diff --git a/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md b/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md index 7d552e2..8d81fb8 100644 --- a/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md +++ b/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md @@ -9,10 +9,10 @@ | | | |---|---| -| **Version** | **v0.13**, 13 September 2026 | +| **Version** | **v0.14**, 13 September 2026 | | **Can it be run?** | **Yes, from this document alone.** A GM with this file and the compendium can run it end to end. | | **Is it convention-ready?** | **Nearly.** The print pack is built (`CLEAN_GROUND_HANDOUTS.html`, held by `check-handouts`). What is missing is a run with human beings, and a slot. | -| **Playtesting** | Three desk passes, all fixes applied: `CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md` (GM chair, seed 4271), `_2.md` (Act Four stress, seed 9314), `_3.md` (player chair, contrarian, seed 5580). Twenty-three fixes plus one post-pass. | +| **Playtesting** | **Four desk passes, no human runs.** `_1.md` GM chair (seed 4271) · `_2.md` Act Four stress (9314) · `_3.md` player chair, contrarian (5580) · `_4.md` **the clock, against v0.13's recut timings** (6142). Twenty-eight fixes plus one post-pass. Pass 4 is the only one that describes the current timings; 1–3 ran against a 65-minute Act Two. | | **What it is** | A **convention one-shot**, decided 13 September 2026. It ends in the slot; there is no second session and the text must not promise one. | | **Where it runs** | **Contingency 2027 — Sunday 31 January 2027, afternoon** (slot 9), Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton. | | **Runtime** | **3h30 of play plus a 10-minute break — 3h40 wall clock**, which is the house budget. Act Two was cut from 65 minutes to 45 in v0.13 to get there. The **Pacing Note** carries a further 65 minutes of cuts; take them as the default. | @@ -176,9 +176,14 @@ written.** See Act Two's budget table. | **Act Three: drop the walk to the northern seam** | ~15 | Nothing. The lorry and the almanac already prove the loop | | **Act Two: the column's hospitality, once rather than twice** | ~5 | A little warmth. Take this one last, and only if the line's rest has already overrun | -**Running total: 65 minutes of cuts available against a 55-minute problem**, so there is -ten minutes of genuine slack for a table that talks — which is the first time this -scenario has had any. +**Running total: 65 minutes of cuts available against a 55-minute problem.** On paper that +is ten minutes of slack. **Plan against four.** + +Desk pass 4 ran v0.13 on a deliberately hostile seed — two fumbles, eight failures — took +two of the three cuts, and finished at **~3:46 against 3:40**, with the hospitality cut +still in hand. That is four minutes of margin plus one unspent cut, and it is the honest +number. Ten is what you get on a friendly seed, and a GM who plans against ten will find +out at the Close that they were planning against the wrong one. **Do not cut:** telling Ivy, the almanac pair, or the Close. They are the scenario. @@ -354,6 +359,20 @@ ever able to tell me. the players understand that an ordinary professional has been left holding this. - **Failure case:** if nobody asks for the note, Swinburne has a photocopy of it in a drawer because she was not satisfied with what she was told, and she will produce it. +- **On a FUMBLED Persuade with Swinburne** — she has buried a dog and been fobbed off once + already, and the above is written for a party who never asked, not for one that asked + badly. **She does not produce the photocopy. She produces the dog.** + - She walks them out to the stump and shows them where it died, and she does not speak on + the way. Handing a rude stranger a document is a favour; showing them the thing that + actually happened to her is not, and she is owed neither. + - **This is better staging than the drawer and the GM should not regret the fumble.** It + puts them at the stump early, on foot, in silence, with a woman who is not helping + them — and the felled oak is the scene the act is walking toward anyway. + - **H01 still reaches them, later and from the coroner.** It arrives in Act Two or at the + break as a faxed copy Registry forwards, by which point it **confirms rather than + reveals** — which costs the party nothing except the pleasure of having found it. + - *Desk pass 4, seed 6142: Renshaw fumbled this roll and the GM had to improvise + Swinburne helpfully producing the note anyway, which worked and was flat.* --- @@ -590,7 +609,13 @@ agents got what they wanted. - **THE OFFER — the anchor's beat, and it is not optional.** **Run it DURING the line's rest, while the other players are talking to Ivy** — that is where the twenty minutes came from, and it costs nothing because the table is occupied. Take Ashcroft's player - aside for one minute. The record offers him the cleanest version of the + aside for one minute. + - **Do not move this back to a quiet moment, and here is why.** It was originally its own + beat and was rescheduled in v0.13 purely to save time. The side-effect is better than + the reason: run mid-scene, **the offer has no audience**, and Ashcroft's player comes + back to a conversation that carried on without him. A man being quietly told he could + put the weight down, while the people he holds the door for do not notice he has gone, + is the whole character in one staging accident. **Keep it.** The record offers him the cleanest version of the lie: that he has always been the anchor for *this* valley, that the three years his body is older than his birthday were spent here, and that he may put the weight down now. **Accepting costs nothing in the moment, 2 Coherence at the Close, and one more thing he @@ -614,6 +639,18 @@ agents got what they wanted. that; let it be noticed or not. - **Say nothing further until a player speaks.** They offer water they cannot spare. `[CUS: Persuade — they will believe almost anything except that it is 2026]` + - ⏱ **On a SPECIAL or better, give something PORTABLE — never more conversation.** + This is a timing rule and a fairness rule at once. The rest has a clock (above), so a + good roll that buys extra talking is a good roll the clock then takes away, and desk + pass 4 found a player saying *"I rolled a 7 and got less time."* Hand over one of: + - **The almanac now** rather than at the line's departure — H03a early, which moves + Act Three's reveal forward and buys the GM room later. + - **A name from 1962** — Ivy's mother, or the man who carried the tent poles — which + Bhattacharya can look for in the depot paperwork in Act Three. + - **"The six at the back don't eat."** Said flatly, as a housekeeping detail, by + somebody who has stopped finding it strange. + - Each of those travels out of the scene. **The line still stands up on schedule and + the roll still paid** — which is the only arrangement where both are true. - **Ivy Hetherington** (b. 1948, aged 14 when she arrived) leads by consent. She has walked the valley since before the agents' parents were born and has an almanac of a journey she has never completed. @@ -632,7 +669,20 @@ carelessness — this column has done this before, and it has lost people doing --- -## Act Three — There is no north *(~50 min)* +## Act Three — There is no north *(~50 min, and read the next line before you trust that)* + +> ⏱ **This act has a twenty-minute bomb in it and the 50 does not include it.** If anybody +> fumbles Anomaly Lore on the depot entry, the text below sends them chasing the re-cut +> peg, and it says in terms that *a table will spend twenty minutes on it*. That is a real +> instruction and it should be obeyed — the silence of that failure teaches more than a +> correct roll. But 50 + 20 is 70, and the act is budgeted at 50. +> +> **So if that fumble happens, the northern-seam cut is no longer optional.** Take it the +> moment the fumble lands, not at the break. With the cut, a fumbled act runs ~55 and the +> session absorbs it. Without it, Act Three runs 70 and the Close pays. +> +> Desk pass 4 hit this fumble and came out even only because the cut had already been +> taken. Nothing in the act previously said the two were connected. **Beats** - **The evidence of the loop — three routes, with the almanac behind all of them.** diff --git a/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_4.md b/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_4.md index 2f40a21..503c17c 100644 --- a/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_4.md +++ b/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_4.md @@ -289,3 +289,31 @@ Numbered, prioritised, nothing rewritten here. **Not a fix, recorded as a result:** the unsettled countdown outcome, written blind in v0.12, fired on its first test via an aggressor fumble and needed nothing. Leave it alone. + +--- + +## POST-PASS — a correction to finding 2, found while applying it + +**Fix 2 above says the re-cut-the-peg fumble has "no timing guidance" and needs "a duration +and an ender". That was wrong, and I only found out by going to the text to change it.** + +The clause already carries both. It reads: *"a table will spend twenty minutes on it. **Let +them try it exactly once.** Cutting the notch does nothing whatsoever."* Twenty minutes is +the duration and trying it once is the ender. Both were there before this pass ran, and my +own simulation costed the chase at ten minutes — half what the document predicts. + +**So the finding was right about the symptom and wrong about the cause.** The problem is +not that the fumble is unbounded. It is that **the document knows the fumble costs twenty +minutes and the timing table does not**: Act Three is budgeted at 50, the text predicts +50 + 20, and nothing connects the fumble to the northern-seam cut that would pay for it. + +Applied as that instead: a timing warning at the head of Act Three saying the twenty +minutes exist, are deliberate, and make the seam cut compulsory the moment the fumble +lands. The clause itself is untouched — it was already right. + +**Kept as the pass's own lesson.** Pass 4 read that clause, formed a view about what it +lacked, and did not re-read it before writing the finding down. The finding then sat in a +committed document until the fix went to apply it. A playtest is a reading of the text, and +a reading made while looking for faults finds faults that are not there as readily as ones +that are — which is an argument for applying fixes against the source rather than against +the notes.