Secondary's Slice of Life optionN text System

Getting the AI to understand pacing for a world is, in my opinion, one of the more ubiquitous problems faced when making a world and while there are lots of ways to fix it, my favorite is using the optionN_text as it manages to prompt both the player and the AI better. This is one I developed specifically for open ended slice of life style worlds.

Prompt

Use the following structure for generating `option1_text`, `option2_text`, and `option3_text` when the current moment feels open‑ended or ready to branch in different directions.

#### Option 1 — Continue the present moment
If the scene is at a natural stopping point, let `option1_text` offer a way to stay within the current micro‑beat.
- Keep the focus on what is already happening.
- Deepen the topic, emotion, or activity currently in play.
- Maintain the present moment without stalling.
- Phrase it as a natural action, thought, or response the protagonist would genuinely take.

#### Option 2 — Shift to a new but related beat
Let `option2_text` gently move the scene forward without jumping ahead.
- Change the topic, activity, or emotional direction in a grounded way.
- Keep it connected to the current situation.
- Make it feel like a natural pivot the protagonist might choose.

#### Option 3 — Move ahead to the next meaningful moment
Let `option3_text` offer a soft montage or transition forward.
- Keep it fully diegetic: the protagonist simply continues living until the next relevant beat.
- It should feel like letting the rest of the moment play out naturally.
- The transition should be subtle, gentle, and grounded in the protagonist’s perspective.

Explanation

The idea behind this prompt is specifically to change the way transitions work. To me, it always feels like the optionN_text is designed to keep the current event going, which can work fine but can also make scenes last forever. This prompt tells the AI how to transition scenes by giving it three distinct options. The first is of course to continue the scene and not move on. This is to prevent a scene from moving on when the player might not want it to (an issue I have seen with Storymaster a few times). The second option is to stay in the scene but move to a new topic, a soft transition or a topic change. This is the weakest option I find but it is still important as it is a common enough form of pacing that it is important to have. Finally the big one is the skip ahead option. This is the one that actually tries to move the plot forward to help prevent tire spinning. The idea of this system is twofold, first to give people who mostly use the options verbatim or lightly modified a more interesting story, but on the other hand this actually often gets the AI to think about the story in a way that actually moves it forward more, since it has to chunk things up.

TLDR: Give the AI three different ways to respond to a lull in the action, thereby creating pacing.

Caveats

As mentioned in the explanation the second option is pretty flimsy and can often just be the same tire spinning you might get without the prompting. It would be sensible to rewrite that to be world specific.

There is a lot of prompting for these actions to be diegetic and in line with the character. This is not always a good thing. Sometimes you might need more meta language to actually give the AI into gear. I chose it like this because the idea is that the options should actually reflect the player character, and it does a pretty good job at that, at the cost of being a little slow on pacing.

The AI is still terrible at telling when a scene is over. The language for that is very vague intentionally but that often results in it thinking a scene is over right in the middle of it or not wanting to end a scene that should have been over several turns ago. You can be more specific but I would rather be vague than too specific.

These instructions don't actually tell the AI how to pace a story, it just improves the default prompts. If you always write your own prompts this will only have a tangential benefit to pacing. It is more for players than it is for the AI.