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.
What this page becomes
Once named and numbered, each axiom appears with its statement, derivation, and example. Some axioms will be specific enough to apply to one collection and not others — those will be moved to the collection’s own page.
Coming soon — the system is being prepared alongside the first A Table Without Edges episodes.