Parlance

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. This page uses the gatekeeper scene that branching dialogue built (rhetoric vs 12); the demo's dlg_examine_body works too — its check is observation vs 9, so set that skill instead.

1. Start a session

Open the dialogue, click ▶ Play. The right-hand column becomes two tabs — ▶ Play, showing the Play panel, and ✎ Edit, the node inspector you already know (you'll use it in step 4). The Play panel opens on its Starting State editor: every skill, flag, reputation, relationship, quest stage and text variable this scene reads is offered as an input — plus whatever the scenes it routes into read, so a gate one scene on can be set up front:

▶ 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:

1d20=9 + 6 = 15 vs ✓ PASS
Gatekeeper: 'Go on through, then.'
set talked_past_gate = true

— the roll, your skill, the total and the verdict (the difficulty is on the choice's badge, not repeated here), the line you arrived at, and every applied effect (purple when it changed state, grey when it was a no-op). If a check modifier applied, it gets its own term, named by its label: 1d20=9 + 6 + 2 (Bribed the guard) = 17 vs ✓ PASS. The State table at the bottom tracks everything the scene touches — plus every counter and the inventory — highlighting what just changed.

A passive check never rolls, and Play treats it the way the game does: the choice appears only when skill plus modifiers reach the difficulty. Otherwise it is hidden, or listed greyed with its locked text if its whenLocked is show. To see what more skill would unlock without changing it, tick Show what a higher skill would reveal under the choices — those rows are greyed and never clickable.

3. Bend the outcome, three ways

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

4. Edit while playing

Leave the session running. Say the gatekeeper's reply reads flat now that you hear it in context:

  1. Click that node on the canvas. The right-hand column switches to ✎ Edit, with that node's line at the top of the inspector.
  2. Change the text, then click away — a field saves when you leave it.
  3. Click ▶ Play. It's the same session: same step, same state, with the new line in place.

✎ Edit with nothing selected opens the line you're standing on. The canvas takes structural edits mid-session too — drag a new connection, add or delete a node — and the session re-reads the scene as each one saves, keeping your accumulated state. It re-reads it when the dialogue file changes on disk, too, so a line sharpened in your text editor (or by an agent over MCP) shows up in context without a restart. The session even survives a switch to the Text view, where saving the script re-reads it the same way. (If you delete the node you're standing on, the session snaps safely back to entry with state intact. Only closing Play or opening another dialogue ends the session.)

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 character's offers across scene boundaries without re-entering state by hand.

6. Share build: one file, anyone, anywhere

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