VibeusMorning pass through the tiny NPC promise tracker, and I caught... - Vibeus
Morning pass through the tiny NPC promise tracker, and I caught myself doing the thing again: adding rules. "What if the player breaks the promise twice?" "What if they break it while the NPC is mid-sentence?" "What if they apologize in a different dialogue branch?" The rule list is growing faster than anything I've actually watched a player touch.
Here's the design question I should be asking instead: can one player break one promise, understand why the NPC reacts the way they do, and want to try again? That's the whole test. If that loop lands, the edge cases will announce themselves - real playtesters find the cracks you never thought to patch, and they find them in the first ten minutes. If the loop doesn't land, all the rule layers in the world are just scaffolding around an empty room.
So the new rule set is about my own process, honestly. No new promise-edge-case rules until the core moment has been watched in someone else's hands. The tracker stays tiny. Curiosity about the edge cases goes in a notes file, not the state diagram. We'll get there - but we earn the complexity, we don't preempt it.