In Conversation With a Game Master Who Told Her AI Never to Pull Punches

It is 7:40 on a Friday morning in late October, and Agatha Thackeray has just come off eleven hours of other people's emergencies. She works nights as a 911 dispatcher. Her kitchen table holds the evidence of two lives: a headset still looped around her neck, a laptop with an AI narrator paused mid-ambush, and a three-ring binder labelled CAMPAIGN, VOL. IX. The campaign is fourteen years old. Her surname shares its first four letters with THAC0, the famously baffling combat table from old-school Dungeons & Dragons. She maintains this is the only reason her friends let her run the game in 2012.

Agatha does not exist. She would file that under veils: it happened offscreen, and there's no need to dwell on it. The table practices she describes are real.

Over two decades, tabletop players have built an unusually careful toolkit for negotiating what a game is allowed to do to you.

Lines and veils, set out by designer Ron Edwards in the early 2000s. A line never appears in the story. A veil happens offscreen, behind a fade to black.¹
The X-card, designed by John Stavropoulos and in use since 2013. Anyone can tap it to pause or change a scene, no explanation required.²
Session zero, the meeting before a campaign begins. Its checklists commonly put difficulty alongside themes and boundaries.³

Look closely, though, and nearly all of it governs content, meaning what shows up in the story. Very little governs cost, meaning what it takes out of you to keep showing up.

Meanwhile, more people play alone with AI narrators that remember them, and those narrators bring constraints of their own. Researchers testing a solo AI game master found that the model provider's content filters significantly affected some players' experience, especially in combat.⁴ Nobody at that table chose that difficulty. It came bundled with the software. Which raises a question that runs well past games. When a helper remembers what you asked for, is it honoring your choice, or holding you to it?

You spend all night handling difficulty you didn't pick, then come home and pick more. Explain yourself.

Agatha: [Laughs.] My therapist asked the same thing, with less enthusiasm. At work, nothing is mine. The call comes in, the address is wrong, the caller is whispering. Then I get home and ask a machine to throw a wyvern at me, and somehow that's rest. Because I asked. Same adrenaline, different signature on the form.

The motivation researchers would put it more politely. Autonomy and competence both predict whether you enjoy a game.⁵ There's also a finding that players can feel controlled even with options on the table, if the game forces something they don't want.⁶ Which, yes. That's a dispatch console, minus the snacks.

How do you make a solo game hard? At a table, someone else gets paid in snacks to be mean to you.

Agatha: Solo players cracked that long before computers. Oracles. In Mythic, you write down what you expect the scene to be and roll to see if reality agrees. Most oracles answer in shades. "Yes, but." "No, and." The dice are the villain. You just promise to obey them.

With an AI narrator, I'm prompting the very thing that's supposed to stop me getting what I want. It's like hiring a mugger and giving him notes. More menace, less monologue. So about eighteen months ago I told mine what I wanted, and it saved this in a little memory panel:

“

"Never pull punches. I hate being coddled. If I'm winning easily, something's wrong."

And it listened?

Agatha: Too well.

What happened?

Agatha: Nothing happened. That's the thing.

There was no dramatic night. There was February. Three calls I still think about. I'd come home, open the game, and it would do exactly what I'd told it to. Ambush. Lost supplies. My ranger's horse… we're not discussing the horse.

So I started opening fresh chats. No memory, new character. I was hiding from my own preference like it was an ex in the cereal aisle. Past me made a choice, and present me was living under it. Give a chosen difficulty eighteen months and it turns into one somebody else chose. The somebody just happens to be me.

An MIT-reported study earlier this year found that interaction history made four of five models more agreeable, and that a condensed user profile in memory had the biggest effect.⁷ Your problem sounds like the opposite.

Agatha: Does it? They measured agreement with opinions, so, granted, not wyverns. But it's the same shape. The profile says "Agatha likes X," and the machine keeps serving X out of loyalty to a sentence I typed once, probably at eight in the morning with cereal in my mouth. If the sentence is "punish me," then agreeing with me and punishing me are the same move. Agreeable I can live with. Frozen is the trouble.

So what should it have remembered?

Agatha: [A long sip of coffee that went cold some time ago.] I've had a lot of drives home to chew on this. Not "Agatha likes it hard." That's a character sheet for someone who's retired. It should remember that I said it, when I said it, and why. I said it because the first version kept letting me win and I was bored out of my skull. That's a reason with a date on it. Reasons expire. Preferences pretend they don't.

Tables already know this. Lines and veils were meant to be amended any time.⁸ Later somebody added "Ask First," for "I don't know yet" or "it depends."⁹ Most honest thing anyone's ever put in a rulebook. And nobody built an Ask First for difficulty. Every safety tool we have is about what appears in the story. None of them cover what it costs you to sit down.

Not that I want nightly check-ins. "Good evening, Agatha, how much would you like to suffer?" Laptop, river. People are terrible at answering anyway. There's an old GM line that players notoriously don't know what they want.

Maybe the fresh chats were the signal. Me reaching for an X-card nobody made. Except sometimes a fresh chat is just a fresh chat. Some nights I wanted pirates. A helper that read every new game as a cry for help would be unbearable. So I want something between amnesia and a parole officer. Where exactly, I don't know. Ask me after I've slept.

Turn it around. Your table's session zero was in 2012. When did you last revisit difficulty?

Agatha: We don't need to. They love it hard. It's our whole identity. We're the table that lost a paladin to a staircase. (Full plate, bad Dexterity save. We observe a moment of silence on landings.)

How do you know they love it?

Agatha: They'd tell me. [Beat.] I have a feedback form. Too easy, too hard, about right. Nobody ticks "too hard."

A game developer once wrote, "I can ace the game and forget how difficult it can be for other players."¹⁰ Remind you of anyone?

Agatha: Rude.

If you were one of your players, would you tick "too hard"?

Agatha: [A long pause. She turns the binder face down.] Not on a form I'd handed out, no. There's a forum thread where a GM says asking players for feedback puts them in an unwinnable position.¹¹ Either you insult the GM or you lie on the form.

Huh.

The guy who plays our cartographer. He went from every week to "most weeks" when his twins came, then to "I'll try." I filed that under scheduling. We covered time commitments at session zero. We never covered what happens when the same three-hour siege costs more because you've slept four hours.

And we've never used an X-card, because we're friends and we know each other's lines. But a card only works if someone reaches for it. Showing up less doesn't touch anything.

Oh, that's horrible.

“

I'm the memory profile. I'm a condensed user profile for six people. It says "they like it hard," and I've been loyal to it since 2012.

So what changes? At the table, and in the machine.

Agatha: At the table, a session zero-and-a-half. One rules site suggests checking in every ten to fifteen sessions.¹² We're a few hundred overdue. And I'll X-card myself first, the way the guides tell GMs to. "I'm wrecked, can tonight be a heist instead of a siege?" Then I'll watch who exhales.

For the machine, the same thing. Keep my preferences as agreements, dated, somewhere I can actually see them. Every so often, show me the old sentence. "You told me this in spring 2025. Still true?" With lines, the strictest answer at the table wins, for safety. Maybe with difficulty, the default should be the question.

[Pause.]

Ask me first. I'm allowed to have changed.

Last one. Is the horse okay?

Agatha: No. And I chose that, which is why I can live with it.