Deck Narrative Arc Skill

A deck can pass every slide-level test — clean headlines, honest charts — and still lose the room, because rooms follow stories, not sequences. The oldest working arc: situation (the world as the audience knows it — brief, they live there) → complication (the tension: what changed, what threatens, what's newly possible — this is where attention gets recruited) → resolution (the recommendation, arriving as the answer to the tension rather than as an announcement). Decks that sag in the middle usually have no complication — nothing at stake — so the resolution lands as opinion instead of necessity.

What This Skill Produces

• The arc mapping — the deck's slides assigned to situation / complication / resolution, with the imbalances flagged
• The tension line — the complication stated in one sentence; the thing the whole deck resolves
• The transition script — the spoken sentence between each slide that carries the thread ("so if that's the leak — what's causing it?")
• The sag diagnosis — where the room will drift, and the fix (usually: tension arrived too late or dissolved too early)

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The deck (or its outline) — arcs are checked against the actual sequence (deck-outline-first headlines are the ideal input)
• The audience's starting state — what they already believe and know; the situation section's length is set by their familiarity, and re-explaining their own world is the classic opening sag
• The genuine tension — what's actually at stake (the risk, the closing window, the competitor's move, the cost of drift); decks without real stakes should say so honestly and be informational, not dramatic
• The exec-timing constraint — answer-first audiences (exec-vs-working-deck) still get an arc — it's compressed: the tension arrives in the first two minutes, not built across ten