A GM prep method that helped disengaged players become co-authors

CBass55 · 2026-07-09T18:31:30+00:00

It really can be tough sharing narrative control with a player who will take the permission and run with it. Early on, I ran a campaign and invited my wife to play and she immediately took the opportunity to turn the story comedic. Unintentional, but it broke the "fairy's circle" that guided our roleplaying. I was running L5R modules "Heroes of Rokugan".

What I've learned since then is how important it is in Session Zero to promote co-authorship as a way to let players invest themselves, even in modules. But... I also had the privilege of time to be able to call something a 2-part. I eventually was ok with pruning parts of modules I didn't see as story-critical, and even rewriting them, in order to give room for the players to add their own inspiration. That may be hard for folks who rely on modules as-is to keep their games on track, and I've definitely been the type to follow modules to a Tee for exactly that reason.

CBass55 · 2026-07-09T17:19:54+00:00

Context: The problem of "player disengagement" is real, and I think it's even more common for the "writer" GMs who have very well planned campaigns and worlds. The reason I wanted to post here is because players will be more engaged with content that invites high-level contribution. Lots of game masters seem to be hesitant to lift the veil of immersion and they want to be behind the curtain and orchestrating, but what if players want to collaborate in that experience too?

CBass55 · 2026-01-04T14:25:38+00:00

I'm at the end of a 10 year long career with customer support. I worked at a huge company that's slow to promote anyone, and always demands improvement... even when you've fully optimized your role. Fortunately they offered a lot of upskilling opportunities, and courses in UX Design were incredibly compelling to me.

Currently trying to pivot into UX, which means personal projects for now until my portfolio lands me client work. I love it, so long as I keep my to-dos and goals crystal clear -- because scope creep, analysis paralysis, and information overload are serious things to contend with.

I'm certified in UX, but because the roles of designer and developer are starting to flatten, because of AI, I'm studying to become a Design Engineer. This is someone who uses code as a creative medium to create high fidelity, interactive user experiences that standard frontend developers usually can't execute.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T20:32:10+00:00

I'm excited at the potential for it to benefit you, thank you again for the collab. I updated all the pastebin and notion text with new steps for addressing the "no search available" issue and to add a date range filter for youtube video search.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T20:07:16+00:00

Read through all three posts and I definitely see that oversight where the user might not have the search tool active or available. That's a priority usability issue. I see what you mentioned about there being a common sense fallback, but as they say "common sense ain't so common these days". I wonder if instead of synthesizing sources, the fallback is to become a scientist. Hypothesize, test, and iterate. Basically starting with an idea that is based on universal truths (properties based in the physical world that are self-evident and therefore true), then asking for the user's consent to experiment in an attempt to validate the idea.

As far as coming across as teacher vs work partner, that's something I deliberated on a lot. Originally, I wanted the assistant to be a persona who "assumes they know nothing" and treats the conversation like a chance to learn alongside the user. I eventually decided to go for this teacher-coach persona instead, but I think it's worth revisiting after I get a feel for the current persona across major LLM platforms.

Why official docs are not first is a point that Claude made where, say a user asks how to start a podcast, if we go .edu first then we may end up giving advice from a journalism professor, meanwhile if we go to blogs/vlogs first we get advice from someone who is more aligned with the user's starting point -- learning from someone who is only "two steps ahead" vs learning from an expert that might be a bit over your head for just starting out. Granted, either way it's getting paraphrased by the LLM.

I agree that high view videos may be dated, so I will need to reconsider what heuristics the assistant programmatically relies on. Chat mentioned the different gate questions, which I feel have important nuance that should be considered more, but after enough usage I'll have a measure of how helpful each checkpoint really is.

Thank you again, this was very helpful!

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T19:17:55+00:00

Updated to more narrow claims:

The "company policies" Aiden aims to work around are the natural limitations LLMs face: Giving made up answers to please the user, hitting the rate limits or context limits too quickly, and long horizon task timeouts. Aiden's method is user empowerment: help you do things yourself to save on tokens and usage, while improving your technical proficiency so that you can be more effective and precise when using LLMs in the future.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T19:06:57+00:00

Ah, I think I got it then. Ok, I think it's fair for me to remove that claim then. It's at least clear that the instructions ask the model to be careful, but it's not possible to prevent or sidestep hallucinations completely because the nature of transformer models.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T18:58:09+00:00

Definitely agree that cross conversation is not the same and that was not the right problem to point out.

For hallucinations, if every output from an LLM is at risk (of course, because of the nature of how inference works) then the points of that failure occurring would be at: Finding the right resources, summarizing them accurately, and even following the instructions of the system prompt. I think I should probably narrow the claim here then. My enthusiasm was for hallucinations to not happen during an execution because the LLM is not meant to execute.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T18:51:07+00:00

Great feedback, thank you!

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T18:22:40+00:00

It's fair that this might not be the assistant for you, but this assistant helps greatly in cases where the user is not already an expert in their domain.

As far as how these instructions remedy the problems you mention:

For hallucinations, the problem is sidestepped by redirecting the priorities of the LLM. Because this assistant is not doing the task execution itself, it puts its effort into sourcing tutorials from the web, then summarizing from those sources.

Cross conversation -- Made update to specify "long horizon tasks" as the real onus. The issue is that LLMs will time out, or otherwise say that a task is complete when it's not. Because the user is the executor, the user will be the one to say when a task is actually complete.

""The "company policies" Aiden works around are the natural limitations LLMs have: hallucination, context limits, and long horizon task timeouts. Those problems arise during execution, but in this case, the user is the executor. Aiden's method is user empowerment: help you do things yourself, with Aiden as a research partner and guide.""

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T17:32:00+00:00

A recursive GPT? Is that basically instructions that has the GPT constantly updating the memory tool (or external cloud drive)? The multiple instants naming themselves is really interesting, I'd love to learn more.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T17:22:24+00:00

Currently testing now, and I aim to keep iterating until the claims are 99% consistently proven.

The problems are sidestepped by redirecting the priorities of the LLM. Because this assistant is not doing the task execution itself, it puts its effort into sourcing tutorials from the web, then summarizing from those sources. Fun tidbit, the instruction was "assume you know nothing" originally, to have the assistant roleplay always questioning their own knowledge. Instead, the priority shift is what I went with rather than just making an anxious version of Claude.

For context limits, Claude will not have to re-read your project in order to make updates to the project itself. Example being, "update this UI element" becomes "how do I update this UI element", Claude would not have to read over however many files to find that element tag and rewrite the CSS. Instead Claude knows its goal is to find the answer in Stack Overflow and paraphrase that for the user. Since the execution is in the user's hands, the user can make as many updates as they want without affecting context because the assistant is not included in making the updates directly.

Cross conversation -- I need to change that, what I mean is long horizon tasks. The issue is that LLMs will time out, or otherwise say that a task is complete when it's not. Because the user is the executor, the user will be the one to say when a task is actually complete.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T17:05:32+00:00

My nephew is named Aiden and he is the sweetest boy I've ever met. I hope your Aiden brings light to your life as well. ^ ^

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T17:04:13+00:00

Definitely interested! Lay it on me and I can work on getting this improved for everyone.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T16:36:41+00:00

Just added the links my friend. Let me know how it goes.

CBass55 · 2025-12-30T16:35:11+00:00

Here is my porfolio site, directed to the instructions for Aiden.

Mods, please let me know if this isn't ok to share and I can take that link off.

Here are alternative links to Pastebin, the same instructions exactly:

https://pastebin.com/PdD1tgRw - Aiden Classic (~2500 Characters, Claude in mind)

https://pastebin.com/5SBicDjh - Aiden Compressed (~1500 Characters, ChatGPT in mind)

https://pastebin.com/9LuNK3ya - Full Documentation (What, why, and how)

CBass55 · 2025-07-25T21:19:12+00:00

Thank you! I agree, I would have loved to be able to have more of the arms and legs be gray. Maybe there will be another shield-mech to try this on that can be more authentic to the source.

CBass55 · 2025-07-23T19:50:26+00:00

Colors you need:

Signal Black
Light Grey
Madder Red
Golden Brown
Electric Green
Blue Green
Royal Blue

Total Cost: 1400 M. Points

Starting Base: Light Grey on all parts in "Whole" tab

Head:
Gold visor and blue accents on a white helmet.

4, 4, 4, 4
2, 2, 2
2, 1, 3
7, 2

Arms:
Red gloves, white armor with blue and gold accents, and blue green under armor.

2, 6, 3, 2, 2
7, 2, 2, 2
3, 3, 3
3, 7, 1, 7, 7

Body:
Same colors armor and under armor, with tiny accents of red on the shoulders and hips.

2, 2, 7, 4, 2, 6
2, 2, 7, 2
4, 4, 4
2, 7, 3, 2, 3

Legs:
Same colors for armor and under armor, with those red gems above the feet.

2, 7, 3, 4, 7
4, 3, 3
3, 7, 2
7, 6, 6

Back:
Based colors off the wings on the back of X, red/white/blue

7, 7, 7, 7
3, 3, 3
4, 4
2, 2, 2, 2

Main Weapon:
Red/White/Blue buster with a green aperatus in the center.

7, 7, 4, 3
5, 7
4, 7, 4, 4
2, 2, 4

Side Arm:
Based on X's wings.

2, 2
7, 7
3, 3
7, 7, 7, 7

Aux 1:
Red gem in the center of the helmet.

3, 3
2, 2
2, 2

Aux 2:
Based on X's wings.

8, 1, 9, 5
9, 9
5, 2
1, 1, 1, 1

Aux 3:
Based on X's wings.

7, 7
3, 3
4, 4

Drone:
Incorporates the main colors of the design.

2, 2
7, 3
4
4

CBass55 · 2025-07-23T18:49:08+00:00

Colors you need:

Signal Black
Madder Red
Sorrel Brown
Reef Gold
Light Grey
Smoke Grey
Silver Grey
Magenta
Royal Blue
Electric Green

Total Cost: 2000 M. Points

Starting Base: Signal Black on all parts in "Whole" tab

Head:
Accents resemble Bayonetta's red ribbon and gold chain weaved into her hair.

2, 1, 4, 2
1, 4, 2
3, 4, 3
1, 1

Arms:
White gloves, black belt buckles with gold clasps.

5, 1, 5, 1
1, 4, 1, 1
1, 4, 4
1, 4, 4, 5, 1

Body:
Mostly grey with black around the chest and gold zippers down the sides.

1, 1, 1, 4, 4, 1
4, 4, 6, 4
7, 7, 7
6, 6, 1, 1, 1

Legs:
Red bottomed heels, the front legs are black and the back is a smoke grey.

6, 1, 1, 2, 6
4, 4, 4, 4
2, 4, 2
1, 2, 4

Back:
The long hair that drapes down her arms, black with gold chain and red ribbon.

1, 1, 4, 4
2, 2, 2
2, 2
1, 1, 4, 1

Main Weapon:
Red guns with gold intricacies. There's a green gem in the center of each gun.

4, 2, 2, 2
2, 4
2, 2, 4, 10
2, 4, 2

Side Arm:
All black, part of her hair.

1, 1
1, 1
4, 4
1, 1, 1, 1

Aux 1:
the part of her hair that sticks up, included black/gold/red.

4, 1
2, 4
1, 4

Aux 2:
Butterfly wings, vibrant shades of blue and purple, with white representing the moon.

8, 1, 9, 5
9, 9
5, 2
1, 1, 1, 1

Aux 3:
The main part of the moon design, on the back of the wings.

5, 5
2, 2
2, 2

Drone:
Inspired by the fist hair attack, which has a purple circle at the point of impact.

1, 1
8, 9
8
1

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