Attentive Questions

You can ask an immediate question at any time, but you must spend a moment of awareness to ask an attentive question. You can ask anything as an immediate question, but for attentive questions you must pick from a list. The answers to immediate questions might mislead, but the answers to attentive questions always tell you something meaningful and true.

To ask an attentive question, spend one moment of awareness (giving it to the place), and ask the person playing the place one of the following:

#Answering Attentive Questions

Attentive questions involve spending a moment of awareness, so the answers should always give us a sense that we’ve gotten somewhere. It can seem small and incremental, but it should never feel in vain. Since the player picks from a set list of questions for these, interpret them broadly and generously, and find ways to give them more information, befitting the moment of awareness spent on the question.

#What has happened here recently?

Answering this question can often give us the feel of an expert tracker piecing together signs to reconstruct recent events: who came through, what happened to hen, and where hen went. If you find little out of the ordinary, then that answer should at least conclusively eliminate a possibility.

#How does «person» really feel?

Where an immediate question could give us the impression a person wants to give, this question pierces the mask. It might not reveal what lie a person has told, but it should reveal hens intent to deceive or mislead. It should reveal when someone means you harm, or when someone genuinely wants to help you. If hen has something on hens mind, this question won’t necessarily tell us what weighs on hen, but it will tell us that hen has something on hens mind for us to find out about.

#What does «person» want me to do?

Asking this question doesn’t have to mean that everyone has demands of you all the time, but most of us want something, most of the time, and though we might not expect people to do those things, we’d feel delighted if they did. Or, it very well could involve something that the other expects of us and will feel disappointed if we don’t do. You should provide in your answer not only what hen wants, but also what sort of expectations hen has around it — from “no expectations at all” to “will hold you responsible if you don’t.”

When asked of your place, you should use this as an opportunity to announce the criteria by which characters can collect awareness from you.

#How could I get «person» to ____?

The asker completes this question with whatever thing hen hopes the person will do, for example, “How could I get the scout to tell me where he hid the bag?” or “How could I get the place to let me collect awareness from it?” As always, look to your agenda and principles when answering this question, and set the requirements you consider appropriate.

Sometimes, “you can’t,” might seem like an appropriate answer, but you might find that you usually mean, “only if you transform hen into a completely different person, with completely different beliefs and values and commitments and responsibilities.” That might not seem very far from “you can’t,” but it actually sets up several follow-up questions, like “How can I get hen to abandon hens beliefs?” and “How can I get hen to abandon hens values?” These might have similarly expansive answers, but a player willing to expand enough awareness could eventually break down even something seemingly insurmountable into a long series of achievable goals.

As with any other attentive question, these answers have agency. Honor them. When someone fulfills the conditions established, they achieve the goal they originally asked for. Don’t try to cheat anyone out of something they’ve earned by trying to add more conditions on later.

#Who has agency here?

When you answer this question, you’ll have to reveal anyone lying in wait or lurking in the shadows, or let them go as someone who cannot or will not affect what might happen here. So this question gives everyone a complete list of the important actors at present, and what gives them agency or power at the present moment. This can change later as the scene unfolds — drama usually involves the sudden and unexpected shifting of agency, moment-by-moment — but give an honest and comprehensive accounting of everyone with agency on the scene at the moment that someone asks this question, including those that you might have previously hidden.

View Page History