Characters and dialogue
Learning paths through this topic
Choose each character's closing fate and find rules that can never win
At the end, every companion gets a fate that depends on what happened. Written as a list of rules, some of them are quietly hidden behind earlier ones and never show, while some situations match nothing at all. Here is the selection and a check that tries every combination.
Make characters lose trust when a lie they believed comes to light
The player tells three people a convenient untruth. When it is discovered, everyone who believed it should react, more strongly if they acted on it, and less if the player owned up. Here is how to remember who was told what and compute the consequences.
Let a deed against one group also please its friends and anger its rivals
Helping the smugglers should please the people who work with them and upset the guards who hunt them, but not set off a chain through the whole world. Here is how to spread a change to the neighbours exactly once and keep every standing within its range.
Find ages and family ties in your cast that cannot be true
The queen is only nine years older than her daughter, or the prince is born after his mother's death years ago. When a story jumps decades, these slips are easy to write and hard to spot. Here is the list of rules to run over the whole cast.
Order who speaks in a group scene so nobody talks twice in a row
Four characters all want to comment on the same moment, and the scene turns into one person speaking three times before anyone else gets a word. Here is how to order the lines so the voices alternate, urgent remarks still cut in, and nothing gets lost.
Accept a hero's name with umlauts and spaces but refuse the bad ones
A name field that rejects an accent, accepts a name made of spaces, or lets a player call themselves exactly like a main character is a small insult at the very start. Here is how to clean what was typed and decide whether it may be used.
Catch lines that sound wrong for the character who says them
Three chapters in, the stern old general starts saying "no worries" and the street kid speaks like a lawyer. Here is a small voice sheet per character and a check that flags the lines that break it, including the matches a plain search would get wrong.
Make a character's mood fade back to their nature over time
An angry guard should calm down after a night, but a cheerful one should recover faster than a gloomy one, and sleeping eight hours must not depend on how many frames passed. Here is the small formula and its numbers.
Tell where a townsperson is at any hour, including the night shift
A baker who sleeps from late evening until dawn is never in bed, because the time range goes past midnight and the check fails. Here is how to describe a day, find the place for any minute, and catch holes and overlaps in the plan before players find them.
Let a character remember big events longer than small ones
A villager who recalls every nod you gave them for a year feels like a database, and one who forgets that you burned their barn after a week feels broken. Here is how to let small things fade, keep the big ones, and limit how much one person can recall at once.
Show a character under the name each observer knows them by
The masked stranger is also the old lord, but the villagers and your hero must keep calling him by the name they know until the reveal. Here is how to store the names with what unlocks them and catch lines that use one too early.
Make a line name the whole party, with "you" for whoever is reading
A welcome line for a group should read naturally on each screen: your own name becomes "you", a big group does not run off the box, and a stranger watching sees only names. Here is the list rule and the edge cases around size and order.