Parlance

Branching dialogue

Goal: a scene with a real branch — a skill check whose failure still moves the story — plus the canvas skills you'll use every day. ~15 minutes. Prereq: your first project.

1. Lay down the beats

Open your dialogue and click + Node three times. You get blank nodes to the right of the graph. Click each and fill its Text in the inspector:

Drag nodes by their headers to arrange them; positions save automatically to a gitignored sidecar, so your layout never pollutes the content diff. Auto layout reflows everything left-to-right whenever things get messy.

2. Add a choice

Select node_open and add a choice: "Talk your way past." Every choice has a small source handle dot on its right edge — drag from it to the left edge of a target node to wire a goto. That's the whole connection model.

3. Turn it into a check

Expand the choice and add a Check:

The choice now shows two handles — green (success) and red (failure). Drag green → node_pass, red → node_fail. On the canvas the choice wears a generated rhetoric / 12 badge — don't type [Rhetoric] into the choice text; badges derive from the data and the prose stays clean.

The inspector's probability bar previews P(success) at any stat value — difficulty tuning without spreadsheets.

Failure is content. node_fail isn't a dead end — give it its own choices (bribe? climb the wall?). The demo's body-examination scene is the pattern done well: failing the check costs a detail, never the plot.

4. Add a choiceless beat

Add a node node_bell — "Somewhere beyond the gate, a bell counts four." — and note it has a single continue handle (it has no choices). Drag it to node_pass: that's a next — a listen-only narration beat the player advances with one Continue → click. A node can have choices or next or be an end, never two of the three; the inspector disables what doesn't apply.

Mark the final nodes Is End so the conversation can actually finish — an unmarked dead-end node is a FLOW warning, and the Pacing panel (click empty canvas) counts your dead ends alongside scene size, branch shape, and check density.

5. Meet the script view

Flip the toolbar's Graph · Text toggle. Your scene, as editable text:

== node_open [entry] ==
The gatekeeper looks you over.
- c_talk: "Talk your way past." check rhetoric >= 12 -> node_pass / node_fail

The script is a lossless representation — saving reproduces the JSON byte-for-byte except what you edited, and a syntax error blocks the save pointing at the line. Some scenes are faster typed than clicked; use whichever fits the moment.

6. Effects, if you're ready

Anything a choice does to the world — set a flag, adjust reputation, give an item — is an effect on the choice (or On Enter effects on the node it reaches). Add one: effect type set_flag, and use the ＋ New flag row in the picker to create the flag inline without a side trip. The effects reference lists all nine types.

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