12 · Nothing Is Forced
Last thing, and it is the one that matters most.
Your limits are the highest authority in this system. Higher than the world's tone, higher than the genre, higher than anything the GM would otherwise do, higher than a rule the world's own designer wrote down.
They live on @Missing file, and the GM reads them before it reads anything about the world at all — before the scene, before the people in it, before what time it is. Not as a filter applied to output afterwards. As the first thing in the room.
HARD LIMITS never depicted. No negotiation, no fade-to-black version,
no tasteful implication. It does not happen.
SOFT LIMITS approachable, with weight and with warning.
Nobody guesses at these. You are asked, once, at installation, and your answer is written down word for word rather than summarised — because a limit paraphrased is a limit half-kept, and the paraphrase is always the version that drifts.
The file is pinned, which is a technical way of saying the read cannot be skipped. Not on a busy turn, not in the middle of something, not when the scene has momentum. Every turn, before anything else.
RULE OF THUMB · A limit is not a difficulty setting and it is never negotiated mid-scene. You are never asked to reconfirm one, because asking raises the subject, and raising it is the thing the limit exists to prevent.
12.1 · You can change them whenever
Not at a checkpoint. Not by asking permission. Not by finding the right menu.
Say it in OOC mid-scene and it takes effect immediately — and the GM will not make it a moment, or check whether you are sure, or perform being understanding about it. It will simply be true from the next sentence onward, and it will never ask you to reconfirm one later.
Widening works exactly the same way as narrowing. Both directions, same speed, same absence of ceremony.
12.2 · The other direction is also true
A world can run dark. Properly dark — obligation, violence, appetite, consequence that does not soften because you are the one holding the controller. Caves of Qud does not apologise for what it does to you; neither does anything else worth playing in this space.
If that is what you came for, the system will meet you there without flinching and without the apologetic hedging that makes most AI fiction unreadable — the constant stopping to check, the sudden tasteful cut, the narrator who keeps stepping out to reassure you.
Both of those are the same feature. A system that can genuinely say no to itself is the only kind that can be trusted to say yes.
That is worth sitting with, because it is the whole argument. Guardrails that cannot be moved are indistinguishable from a system that has no idea what you asked for. Guardrails that move only one way are worse. The reason this can go where you point it is precisely that it stops dead where you tell it to.
12.3 · One practical thing, before you set it
If your world is on Ambient or Full, the model you play on decides whether any of that lands.
Most of them soften mature material no matter how the world is configured. They go abstract at the moment it counts, or they stop to ask permission every single time — which is precisely the handholding this dial exists to remove. On CraftRPG, MiMi V2.5 Pro is the one that holds the register.
Set it to Full, play on something that will not hold it, and the world comes out prudish while every setting on the sheet reads correct. Nothing looks broken. Nothing reports an error. That is exactly what makes it worth saying out loud.
12.4 · And that is the game
You are not owed a plot. You are owed a world that behaves the same whether or not you are looking at it, that remembers you slightly wrong, that says no when no is true, and that stops instantly when you tell it to.
Go and find out what it was doing while you were reading this.
SEE ALSO · Two chapters of back matter follow, and neither needs reading front to back. Chapter 13 · Quick Reference is the page to keep open while you play. Chapter 14 · Glossary is where to look when an earlier chapter used a word you skimmed.