Play PAPER HARBOUR with the criminal, and fix R-246

A pier that closed in 1974, a beacon still transmitting, and a probationer recruited
out of a city with a caution the department has quietly lost. The generator's gap —
somebody uses that agent's name before it is given — landed on him in phase 2, and he
held it on Fast Talk 14 against 48 while the Field Lead missed the read.

The case turned on a warrant card: the keepers of the ground want relieving by somebody
official enough to take the duty on, and every agent carries exactly that. Bargain 27,
favourable, rolled 33 — impression -1 to +1. The one unambiguously his moment was the
log the first team locked in behind them: 11 against Sleight of Hand 50.

R-246: a fumbled greeting cost nothing. contactOutcomes has said fumble/signal -1 since
the social pillar was built, and impression was adjusted only inside the `offer` branch
— so the -1 was computed on every botched greeting and thrown away. Impression now
falls on a fumble at any stage and still only rises on an offer; the narrower fix
matters because read's delta counts FACTS LEARNED, not standing, so applying the delta
always would have paid the team impression for doing research.

Also logged: a probationary criminal is out-sneaked by a career Field Lead (47 to 60)
because trade skills use the agency tier bands — defensible, flagged, not changed. And
one invented step of my own: I rolled Transposition to get them home after the
extraction phase had already put them out.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
slaguru666
2026-08-11 22:35:37 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent b8430c284b
commit c60485de72
2 changed files with 72 additions and 2 deletions
+62
View File
@@ -4764,3 +4764,65 @@ ad-hoc rolls passed a rating and a category but no `skillFamilyId` — the same
R-222 found in `resolveLegDialog`, reproduced by hand in a test harness. Re-rolled with
the skill named, the tick appeared and the improvement roll landed: **Medicine 56 vs
42% → +6 → 48%.** The rule was right; the probe was not naming its skill.
## PAPER HARBOUR — the criminal
A pier that closed in 1974. A Custodian team crossed nineteen hours ago on a routine
survey and their beacon is still transmitting; three of the four are still alive and
the fourth is what the beacon is. The team: **Sennen Roake**, probationary, recruited
out of a city with a caution the department has quietly lost — plus a Field Lead and a
Technical Officer.
The generator's gap, unprompted: *one agent has a connection to this place that the
assigning officer either missed or did not miss, and it surfaces when somebody uses
that agent's name before it is given.* Phase 2 forced that encounter.
**He held it.** Fast Talk 14 against 48 — a clean success — and Sowande missed the read
on 42 against Insight 32. Nobody on his team knows. The case's own pressure, produced by
the tables and resolved by the one skill a criminal has instead of composure.
**The phases went badly and the ramp is why.** 52%, then −5%, then Difficult at 26%,
then −15%. One success and three failures, Containment 10 → 7, and the window clock at
1. That is the retuned ramp doing exactly what it was retuned to do, on a team whose
best phase-lead skill was a Field Lead's Tradecraft 52.
**Then the case turned on a warrant card.** The keepers of the ground — twelve of them,
an arrangement none will describe — want *"to be relieved. Somebody, anybody, official
enough to take the duty on."* Every agent on the team is carrying exactly that, and the
probationer with the quietly-lost caution is the one who handed it over: Bargain 27,
favourable, rolled 33. **Impression −1 → +1.** He insulted them in their own language
and then gave them the first honest thing anyone had offered them in four generations.
And the one moment that was unambiguously his: the first team locked the log in behind
them, and he opened it on **11 against Sleight of Hand 50** with lock rakes and a master
key ring. The improvement rolls afterwards landed on Fast Talk and Sleight of Hand —
the only two things he actually did.
### R-246. A fumbled greeting cost nothing
`contactOutcomes` has said `fumble: { signal: -1 }` since the social pillar was built,
and impression was adjusted **only inside the `offer` branch**. So the −1 was computed
on every botched greeting and thrown away: a team could insult a group in their own
language all afternoon at no cost, and only a formal offer could ever move how they
were seen. Found by Roake fumbling a signal on 99 and the standing not moving.
Impression now falls on a fumble at any stage and still only rises on an offer. The
narrower fix matters: `read`'s delta counts **facts learned**, not standing, so "apply
the delta always" would have paid the team impression for doing research. Verified by
rolling until a fumble landed — 99, delta −1, impression 0 → −1, standing −1.
### Two notes on the trade, and one on my own play
**A probationary criminal is out-sneaked by a career Field Lead** — stealth 47 against
60 — because trade skills are rated on the agency tier bands. It is defensible (a
probationer is a probationer, and at officer tier the criminal would sit at 45–60) but
it is worth deciding deliberately: a burglar recruited last month has been picking locks
for fifteen years, and the argument for giving trades a tier-independent band for their
*core* is the same argument that says a newly recruited doctor is already a good doctor.
Left as it is; flagged rather than changed.
**I invented a step.** After the extraction phase resolved — *"you are out, but not
cleanly"* — I rolled Transposition for all three to get them home, and all three failed
on ratings of 1, 1 and 6. That was not a step the case had; the phase had already put
them out. Recorded because the rolls happened and the log should say they did not mean
anything.