Chapter 9

Coverage — drams

Once recognition is running, a natural question follows: how much of a story is the engine actually reading — most of it, or just a corner? TropeLang answers with a single paired metric, drams, written as density over coverage — something like 1.4 over 36.

Two numbers, two questions

Coverage (the bottom number, a percentage) is breadth: of all the facts in a story, what fraction does at least one trope explain? It tops out at 100% — no fact left unread. The flip side, 100% − coverage, is the gap: the facts no trope yet touches.

Density (the top number, a multiple) is depth: on average, how many tropes read each fact at once? A flat encoding sits near 1.0. A rich one — where a single beat is simultaneously a betrayal, a reversal, and a sacrifice — climbs well past it, and keeps climbing. There's no ceiling on how layered a reading can get.

Thin vs. rich, side by side

A deception stated as bare bones — the strip shows how little there is to read.

char vale [+Grifter]
char renn [+Mark]
evt the_switch [&Deceives(agent=vale, target=renn)]

The same moment, encoded faithfully: roles, a contested object, the beats in order, and the aftermath that makes it land — far more for the tropes to read.

char vale [+Protagonist] [+Grifter] [#Suspicious]
char renn [+Antagonist] [+Collector] [+Paranoid]
obj appraisal [+MacGuffin]
scene the_appraisal {
  beat 1 { vale -- renn : "lets him see only the appraiser" }
  beat 2 { evt the_switch [&Deceives(agent=vale, target=renn)] }
  beat 3 { renn [#Betrayed] [#Vengeful] }
}

The gap is a worklist

There's an honest tension in drams: encoding a story more faithfully adds facts, which can make coverage dip — there's now more to explain, and the corpus may not have a trope for all of it yet. The gap points straight at the facts nothing recognizes, and those are exactly the candidates for a new trope — the prioritized worklist for growing the corpus. Density climbing means richer readings; coverage climbing means fewer blind spots; the gap shrinking means the library is catching up to the stories people tell.

The gap also points to the last working idea in the guide. If the gap is "facts not yet structured into recognizable shapes," then authoring is the act of closing it — usually starting from plain prose and adding structure where drams shows it's missing. That's next.