3 · Talking to the GM
Okay — the actual mechanics of talking. There are five things you can type, you already know two of them, and none of them can be got wrong.
That is the whole interface. Those five are the shapes; [OOC: ...] also takes a handful of standing requests about how the prose reads — shorter turns, plainer language, no headers — and each of those writes a real setting rather than being agreed to and forgotten. The full reference, every construct and exactly what each one costs, is @Missing file, which exists because these used to live scattered across fourteen files like a wiki nobody was maintaining.
| What you type | What it is | Clock |
|---|---|---|
plain text | an action | moves |
"speech in quotes" | speech | moves |
[OOC: …] | talk to the GM, not the world | stops |
[Generate: …] | ask for something to be made | stops |
[OOC: GM Read Rule #67] | the drift stop | stops |
[OOC: shorter turns] | a standing request about the prose | stops |
3.1 · The two halves
The top two lines are the game. Plain text is an action, quotes are speech, and both spend time, because doing a thing takes a while and so does saying one.
The bottom three are square brackets, and the bracket is an absolute gate. A bracketed line pauses the fiction outright: no clock, no scene header, nobody acts, nothing in the world gets a free move while you are outside it. The GM answers plainly and then the scene resumes on precisely the frame you paused it on. There is no cost for stepping out and no penalty for doing it often.
[Generate: ...] is the one nobody finds. It asks for a thing to be made — a person, a place, an item, a piece of the world you just realised should exist — and it freezes the clock exactly the way OOC does. You can build without the world charging you an hour for the privilege.
Rule #67 is the drift stop, and it has a chapter of its own later. It also answers to Rule 67 and [DRIFT], because a phrase you can remember at 1am beats a phrase that is tidy.
3.2 · What comes back
Two markers are worth recognising on sight.
>ooc a refusal. The world would not bend.
[ ... ] a status line, not a nudge.
>ooc gets its own chapter, and it is not the game breaking — it is the game having edges.
The bracketed status line only appears if you are directing several characters at once. It names whichever of them is still standing there without an order — flatly, once — and it never tells you what to do with them. Naming a gap is service. Filling it is not.
3.3 · A small moment gets a small turn
Here is the thing most systems like this get wrong, and it is worth saying out loud because you will notice its absence.
If you sit down and drink your tea, you get the tea. One line of the world carrying on somewhere behind you, and an ending. Not a paragraph about the weight of the cup. Not a stranger arriving to give the scene a shape. Not twelve beats built out of four words because four words looked like they needed help.
The turn answers the moment, not the message. A short line about something enormous gets everything it deserves. A short line about nothing gets a short turn back, and that is the system working rather than the system running out of things to say.
3.4 · And a long stretch does not get narrated at you
The other half of the same rule. Say "I spend the winter learning to read" and the winter genuinely happens — the clock takes all of it, everything that came due comes due, people move, threads advance, the world spends every one of those months.
What you get back is a paragraph. Not a season performed scene by scene.
The world went the whole distance; you just were not handed a camera for it. Then you are standing in spring, and things are different, and nobody explains which of the differences you are supposed to find significant.
There is nothing to type for this. No mode to set, no command, no syntax. You said winter, so it charged you a winter.
RULE OF THUMB · The turn answers the moment, not the message. Four words about nothing get four words back; four words about something enormous get everything they deserve.
3.5 · Your input is fuel, not instruction
What you write is read whole. Never summarised, never partly ignored, never quietly "improved" into something tidier.
But it is a proposal to reality, not a command to it. Time and life already moved before your words landed; the world was mid-sentence when you spoke. What it does with your intent is its business.
This is the immersive-sim contract rather than the dialogue-wheel one. You get to try the thing. You do not get to pick the outcome off a list, and the list was the part that was lying to you anyway.
3.6 · Your character can be cut off
This surprises people, so let me be very clear about it up front.
What you type is sacred. What your character gets to say out loud is not. If somebody talks over them, if violence starts, if the building moves — the line stops mid-word:
"Dude what are you tal-"
A hyphen, never an ellipsis. A hyphen is something else arriving. An ellipsis is your character trailing off and giving up, which is a completely different event happening to a completely different person, and the system keeps them separate on purpose.
That is not the GM overriding you or taking your character away from you. It is the world moving faster than your character could finish a sentence, exactly the way it does to everybody else in the room.
The rest of what you meant still happened, as intent. The listener answers what they think was coming. The unsaid part stays unsaid a while longer. It went somewhere; it was not discarded.
And it runs both ways. Act while somebody is still talking and you cut them off, and they react the way that particular person would react to being cut off.
If you want it to happen less, say so in OOC. The world's interruption rate is a dial, and None — a world whose people wait their turn — is a completely real setting.
DON'T · Don't rephrase and re-send when you want a bigger response. A repeated input tells the world its last answer failed, and it will answer the thing you were reaching for rather than run the same turn again.
3.7 · The GM will say no
Not to be difficult. Because the world has edges, and a world that grants everything teaches you that nothing you achieve inside it means anything.
Pushing harder in OOC will not work and is not meant to. If you genuinely need something changed, change it properly — edit the sheet, take it to Orbit — and the GM will honour it completely and without resentment, because that was always the legitimate path.