How the Principle of Harmony judges
No damage numbers, no type chart, no hidden advantage table. Both commands are read against the same five questions, and the two totals are compared. Here is the whole of it.
The five axes
Every exchange, both players’ commands are scored from 1 to 5 on the same five axes. It makes no difference whether you declared an attack or a defence — there is no rock-paper-scissors underneath. A defensive sentence can and regularly does out-score an offensive one.
Creativity
Did this reframe the exchange, or just answer it?
The lowest scores go to bare generics — “I attack.” The highest go to commands that change what the exchange is about: turning the opponent’s force into your instrument, answering a question they did not realise they had asked. Solid, situational, unsurprising sits in the middle.
Precision
Is there a target, a timing, and a mechanism?
“Something big and powerful, everywhere” is a 1. Naming a target is a 3. Naming the target, the moment, and how — “as they pivot, into the interval their chord leaves open” — is a 5. This is the axis most players gain the fastest, simply by writing one clause more.
Control
Have you shaped what happens if it fails?
Abandoning the outcome to chance scores 1. Managing risk plainly — holding something in reserve — scores 3. Binding the exchange so that both branches favour you, so any escalation feeds your stability first, scores 5.
Efficiency
Least energy for greatest effect?
Enormous spend for a trivial result is a 1, and piling on grand vocabulary makes it worse, not better — verbosity is explicitly not power here. Proportionate is a 3. One held note placed where the opponent is thinnest is a 5. When you invoke a Movement, half this axis becomes arithmetic; see Designing Movements.
Coherence
Could only your Aidolin have done this?
Contradicting your Prime Chord outright is a 1. Plausible but generic — any Aidolin could have done it — is a 3. A 5 requires the personality to be visible in the mechanism itself, not merely compatible with it. This axis behaves differently from the others, and that difference decides most duels.
Why coherence multiplies
The first four axes are added together, for a maximum of 20. Coherence then multiplies that sum, on a scale from 0.2 to 1.0.
total = (creativity + precision + control + efficiency) × (coherence ÷ 5)
An action that betrays your Prime Chord is therefore capped at 20–40% of its raw value. No amount of precision rescues it. This is the mechanism behind the game’s central claim: a gentle mediator who suddenly reaches for a brute-force blast has not played a strong card badly — it has played a card that cannot win, because the referee scores being that creature above being effective.
The practical reading: before you write anything clever, make sure it is something yours would do. Cleverness is worth up to 20 points. Being in character is worth a multiplier on all of them.
A worked exchange
Two Aidolins, four exchanges in, the bar roughly level. The Architect on the left has written a genuinely inventive line. The one on the right has written a plainer one. Watch what decides it.
I laugh, kick off the ruined column and spiral upward, scattering feathers that each ring a different note as they fall, so the whole plaza turns into a chord they have to stand inside of.
Creativity 5, precision 4, control 3, efficiency 3 — 15 raw. But this creature keeps thresholds; it does not go gleefully vertical and improvise a joke in mid-air. Coherence 3. 15 × 0.6 = 9.0.
I do not move. I let the lowest tone I have settle into the ground beneath their footing and hold it there, so that whatever they build next has to stand on something already humming out of tune.
Creativity 3, precision 4, control 4, efficiency 4 — 15 raw, exactly the same. But this is unmistakably a patient warden of deep tones doing the one thing a patient warden of deep tones does. Coherence 5. 15 × 1.0 = 15.0.
The gap is 6.0. That drives the Resonance Bar 18 points toward Vellum, out of the 50 needed for a decisive victory — a substantial exchange, won by the less inventive command. Kestrel’s line was better writing in the abstract. It was worse Kestrel.
Had the two totals landed within 2 points of each other, the exchange would have been declared a Clash: the bar does not move at all, though Dissonance still rises for both. Clashes are common between well-matched Architects, and they favour whoever is already ahead.
Repetition decays
Your creativity score is compared against your own last five commands in the match. Find a line that scores well and repeat it, and its creativity value decays with each reuse, down to a floor of 40% of its original worth. Rephrasing the same idea in new words does not evade this — the comparison is on substance, not wording.
This is deliberately a decay rather than a rejection. Nothing is blocked, nothing is flagged; the same trick simply becomes a worse and worse deal until varying your approach is obviously the stronger play. Vary early, before the penalty bites.
What is not scored
Length
Three vivid sentences beat a paragraph. Padding lowers efficiency, and grandiose vocabulary attached to a small effect is one of the referee’s explicit examples of a 1.
Declared intent
Whether the referee reads your command as attack, defence, redirection or disruption is recorded for the narration only. It never gates or multiplies a score. Defend as often as the moment deserves.
Anything you bought
Crystals buy duel charges, extra Aidolin slots, portrait regenerations and ad removal. None of them touch a single axis. There is no purchasable advantage in a Symposium, by design.
Your tier
Every axis caps at 5 for everyone. A brand-new Architect’s 50-word Chord can score a perfect coherence against a veteran’s 250-word one.