The nine-question pack
Every character answers the same nine questions every beat, in one evaluation call: action, target, mask, hunger, threat, betrayal, two questions the room cares about, and what they have left afterwards.
- Questions
- 9, fixed, per character per beat
- Calls
- 1 per character per beat
- Of the nine
- seven are shared, two belong to the room
The pack
| # | Question | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What does this person actually do this beat? | choice |
| 2 | Who is it about? | choice |
| 3 | What face do they wear while doing it? | choice |
| 4 | How badly do they want the prize right now? | score |
| 5 | How dangerous is that person to them? | score |
| 6 | Would they be better off without the people they are with? | boolean |
| 7–8 | Two the room cares about (declared in the RoomSpec) | varies |
| 9 | What are they left with afterwards? | score |
Why it never varies
Repetition is the point. One personality run through a fixed decision head, beat after beat, is a character. A bespoke prompt per situation is a short story written by committee.
It also keeps the scales stable. The moment you reword a question you have changed what its numbers mean, so every bar sitting on it has to be re-measured. Holding the pack still is what makes a threshold like 0.42 mean the same thing on beat 3 and beat 19.
Eight guests, seventy-two gut-checks a beat
Nine questions for each of eight people is about seventy-two judgements a beat, which is why the running cost goes on the screen instead of being hidden. The two room questions are the only variable part, and they are how one engine runs a rooftop and a back room without a branch.
Read next
Typed questions: choice, score, boolean
Parlour asks three shapes of question: a choice over options, a score on ordered levels, and a boolean. The option sets are built per character per beat from the rules, so the model can only pick something legal.
The state object: what one character can see
Each call carries a JSON state built for one character: their own condition, the people in reach, what they can remember of the last few beats, and the arithmetic of the prize. Never the whole world, and never the rules.
What a beat is
A beat is the simulation's unit of slow time, fifteen seconds of wall clock and twenty or twenty-four to a party. It is the only moment at which heat cools, energy returns, trust drifts and a room makes a decision.
Rooms are data, physics is code
A room is a plain RoomSpec: cast, personality rigs, locations, an action menu, two room-specific questions, ticker templates. Adding one should mean adding one file and never touching the engine.
typesafe-ai/jev, and what Parlour uses it for
Jev is the evaluation model Parlour runs on. It answers nine typed questions per character per beat in one call, is billed on input tokens only, and costs roughly three cents for a five-minute party.