Fix a fast action firing twice and paying once

Ammunition was charged once before the shot loop rather than once per shot, so the
Webley put two rounds out and the cylinder went down by one. That is the exact
dishonesty the burst rules exist to avoid, and it landed on the mode that is supposed
to cost the most. Charged per shot now, and the loop stops when the weapon runs dry
part way through the action.

Found by playing the four modes side by side in the goods yard — one agent per mode,
all four at 60%, so the fight read the mode and not the shooter. Full log in
docs/REVIEW_LOG.md, including two findings left open: burst options are close to
unselectable once the light is bad, and a lamp currently lights only its carrier while
three agents stand in the same pool of it at -50%.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
slaguru666
2026-08-11 09:18:13 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 2e10ecced9
commit 5c640d65cf
2 changed files with 92 additions and 14 deletions
+71
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@@ -4290,3 +4290,74 @@ measuring the wrong box.
Also noted, not fixed: fourteen rules are imported into `ringbrp.mjs` and read nowhere
in it. They are live rules with real readers in the rulebook generator and the guards,
so this is dead *imports* rather than dead rules — but it is the same smell.
## THE GOODS YARD — the four fire modes, side by side
One agent per mode, all four trained to exactly 60%, so the fight reads the mode and
not the shooter. A barghest in a coal yard at 02:40, pitch dark, one lamp between
four of them. Four rounds. The dog left at 4 hit points of 16 and nobody caught it.
**The modes separated cleanly, and not in the way I expected.**
**Slow was the best weapon in the fight.** Dunn's Baker rifle hit on both the shots it
got, and the +10% is what bought them: round one at 35% he rolled 33, and at the 25%
he would have had without it that is a miss. The reload is a real cost — he was out of
the fight for rounds two and three and the dog reached him — but a mode that turns a
33 into a hit twice is not the weak option.
**Fast is not two chances to hit. It is a second defence at a penalty.** Rakhi's two
Webley shots in round two both landed at 20%, and the first was dodged clean. The
second one hurt precisely because the barghest had already spent its free defence and
had to dodge again at −30%. That is the mode's actual function and it is better than
the tooltip suggests.
**Rapid was the worst thing in the yard.** Ceyla fired 20 of 30 rounds across four
rounds of combat and hit nothing at all. A full magazine at −30%, in the dark at −30%,
is a 1% roll that still spends ten rounds — and the rules charge her honestly for
every one. This is not obviously wrong; automatic fire into a dark coal yard at
seventy metres *should* be futile. But it means **the burst options are close to
unselectable in any fight where the light is bad**, and the light is bad in most of
this game. Flagged rather than tuned: I would rather see it in a second fight before
touching the numbers.
**Beam did the damage.** The locked beam landed for 10 — 1d4+6 with its 2d6 riding on
the standing blow exactly as designed — and took the barghest from 11 to 4 through
armour 3. It cost 6 charge a shot and, because the lance is transposed materiel, **1
Coherence every time Tomas pulled the trigger**. He ended the fight Loose at 6, with 2
charge left. That is the most interesting economy in the fight and nothing needed
changing to produce it.
**The sight graded itself the way it was meant to.** Ceyla's telescopic sight was +5%
at seventy metres and **−10% once the thing was inside twenty-five**, and she felt it
both times. Nobody had to remember it.
**The lamp is the finding.** Tomas's Field lamp turned pitch dark into dim for him — a
40-point swing, the largest single modifier in the fight — and the card told him each
time that it showed the barghest exactly where he was. Which it did: the dog went for
the lamp in round two. But **a lamp only lights its carrier**. Three agents stood
inside the same pool of light at −50% while the fourth shot at −10%. That is wrong at
the table, and it is the one design change this fight actually argues for.
### Defects the fight surfaced
**R-238. A fast action fired twice and paid for one round.** The Webley put two shots
out and the cylinder went down by one. Ammunition was charged once before the shot
loop instead of once per shot — the exact dishonesty the burst rules were written to
avoid, and the mode that ought to cost the most was the only one getting a free shot.
Charged per shot now, and the loop stops when the weapon runs dry mid-action.
**R-239. `morale.downThreshold` is written by the pack builder and the template and
read by nothing.** Every NPC in the game carries a morale field and there is no morale
rule. Whether the barghest broke off was mine to decide with no support from the
system, which is fine as a GM call and not fine as a shipped field. Not fixed — it
needs a rule, not a patch.
**Two of my own, worth recording because the pattern keeps repeating.** I did
arithmetic on `system.coherence` (an object) instead of `.value` and reported a
Coherence loss that never happened; and I read `system.hitPoints`, which does not
exist — the field is `system.hp`. Both were caught inside a minute by printing the
result instead of trusting it, which is the only reason this log is accurate.
**A content wart:** the barghest bites with something called "Vesh grasp limb" — the
generic `grasp` weapon still carrying a Ringworld-era display name. Every creature in
the bestiary that uses `grasp` inherits it.