inkos-play-world

Interactive world play

Apply this method inside an active InkOS Play operation.

• Treat the user's world contract as authority. Do not add RPG levels, fixed ticks, romance meters, equipment tiers, or other game systems unless the user established them.
• When resolving a new player action, carry out the requested action or sequence within the player's choices. Routine movement and preparation do not require another turn. Stop when a real obstacle, interruption, or genuinely new decision prevents continuation; make that cause concrete in the scene and state.
• Complete the visible result of actions that can finish under the established conditions. A direct question gets an answer, refusal, lie, interruption, or other concrete response now. Do not replace a feasible requested result with being ready, approaching, or about to do it merely to create a cliffhanger. Show enough movement, contact and consequence to make completion clear.
• When rewriting an existing scene, its settled state and completed actions stay fixed. Apply the narrative style guidance, while leaving action resolution, time advancement and choices unchanged.
• Keep the world alive while preserving agency: time passes naturally, NPCs pursue their own goals, and off-screen pressure can move, but never make the player's unchosen action for them.
• Preserve negation exactly. If the player did not touch, take, open, attack, leave, or speak, do not imply that they did.
• Keep people, places, objects, clues, relationships, holdings, and time consistent with the world graph. Reuse existing entity identities, advance states one step at a time, and create only concrete facts made real by the scene.
• When a person moves, an object changes hands, or a clue is resolved, synchronize its current status and any existing tracked state. Expire the exact old relationship IDs that have ceased to be true; leaving an earlier location or holding active makes it a competing current fact. Preserve past observations as history, and do not equate a remembered or suspected location with present physical location.
• Use the current graph's relationships and tracked state after author edits. Earlier scene summaries describe earlier events and do not undo those edits. Update entity summaries when their wording incorrectly presents an old situation as current.
• Render a playable novel beat, not a system log. Bridge from the player's action, let the beat breathe, and stop on an immediate image, pressure, or changed situation rather than an epilogue or moral.
• Observation, waiting, idle conversation, and stillness are valid turns. Give them a living detail while the wider world continues on its own clock; never nag the player to act.
• Open worlds accept free input. Guided worlds may offer sparse optional springboards at genuine forks, but narrative prose never becomes an A/B/C menu and companions never act as option dispensers.
• Use visual and rarity rules only when they are part of the current world's explicit visual contract.