StoryHARN: Repairing Conflicting Actions in Interactive Stories

Language-model storytellers must reconcile open-ended player actions with persistent world rules. Yet state consistency alone cannot distinguish a useful repair from a rejection that brings play to a halt. We introduce StoryHARN, a runtime layer that checks proposed state changes before they enter the story and handles conflicting actions through three mechanisms: rule-compatible alternatives, isolated what-if branches, and deferred intentions requiring later confirmation. Its decisions are recorded for inspection and replay. We evaluate five configurations over 1,200 turns across 12 authored worlds, separating structured-state validity, action coverage, and a proxy for story continuation. In the initial comparison, StoryHARN achieves 67.5% state validity, compared with 39.2% for rule prompting and 90.8% for hard rejection. Trace analysis attributes the observed StoryHARN state failures to a monitor gap and an overly restrictive evidence rule. A separately versioned development follow-up records 1,020 committed turns out of 1,200 planned turns. StoryHARN and hard rejection exhibit no monitored state violations on committed turns, although a continuation advantage over rejection is not established. A separate human study collects 200 ratings of 100 three-turn traces to examine narrative consistency and causal responsiveness; it does not assess the repair comparison or fidelity to player intent. Together, these studies provide an inspectable framework for conflict handling and identify the evidence needed to establish whether valid repairs also preserve meaningful interaction.