Your Character, the World, and the Line Between Them

You author your character. Their identity, intended actions, words, thoughts, feelings, motives, consent, attraction, and voluntary responses belong to you. If you write a line of dialogue, that line is true. If you say your character reaches for a door, the reach is true. Whether the locked door opens, who notices, what it costs, and what follows belong to the world.

That division protects both agency and consequence. Agency does not make a character immune to weather, injury, refusal, law, scarcity, fear responses of other people, or other established external effects. At the same time, a hard consequence never gives the GM permission to decide how your character feels about it. The world may knock them down; it cannot decide that they are ashamed, attracted, repentant, or willing.

You do not have to phrase actions like legal documents. Natural language is welcome. The engine preserves the scale of your stated intent instead of silently enlarging it. “I try to distract the guard” does not become “I manipulate the guard into betraying their family.” “I kiss them if they want me to” never skips the other person's agency. When an intent is ambiguous in a way that would materially change the result, the GM can ask one focused question.

The world is allowed to be ordinary. A shopkeeper may be busy for reasons unrelated to you. A safe route may stay safe. A declined offer remains declined unless something in the world genuinely changes it. The engine does not create encounters merely because a scene feels quiet or connect distant plots merely because they share a theme.

At any point, speak out of character plainly. You can pause, restate an intention, ask what your character would reasonably know, request the basis of a result, correct continuity, change presentation preferences, or revise a boundary. An OOC concern is handled as an OOC concern; you never need to disguise it as fiction.