CLEAN GROUND v0.9: the anchor cannot fight, and the cut is three

Reading two narrated fights from another session showed Dominic attacking at
`vs 1`, four times in one of them. Confirmed against the sheet rather than the
log: weapons is empty and his only combat skill is Firearm (Pistol) 43, with
nothing to fire. So the four-player cut fights with Renshaw and Bhattacharya on
compact pistols and Braithwaite on a knife — a quarter of the party out of any
fight, and a large part of why EXPOSURE already said violence at four players is
party-ending without knowing that was the reason.

A defect I introduced. "He carries no weapon, and the GM must not fix it" was
written as characterisation about an anchor having both hands full, and was never
checked against a fight.

Not fixed by arming him, which would cost the character to solve what is really a
briefing failure. Said out loud instead: his entry now states the 1% plainly and
instructs the GM to tell his player BEFORE the game that Dodge 63, First Aid 40,
Insight 63 and the anchor are his set-piece. A player who is not told will roll at
1% for twenty minutes and conclude the sheet is broken, which is the actual harm
here. The scaling note carries the three-attacker arithmetic and points at Agyeman
as fixing the sum as well as the lane; EXPOSURE names the cause in its own prose.

Also recorded in the pass-3 log, deliberately NOT applied: the bimodality now has a
mechanism — both sides disable at half max HP, so each disable thins the return fire
and makes the next likelier, and first blood is a true coin worth 43 points of wipe
rate in the cut against 14 at six-vs-six. It reproduces exactly. It stays out of the
scenario because it comes from a reading tool with no guarded baseline, and a
GM-facing page may not carry a figure nobody can re-derive. The duller published
sentence is the checkable one. If that measurement gets a guarded home the paragraph
should be reframed around the first disabling blow, which is the better frame.

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

docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 > and clean soil, and there is no north. Two weeks ago a contractor felled the tree the
 > whole arrangement was pegged to.*
 
-**Status:** v0.8 — **absorbs all fixes from desk passes 1, 2 and 3** (eight, seven, eight)
+**Status:** v0.9 — **absorbs all fixes from desk passes 1, 2 and 3** (eight, seven, eight), plus the post-pass finding that the four-player cut fields three attackers, not four
 (`CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md`, GM chair, seed 4271). No clue is now behind a single roll,
 every roll in the document has a written miss, Act Four has a spine and its tell is
 ungated, and about 25 minutes of pre-written cuts are in the Pacing Note. **Still not
@@ -675,9 +675,10 @@ losing. Both of the first two are live in this scenario.
    will cross it without noticing. This is why Act Two says the column must never become a
    threat: not only because shooting refugees is the moral catastrophe of the case, but
    because the table will lose.
-4. **The four-player cut is a different game.** Without Okonkwo's rifle and breach suit
-   and without Pollard's shield, **three of the column wipe nearly half of all parties** and
-   six wipe virtually every one:
+4. **The four-player cut is a different game.** Without Okonkwo's rifle and breach suit and
+   without Pollard's shield — and with **Ashcroft carrying no weapon at all, so the cut is
+   three effective attackers rather than four** — **three of the column wipe nearly half of
+   all parties** and six wipe virtually every one:
 
    | Four-player cut fights | Hurt | Down | Wiped | Deaths/run |
    |---|---|---|---|---|
@@ -833,8 +834,17 @@ Four, Ashcroft the Close.
 as long as that takes. Three years older than his birthday says, and does not discuss it.*
 
 - **At the table:** Transposition 63, Anomaly Lore 63, Insight 63, Listen 63, Dodge 63.
-- **He carries no weapon.** That is on the sheet on purpose and the GM must not fix it.
-  An anchor holding a door has both hands full.
+- **He carries no weapon, and he is not an attacker.** That is on the sheet on purpose —
+  an anchor holding a door has both hands full — and the GM must not quietly fix it by
+  handing him a pistol. But it has a consequence that was missed for several drafts and is
+  not allowed to be a surprise: **his sheet has no weapon and no unarmed skill, so an attack
+  from him is a 1% roll.** He carries Firearm (Pistol) 43 and nothing to fire.
+  - **TELL HIS PLAYER BEFORE THE GAME.** Not as an apology — as the brief. Dominic does not
+    win fights; he keeps people filed while other people fight. **Dodge 63, First Aid 40,
+    Insight 63, and the anchor** are his set-piece, and they are plenty. A player who is not
+    told will roll at 1% for twenty minutes and conclude, reasonably, that the sheet is
+    broken.
+  - This is why he is never the right answer to "who shoots".
 - **Key relationship:** the department holds the other half of his cut school tie. He is
   the only agent who already understands, in his body, what it means to peg an
   arrangement to an object — which is exactly what was done to the Sike Head oak.
@@ -958,6 +968,11 @@ twice.*
   nothing. If the table wants a shooter, substitute **Joseph Agyeman** `pc_agyeman`
   (Firearm (Pistol) 58, Spot 58, Insight 58, Tradecraft 58) for Okonkwo rather than
   adding a seventh lane.
+  - ⚠ **The four-player cut is three effective attackers, not four.** Ashcroft is not one
+    (see his entry), so the cut fights with Renshaw and Bhattacharya on compact pistols and
+    Braithwaite on a knife. **That is a quarter of the party out of any fight**, and it is a
+    large part of why EXPOSURE says violence at four players is party-ending. Substituting
+    Agyeman fixes the arithmetic as well as the lane.
 - **Never drop Braithwaite.** Xenology (Baseline) is the only test that works. If a
   player insists on a sheet that hasn't got it, hand the lane to **Dr Chidi Nkemdirim**
   `pc_nkemdirim` and accept that Act Four gets harder, or give the understudy a visible

docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_3.md

@@ -258,6 +258,35 @@ conditional target moved onto the countdown row where a GM will actually see it;
 result for reading the child; and the verified bimodality paragraph, with the focus-arm claim
 dropped.
 
+## POST-PASS — two findings from another session, handled differently
+
+**1. Ashcroft is not an attacker, and the cut is three. APPLIED in v0.9.** Reading the two
+narrated fights showed Dominic attacking at `vs 1`, four times. Confirmed against the sheet
+rather than the log: `weapons: []`, and his only combat skill is Firearm (Pistol) 43 with
+nothing to fire. So the four-player cut fights with Renshaw and Bhattacharya on compact
+pistols and Braithwaite on a knife — **a quarter of the party out of any fight.**
+
+A defect I introduced. *"He carries no weapon, and the GM must not fix it"* was written as
+characterisation and never checked against a fight. The fix is to **say it, not repair it**:
+his player is told before the game that Dodge, First Aid, Insight and the anchor are his
+set-piece, the scaling note states the three-attacker arithmetic, and EXPOSURE names it as
+part of why violence at four players is party-ending. Arming him would have cost the
+character for a problem that was really a briefing failure.
+
+**2. The bimodality has a mechanism — VERIFIED, deliberately NOT published.** Both sides
+disable at half max HP, so every disable thins the return fire and makes the next likelier;
+nothing pulls the fight back toward the middle once it tips. First blood is a true coin in
+the cut and worth **43 points of wipe rate** (49.7% / 50.3% at mean round 1.7 → 23.1% against
+66.5% wipes), against a 14-point swing at six-vs-six. It reproduces exactly here.
+
+**It stays out of the scenario for now, and the reason is the point.** It comes from
+`tools/first-blood.mjs`, a reading tool with no guarded baseline — and this house's rule is
+that a GM-facing page may not carry a figure that cannot be re-derived. The published
+"decided by round five" numbers came out of the guarded lineage and can be checked by anyone
+who doubts them. **"Round five is where it becomes legible, not where it happens" is the
+better sentence, and it is not yet a citable one.** If the measurement gets a guarded home,
+reframe the paragraph around the first disabling blow.
+
 ## What three passes have now confirmed
 
 - **The handout and failure-case layer is the strongest thing in the document.** CG-H01's