Story craft
General axioms for writing at Round Online — register, restraint, what fiction can do that a game can't, and the inverse.
Overview
The story-craft axioms are studio-level writing principles — register, pacing, restraint, the things a sentence does that a mechanic can’t, and the things a mechanic does that a sentence can’t.
Collection-specific axioms (for A Table Without Edges and any future work) build on top of this layer. This page is general; the collection pages will be applied.
Working principles (paraphrased — not yet formally numbered)
- Anchors implied, not spoken. Characters never say the meaning out loud; the reader infers it from the fact.
- One depth-axis per piece. A story commits to one thing it is trying to do — repetition, alienation, distance — and stays there.
- The medium chooses the form. A game does what a game does. A sentence does what a sentence does. We don’t write a game-script as a story or a story-arc as a game.
- Voice is a constraint. Each character has a lock — vocabulary, sentence-length, what they will and will not say. The lock is named before the first draft.
- Restraint over density. A page that delivers one thought clearly outranks a page that delivers four.
Coming soon — the system is being prepared alongside the first A Table Without Edges episodes.