A guide written for the person running a live session, separate from the player material instead of a retelling of it.
The Problem
A rulebook that only talks to players leaves the one person actually running the table with nothing.
Every set of instructional material I’d built up to that point assumed a single kind of reader: someone learning content to use themselves. Running a live session is a different job entirely — it’s real-time judgment under conditions nobody can fully script in advance. I didn’t have anything written for that reader at all.
Analysis
A facilitator doesn’t need to be taught the content again in a different voice. They need decision support for the moments the content doesn’t cover: how hard to make something on the fly, what to do when a player asks a question the book never anticipated, how to manage a shared resource the players are actively pulling on mid-scene. None of that is “restate the rules for a GM instead of a player.” It’s a genuinely different document, for a genuinely different job.
Design Decisions
Built “Running the Game” as its own chapter, parallel to the player-facing material, instead of a GM’s-notes appendix bolted onto the end of it.
Taught difficulty-setting as a heuristic, not a lookup table — live-session variation can’t be pre-scripted, and a framework beats a table facilitators would outgrow in one session.
Wrote “ruling on the fly” into the material directly, as the expected, normal thing to do — instead of pretending the rules cover every case and leaving facilitators feeling like they’re doing it wrong when they inevitably improvise.
Gave facilitators a repeatable method for building new content themselves, instead of a fixed list they’d eventually exhaust.
Addressed the one thing almost nobody writes down: how to manage a resource the players are actively spending against you, in real time, without stalling the table to do the math.
Outcome
A facilitator guide that actually supports someone running a live session, instead of restating player content in a different tone. Same split as the performance-support piece, just aimed at the other side of the table: participant-facing material and facilitator-facing material are not the same document wearing different clothes.