cap is a player who isn’t spending, and that’s worth saying out loud to them - not as a rule reminder but as an invitation. They are holding a resource that is currently earning them nothing.

And remember which way the transfer runs. Every Token they spend lands in your pool. Being generous with Fate isn’t charity. It’s how you get paid.

The GM’s Own Pool

Every Token a player spends lands in your pool, and the Fate chapter gives you three things to buy with it - a Twist, a Claim, or Hardening. This is how to use them without wrecking anything.

It’s a budget for consequences, and it balances itself. A one-Token edit hands you one. A five-Token pooled claim hands you five. The size of the pushback scales with the size of the push, and you never have to sit there working out what a big Kotodama ought to cost the party - they already told you.

Never spend it to undo what they bought. This is the one that matters, and getting it wrong kills the whole economy. A claim that has been paid for is true, and your pool does not buy it back. What it buys is what happens next. They asserted the guard was already asleep - fine, he is, and he was due to check in ten minutes ago, and somebody has just noticed he hasn’t. The claim stands. The world responds. Do it the other way once and you have taught your table that Fate Tokens purchase nothing, and they will never spend one again.

Spend it near where it came from. The best complication is the one that grew out of the claim that funded it. They rewrote the records, so somebody is now looking for who rewrote the records. They made the storm arrive on time, so the storm is still there in the morning and the roads are gone. It costs you nothing to connect the two, and it makes the world feel like it noticed rather than like the GM did.

Spend it, and reasonably soon. A pool that only ever grows tells the players their spending has no visible effect, and hoarding a dozen Tokens to dump in one evening reads as being punished for having played the game. Spend in ones and twos, close to when you earn them, and the table will feel a rhythm instead of an ambush.

Keep it where they can see it. Actual tokens, in an actual bowl, in the middle of the table. Watching the pile grow as they spend does more for the tension of a session than anything you could say, and it makes the transfer real rather than something you’ve promised is happening on your side of the screen.

An overflowing pool means you’re not pressing. If you’re sitting on fifteen and can’t think what to do with them, the game is too comfortable. That number is a measure of how much the players have been reshaping the world, and if the world hasn’t answered any of it, you have a setting that does not push back and a table that will eventually stop finding it interesting.

And this is the consensus, mechanically. That’s all the pool is. Every Token in it is a place where somebody overruled the agreement, and the pile in front of you is how much the world has to say about it. Spending it is the world getting its turn.

Catastrophic Failure

A 20 - both dice showing 10 - is a catastrophic failure. That’s one roll in a hundred, which sounds like nothing until you count how many rolls a table makes in a night. In a session with real fighting in it, expect to see one.

That rate is deliberate. Rare enough to land like an event, common enough to actually land.

Outside combat the rule is the one the book has already given you. The attempt fails, and something else goes wrong on top of it. The GM decides what.

The something else has to come out of what the character was doing. That’s the whole craft of it, and it’s the part most games get wrong. A catastrophic failure picking a lock snaps the pick off in the barrel, or wakes the dog, or sends the keyring down the stairwell. It doesn’t bring the ceiling down. If the GM is reaching for a consequence that has nothing to do with the action, they have reached too far - the failure was in the lock, so put the trouble in the lock.

In Combat

A catastrophic failure in combat does two things at once. The attack misses, something goes badly wrong, and the character is Off Balance until the end of their next turn.

Off Balance. You roll everything at Disadvantage. It doesn’t stack - you’re either Off Balance or you’re not - and it clears on its own. A character can spend a Fate Token to Shrug Off an Effect and clear it immediately.

That Fate Token does not touch the other half. Whatever went wrong stays wrong. You can get your feet back under you. You can’t un-drop the magazine.

What Went Wrong

The GM picks it, and it comes out of what the character was actually doing. Here’s the shape of the thing, with enough examples to get the idea. It isn’t a table, and there’s never going to be one, because I can’t write a table that accounts for every situation, or even most of them. The GM was there. The table wasn’t.

Your weapon. Dropped. Sent skittering across the floor. Jammed. Stuck fast in a doorframe, a shield, a rib. The magazine out and gone under the car.

Your footing. Flat on your back. An ankle that will hold your weight and complain about it all week. Down a half-flight of stairs you meant to be standing at the top of.

Your position. You’re somewhere worse than you were. Out of cover. Inside the reach of someone who wanted you there. Between two people who are both now looking at you.

Your gear. A strap gone. A pouch open and its contents across the floor. Something you were counting on later, broken now.

The room. You hit something that wasn’t the target. The light. The window. The pipe. The one beam that was holding the rest of it up.

Attention. You were quiet and now you’re not. The alarm. The dog. The one guard who had not looked this way yet, and has now.

That last one is worth more than it looks in a game about consensus. A fight nobody witnessed is a very different problem from a fight forty people saw.

Match the weight to the situation. A dropped weapon in a bar fight is an inconvenience. A dropped weapon on a catwalk is gone. Same fumble, same roll, wildly different night - and that difference is the fiction doing its job, not the dice.

A catastrophic failure in combat can get somebody killed. Off Balance is a round at Disadvantage in the middle of a fight, and that’s exactly how people die in this game. Add a lost weapon or a lost position on top of it and you’ve a genuinely bad few seconds. That’s the cost, and it’s real. Don’t soften it because you feel bad - the system is built to reward the table for letting things go badly, and this is one of the places it collects.

Two things it deliberately doesn’t do.

It does not get worse the more you swing. Off Balance doesn’t stack, so a character taking two actions a round is in exactly as much trouble as one taking a single Slow action. Systems that charge per fumble quietly punish the characters who act most, which means they punish the ones who fight for a living. This one doesn’t.

It does not put a sword through your own foot, or the person beside you. A character who trained for years doesn’t do that because two dice came up ten. What they do is lose their weapon, their footing or their advantage, and then live with the next few seconds.

Two things reach this roll. On a Skill roll, Master Training Tier lets you roll again, and a second success turns the disaster into an ordinary miss. An attack uses no Skill, so no tier reaches it - that’s what the Never Off Balance Boon is for: attack rolls at its first tier, every roll in combat at its second, and every roll at all at its third.

Pacing

Most of this is true of running any game and you will have heard versions of it before. One piece of it is specific to this one, and it’s the piece GMs get wrong.

A Scene is a mechanical unit here, not just a way of talking. Fate spends are capped per Scene. Gift abilities reset once per Scene. Flustered clears when the Scene does. There are more than forty separate rules in this book hanging off that word. So when you say “right, new scene” you’re not just changing the subject - you are handing everybody their per-Scene Fate capacity back and refreshing every once-per-Scene ability at the table. Do that three times during one fight and you have quietly made the fight much easier without deciding to.

Which cuts the other way too. A long grinding sequence that is honestly several Scenes should be several Scenes. If the party fights through the lobby, regroups on the stairwell, and then hits the penthouse, that isn’t one Scene because it happened in one building. Being stingy with Scene breaks is its own kind of ruling, and it’s the one that makes players feel like their once-per-Scene abilities are decorative.

Cut a scene the moment the interesting thing has happened. Not when the conversation ends. Not when everyone has had a turn. The moment the thing the scene was about has landed - the decision made, the lie caught, the door opened - say what happens and move. Almost every slow session is slow because scenes ran past their own endings.

Start late. You don’t need the walk to the building, the drive over, or the part where they decide who knocks. Begin with somebody already knocking. Players fill in the approach themselves and they do it faster than you can narrate it.

Vary what a scene is for. The XP categories are quietly telling you this - somebody has to be able to earn Learning and Discovery, and they can’t if every scene is a fight. A session that alternates between something to solve, somebody to talk to, and something that goes wrong will hand out four and five XP honestly. A session of five fights will hand out two, and you will find yourself inventing reasons to be generous.

Let downtime actually pass. This system spends real time between the interesting bits. XP is spent between sessions. A pushed Resource stays reduced until the start of the next Month. Scars heal on their own schedule. If your campaign never advances the calendar, none of that machinery does anything, and a player who pushed a Resource to the wall is carrying a penalty forever. Move the clock. It costs one sentence.

And end the session on something unresolved. Not a cliffhanger every week - that gets tiring and everyone can feel it being done to them. Just stop while something is still open. A session that ends with every thread tied off is a session nobody thinks about until next week, and the thinking-about-it is half of what you’re actually making here.