Tuning your story's pacing with cadence preferences

If your current campaign has settled into a rhythm you did not choose, the Steering section of the game screen is worth a few minutes. It holds three controls: the Author's Note, the Scene Instruction, and Narrative Cadence. The first two are text. The third is a set of sliders that changes how often the story leans on each kind of scene.

What the sliders actually represent

Each slider is a weight for one scene type: action, romance, drama, exploration, dialogue and downtime. A seventh, the mature genre, is shown only if you have opted in to that content and are age-verified, and it is hidden otherwise. The weights run from 0 to 100, but they are not percentages on their own. The system normalises them, and each slider shows a live readout such as "about 18% of mix". Read that number, not the raw value. Setting every slider to 80 is identical to setting every slider to 20.

A practical consequence: to get more of something, raise it relative to the others. Lowering action is as much a way to get more exploration as raising exploration is.

How the story responds

After each turn a lightweight classifier tags the prose with scene types. The Director keeps a rolling window of the most recent turns, and when the observed mix drifts far enough from your target, it adds a short, soft suggestion to the narrator's prompt, along the lines of "the next beat could lean quieter and more exploratory".

Three safeguards mean you should expect a drift, not a lurch.

• The suggestion is advisory. The narrator is never forced into a scene change, and ignoring a nudge does not trigger a regeneration.
• It is the first thing dropped when the prompt is under budget pressure.
• A cooldown separates nudges, so the story gets several turns to respond before it is steered again.

Because of this, give a change time. Setting a new target and expecting the very next scene to flip is the usual mistake. Look at the pattern across a handful of turns.

Reading the status line

Under the sliders is a status line with four states.

• Steering is off. The switch is off and no nudges are sent.
• Just getting started. There are not yet enough turns in the window to judge the mix. The panel waits until roughly half the window is filled.
• On track. The mix is close to your target and no nudge has been needed recently.
• Nudged N turns ago. The Director recently suggested a change, and this tells you how long ago.

Each slider's accessible label also reports what share of recent turns it observed, so you can compare the target against what is actually happening.

Tips that tend to help

Change one thing at a time. Raise one slider and leave the rest, then play a few turns. If you move everything at once you will not know which change did what.

Use it alongside the notes, not instead of them. Cadence shapes the background rhythm over many turns. The Scene Instruction is for the very next input, and the Author's Note is for persistent tone. If you want one tense conversation, write a Scene Instruction. If you want a campaign with more breathing room, adjust downtime. Your own notes also take priority over the cadence target if they conflict.

Use the switch, not zeroing. There is no Clear button by design. The switch turns steering off and keeps your weights untouched, so turning it back on restores exactly what you had. Treat it as a pause.

Expect it to follow you across sessions. The preference is stored with the campaign, not in your browser, so it is there when you return on another device. If another tab has changed it, the panel will tell you to reload before you edit again.

Match the target to the story you are in. A heist campaign with a downtime-heavy target will keep trying to slow down a story that wants momentum. If the status line keeps reporting recent nudges and you find them unwelcome, the target may be the wrong one for this plot. Loosen the weights or switch steering off for a stretch.

A short routine

When you open a session, glance at the status line. If it says on track, play on. If it reports repeated nudges, ask whether the story has moved to a different phase, and adjust one slider to match. Once an arc ends, revisit the sliders again, since the right mix for an investigation is seldom the right mix for the aftermath.

The controls are modest by design. They make a campaign a little more like the one you want to be playing, without taking the plot out of the narrator's hands. Open your current campaign, find the Steering section, and try one change for the next handful of turns.