R-269: the fourth quadrant, and a disable does not remove anybody

Seed 16 is the missing corner -- party takes first blood in round 1 and is wiped
anyway -- and it runs 24 rounds. Its last five are Neil dropped by a critical
through armour, then Dominic alone at 1%, failing three times, then dying. That
is what three effective attackers costs at a table when a fight goes long.

Corrects a mechanism I had written twice: a disabling hit does not remove an
attacker, it charges 30 points off physical or manipulation per locationEffectsFor.
Bhattacharya keeps swinging at 10 for four rounds. A slope, not a cliff.

Neither guard fired and neither was wrong: the fight sits in the 25.5% the swing
does not cover, and no guard measures the tail because all of them average.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

docs/REVIEW_LOG.md

@@ -5827,8 +5827,11 @@ produce a single 3-point scratch; the column lands three blows in round 3, Kate
 
 **Both sides disable on one good hit.** The major-wound threshold is half of max HP and it
 is the same rule in both directions — the neighbours have 10, the agents 11 to 13 — so an
-average blow takes a fighter out of the fight. Every disable removes an attacker, which
-thins the return fire, which makes the next disable likelier. Nothing pulls a fight back
+average blow takes a fighter out of the fight. Every disable costs its owner 30 points off
+the relevant skills — `locationEffectsFor`, an arm or a leg — which for a 40% attacker is
+three quarters of their hit chance, so it thins the return fire and makes the next disable
+likelier. It does not remove them: a disabled agent keeps acting, keeps drawing attacks
+and keeps being a target, which is why the compounding is a slope rather than a cliff. Nothing pulls a fight back
 toward the middle once it has tipped, which is the whole of the bimodality.
 
 **Measured, `tools/first-blood.mjs`, 2000 runs across three seeds:**
@@ -5966,3 +5969,37 @@ README's block, the count word fell to "thirteen" while fourteen guards ran, and
 document got *quieter* as the build got worse. A missing line is now fatal. That is the
 third variant of this defect found inside the tooling written to prevent it, which is
 starting to look less like bad luck than like where the defect lives.
+
+## R-269 — the fourth quadrant, and a mechanism I had described wrongly
+
+Three readings of the cut so far took first blood and the outcome together: the party
+strikes first and sweeps (seed 5), the column strikes first and wipes it (seed 2), the
+column strikes first and loses anyway (seed 17). Seed 16 is the missing corner — the party
+takes first blood in round 1 and is wiped — and it runs **24 rounds**, which is longer than
+any fight anyone will run at a table.
+
+**What a disable actually does.** I have twice written that a disabling hit "removes an
+attacker". It does not. `locationEffectsFor` charges 30 points off physical or manipulation
+per disabled limb, so Bhattacharya goes from 40 to 10 in round 6 and keeps attacking at 10
+for four more rounds; the creature that loses a leg drops from 50 to 20 and keeps coming.
+For a 40% attacker that is three quarters of their hit chance, which is why the measured
+effect is as large as it is — but it is a slope, not a cliff, and the disabled keep acting,
+keep drawing attacks and keep being targets. R-266 and `first-blood.mjs` corrected.
+
+**The last five rounds of seed 16 are the scenario's warning, played.** Neil is dropped in
+round 21 by a critical — `armour 4->0`, because a critical ignores armour entirely — and
+from there it is **Dominic alone against one creature, rolling at 1%, three times, and
+then dying**. Rounds 22, 23 and 24 contain four player actions and not one of them could
+have succeeded. That is what "three effective attackers, not four" costs at the table when
+the fight goes long: not a quieter character, a player rolling dice that cannot come up.
+
+**What the fourteen guards would and would not have caught here.** check-firstblood says
+the first blow is worth 40 points, and this fight is squarely in the 25.5% that go the
+other way; the guard is describing a tendency and correctly did not fire. check-attackers
+has Ashcroft at 0.1% of attacks disabling, and rounds 22 to 24 are what 0.1% looks like
+from a chair. Neither guard is wrong, and neither one would have told me a 24-round fight
+was possible — no guard measures the tail, because every one of them averages.
+
+**So the reading is still doing work the measuring cannot.** Fourteen guards, and the
+thing worth knowing about this fight — that it ends with one player failing three
+impossible rolls in a row — is visible only by watching it happen.

tools/first-blood.mjs

@@ -3,7 +3,8 @@
  *
  * check-lethality and check-focus record how a fight ENDS. Neither records how it TURNS,
  * and the four-player cut of CLEAN GROUND turns early: both sides disable on one good
- * hit, so whoever lands it first removes an attacker, which thins the return fire, which
+ * hit, so whoever lands it first costs the other 30 points off the skills that matter,
+ * which thins the return fire, which
  * makes the next disable likelier. Nothing pulls the fight back toward the middle once it
  * has tipped, and that — not anything about round five — is where the scenario's bimodal
  * outcome comes from.