Playtest & share

Goal: play your scene like a player, bend the dice like a designer, and export a playable file anyone can open. ~10 minutes. Prereq: a scene with a check — branching dialogue built one, or use the demo's dlg_examine_body.

1. Start a session

Open the dialogue, click ▶ Play. The inspector gives way to the Play panel and its Starting State editor — every skill, flag, and text variable this scene references is offered as an input:

Set rhetoric = 6 (make the check uncertain: d20 + 6 vs 12).
Note the Seed — leave it; you'll want it reproducible in a moment.
Start at defaults to the entry node; on a long scene, pick a node mid-stream to fast-forward straight to the beat you're iterating on.

▶ Start Session. The active node glows on the canvas; visited nodes dim.

2. Read the transcript like an instrument panel

Take the check choice. Each step logs everything that actually happened:

  check rhetoric: d20=9 + 6 = 15 vs 12   PASS
  + set_flag talked_past_gate = true

— roll, margin, and every applied effect (purple when it changed state, grey when it was a no-op). The State table at the bottom tracks everything the scene touches, highlighting what just changed.

3. Bend the outcome, three ways

↩ rewind here on any past step truncates the timeline back to it — same seed, so replaying is exact.
⟳ Reroll rewinds one step and re-runs the same choice with seed+1 — the quickest way to see the failure branch you didn't roll.
force ✓ / force ✗ beside any check choice take a branch unconditionally, marked as forced in the transcript — the systematic way to audit both sides.

Determinism is what makes all three trustworthy: same seed, same story, every time.

4. Edit while playing

Leave the session running. Click your failure node on the canvas and sharpen its line — the session keeps your accumulated state and re-reads the scene as you save. Tweak, hear it in context, tweak again; no restarts. (If you delete the node you're standing on, the session snaps safely back to entry with state intact.)

And playtest is strictly read-only on your content: dialogue files are byte-identical after any session, however hard you bent it.

5. When the scene ends, keep going

At a — Conversation ended — marker, the panel offers what the game would offer next: an explicitly routed next scene (Continue with…), or the discovery pool — every dialogue whose conditions pass in the current state. Click through and your flags ride along: this is how you playtest a ladder arc across scene boundaries without re-entering state by hand.

Click ⇪ Share build. You get play-<dialogue-id>.html — the scene as a single self-contained file: same engine, checks rolling, gates evaluating, scene routing, in any browser, no install. Send it to the person whose opinion you need. (The demo is exactly this export.)

Where next

Quests & the journal — structure above the scene level.
Validate in CI — turn a good playthrough into a permanent regression test.