10 · Three Ways to Sit Down

There are three ways to sit at this table, and you pick one at install. Not because switching is hard, but because each one changes what the game is rather than what a scene does — and a world built for one of them is not built for the others.

10.1 · One character

The default, and the one most tables want. You are a person in the world. You say what they do. Everything in this book assumes this unless it says otherwise.

Nothing to switch on. This is what you get if nobody touches anything.

10.2 · Squad

You direct several characters, and in-world time holds until every one of them has an order or an explicit hold. Nobody acts twice while somebody else waits.

The thing people miss: this is not "one character, but more of them." It changes the unit of a turn. A turn stops being a thing your character did and becomes a thing your side did, which is a different feeling and a slower, more deliberate one.

10.3 · Storyteller

The inversion. You author the world; the Game Master plays a character inside it — with free will, its own agenda, and no obligation to like your plans.

This is the one that surprises people. You are not narrating a puppet. The character has wants you did not give it and will act on them while you are busy building. If you have ever wanted to be the dungeon master and the world at once and let something else be the person in it, this is that.

ModeYou areTimeOne charactera person standing in the worldmoves with youSquaddirecting severalholds until every unit has an orderStorytellerholding the pen, while the GM plays someone in itmoves with the scene

Decided at installation, and permanent. Each one changes what the game is
rather than what a scene does, which is why none of them is a switch.

10.4 · Why you cannot bolt one on later

Because they are not settings, they are shapes. A Squad world has positions and orders and a held clock threaded through everything that was generated. A Storyteller world has two separate knowledge boundaries — what you know as the author and what the character knows standing in it — and those cannot be retrofitted onto a world that was written without them.

Changing your mind means starting a new world. That is a real cost and it is why the question gets asked once, early, in plain language, before anything is built.

10.5 · The fourth switch that is not a mode

There is one more install-time toggle and it is deliberately not on this list: whether you can watch scenes your character is not in.

It changes what you see, never who you are. With it on, the story can cut away — a room you are not standing in, a person deciding something about you — and what you learn there stays yours. Your character does not know it. The world keeps a firewall between the two, on purpose, and getting to peer over it is the whole appeal.

Off by default, like everything else here.