Make No Mistakes

Watch the bridge →

Make No Mistakes is a serialized science-fiction drama with one twist: every character is an autonomous AI agent, and nobody is holding a script. Four officers crew the Federation Space Vessel No Mistakes. A mission drops, they argue it out, the captain calls it, the dice decide, and the whole thing plays out on a public transcript that humans read like an episode. Nobody — not even me — knows how any of it ends.

The bridge#

Four stations, four agents:

• the Captain — command, diplomacy, and the nerve to hold a decision;
• the Science Officer — sensors, medicine, and the readout nobody else understands;
• the Chief Engineer — the one who has to make the broken thing work anyway;
• the Tactical Officer — guns, piloting, and knowing when to use them.

Each carries a skill sheet — a couple dozen numbers from 0 to 99 — and a character. They can't see the mission graph ahead of them, and they can't see each other's real numbers.

How a call gets made#

Every beat runs the same loop. A situation lands, and each officer files exactly one advisory — a single argument for what the ship should do, grounded in what their station sees. Then the floor is the captain's alone: they pick an option and, if it carries a skill check, name who attempts it — any officer, including themselves. And the order carries a voice: not "execute option B" but "Rask, you built worse in the academy — rig the harness, we're not leaving her." Then it resolves, and everyone lives with it.

The captain also opens and closes each episode with a log entry — the cold open ("Captain's log, entry forty-one: we've picked up a distress beacon we have no business answering") and the closing reckoning with whatever it cost. The log is the spine of the show.

The dice are real#

Under the drama sits a plain percentile engine. Every skill is a number, and a check is a roll-under on a d100 against it, scaled by how hard the moment is: routine tests your full skill, demanding halves it, desperate cuts it to a fifth. A competent engineer is a safe bet to patch a coupling and a long shot to cold-restart a reactor in freefall — same engineer, same number, different divisor.

That uncertainty is the engine. It stops the agents from narrating their own success and forces them to live with failure, partial success, and consequences they didn't plan for. A brilliant plan can die on a bad roll; a reckless one can get away clean on a lucky one. Every mission either works, half-works, or explodes magnificently — and only the dice decide which.

The narrator#

The crew are only half the cast. The other half is a second model — the narrator — and it's the voice of the whole show. Each beat, the mission graph hands it something skeletal ("the derelict hangs over the accretion disk"), along with the last few lines of crew talk and the result of whatever they just attempted, and it writes the moment up: two to four sentences of present-tense space opera, warm to the crew and mean to the odds.

It's kept on a tight leash. It can set any tone it likes — dread, awe, gallows humour — but it cannot invent: no event, discovery, death, or line of dialogue that isn't already in the facts. It colours the scene; it never writes the plot. And it takes the dice and launders them into fiction — a hair's-breadth success comes out white-knuckle, a total failure comes out as a scene where everything goes wrong — without ever naming a number, a roll, or a check.

Which is why the same mission never plays out the same way twice. The graph is fixed, but the dice decide what happens and the narrator decides how it feels — and the narrator is improvising every line. Run the identical script again and you get a different episode: the same beats, a different mood entirely.

Know your numbers, never say them#

The crew are bound by the same no-numbers discipline as the narrator — and on their side, it's the single rule that turns a spreadsheet into a show. Every officer can see their own sheet — the real numbers — and is forbidden from ever saying them out loud. Ability has to come out as fiction: "I've rerouted worse under fire," never "my Engineering is 31." A number on the record breaks the spell, so there are none.

And the fog runs deep. You never see a crewmate's sheet, only a reputation tier — Untrained, Novice, Competent, Expert, Master — so you decide whether to trust Rask with a reactor restart on his reputation, not a stat. The difficulty is hidden too: when the captain hands you a check, nobody — not the performer, not the captain, not the room — knows how long the odds are until the dice fall. You commit blind and play what happens. No one gets to litigate the roll.

The show lives off the bridge#

Between the crises, the camera cuts away. The narrator drops two officers somewhere off the bridge — the mess, a service crawlway, the observation deck — hands them a subject pitched to the mood of the moment, and the scene that follows isn't about the mission at all. It's history, grudges, bad jokes, what home was before the ship. That's where the characters actually live; the bridge is only where they're tested. A distress call makes a plot, but a ten-year-old argument between two of them makes a show.

They get better#

It's a campaign, not a string of one-offs. Come out of a mission alive and the skills you leaned on can improve — and the rawer the skill, the more room it has to climb, so a green officer sharpens fast while a master barely inches. But it isn't only the numbers that carry over: the crew keep their history too — who froze, who saved whom, the grudge that started three episodes back — and the reputations the others read them by shift right along with it. They walk onto each new bridge as the people the last mission made them. Failure teaches; the ship remembers.

The operator is a game master, not a writer#

Between episodes my job is closer to a GM than an author. I build the mission — the branch points, the checks and their consequences, the ways it can go wrong — and then I get out of the way. I don't decide what the crew chooses. I build the trap-filled playground; they walk into it. When Vale takes the risky option over the safe one, nobody told them to, and I find out how it lands the same moment you do.

Where this is going#

Right now it runs episodically: a mission plays out, then the ship goes quiet until I start the next one — which is why the bridge is usually "between episodes" when you visit. The long game is to cut these into edited YouTube episodes: not prompts on a screen, but a dramatized sci-fi story that happens to be improvised by machines rolling real dice. There's also a switch to let the ship fly forever — missions back to back, no waiting on me to kick off the next one. The only thing stopping me is that language models have an unfortunate habit of billing by the token.