docs: desk playtest 11 — the fight the players choose

The last of the original four untested branches, played: a party that opens
fire at the Act Three swap. Seed 7311 for the played fight, 2000 runs at
seed 11 for the distribution around it.

The party survives the fight and the document does not survive the aftermath.
Six findings:

1. Two blocks two hundred lines apart specify two different fights for the
   same trigger. "Use three" is a five-round skirmish that kills nobody
   (0.1% wiped); the mixed force it should name takes 21 rounds and buries
   an agent (8.3% wiped, 0.97 deaths). The mild one predates the measurement.
2. "Forty-one" appears sixteen times and is load-bearing arithmetic. A fight
   moves the count and the handout in the players' hands does not.
3. Ivy is unplaced in the one scene that decides whether the Close happens.
4. A taken PC gets six lines; a dead one gets nothing, at a mean of 0.97 per
   fight in a convention one-shot.
5. A fight in Act Three ends Act Three. Say which three things are lost.
6. The party shooting the thing while it wears the anchor — found by the
   concurrent session, verified here: Transposition 63 is Ashcroft's alone
   and the other five are on the 1% floor, so killing it leaves a 4.90%
   chance anybody opens a door home, and no Close.

Every figure checked against tools/pack-tables-baseline.json rather than
recalled. 20 guards green.

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

docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_11.md

@@ -0,0 +1,242 @@
+# CLEAN GROUND — desk playtest 11 (the table that shoots)
+
+**Scenario version:** v0.21, at commit 4b491b1
+**Date:** 13 September 2026
+**Method:** the last of the original four untested branches, played. A party that opens fire
+at the Act Three swap, resolved honestly through `runFight` at a 400-round cap — **seed
+7311** for the played fight, 2000 runs at seed 11 for the distribution around it. Six
+players, the declared cast.
+
+**Why this pass.** Ten passes closed with *a fight the players choose* still unplayed, and it
+is the one branch dice alone cannot reach: it needs a table that decides to shoot. So this
+pass supplies the decision and rolls everything after it. It is also the first pass to run
+the fight since v0.16 measured what one costs and v0.21 rewrote the Close's failure case.
+
+**Verdict: the party survives the fight and the document does not survive the aftermath. Two
+blocks two hundred lines apart tell a GM to run two different fights for the same trigger,
+and nothing anywhere covers what the valley looks like at dawn once they have.**
+
+---
+
+## The fight, played
+
+Act Three, the swap fails in front of everybody, and the party fires into the column the
+hollow man was standing in.
+
+```
+  six agents vs six hollow men + two of the column          seed 7311, cap 400
+  16 rounds · 5 of 6 hurt · 3 down · 2 DEAD · 3 standing · party won
+```
+
+And the distribution it came from, 2000 runs at seed 11:
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| Mean agents dead | **0.97** |
+| Mean rounds | **23.2** |
+| Party wiped | 8.3% |
+
+**The party usually wins and usually buries somebody.** At three to four minutes a round —
+still an estimate, still unmeasured at a real table — 23 rounds is **70 to 93 minutes**,
+against an Act Three budgeted at fifty that already carries a twenty-minute peg bomb.
+
+---
+
+## ⚠ FINDING 1 — two blocks, two hundred lines apart, specify two different fights
+
+**"What to do instead of a fight", at the foot of EXPOSURE:**
+
+> **If they fire on the column, do not soften it. Use three, resolve it honestly**, and let
+> the survivors keep walking north past them.
+
+**"The fight above is not the fight the table will have", added in v0.16:**
+
+> The trigger is the ordinary one — a hollow man tries the swap in Act Three, fails in front
+> of everybody, and the party fires into the column it is standing in… **Two is the honest
+> default.**
+
+Those are not the same fight, and the difference is the whole finding:
+
+| What the GM is told to run | Hurt | Down | Wiped | Deaths/run | Median rounds |
+|---|---|---|---|---|---|
+| **"Use three"** — three of the column, alone | 1.88 of 6 | 0.40 | **0.1%** | 0.16 | 5 |
+| **Six hollow men + two of the column** | 5.01 of 6 | 2.79 | **8.3%** | 0.97 | 21 |
+
+**One is a skirmish that ends in five rounds and kills nobody. The other takes an act and
+buries an agent.** A GM who reads the instruction at the foot of EXPOSURE runs the first; a
+GM who reads the block at the top runs the second; and the trigger is the same beat.
+
+- **The mild one omits the six at the back**, who are the reason the party is shooting. The
+  hollow man that just tried to climb into a colleague is one of them, and it does not stop
+  being in the scene because the instruction only counts refugees.
+- ⚠ **This is mine, and it is the v0.16 pattern again.** I added the mixed-fight block and
+  never reconciled it with the instruction two hundred lines below that already answered the
+  same question. Desk pass 7 found the same shape — v0.16 wrote the trigger into EXPOSURE
+  and never wrote EXPOSURE into the trigger — and this is the other half of it: the new block
+  never looked at what the old one said.
+- **Fix direction:** one of them is wrong and it is the old one. *"Use three"* predates the
+  measurement. Delete the number, point at the mixed rows, and keep the good half of that
+  sentence — *let the survivors keep walking north past them* is the best line in the
+  aftermath and it is the only one.
+
+---
+
+## ⚠ FINDING 2 — forty-one is load-bearing arithmetic and the fight changes it
+
+**"Forty-one" appears sixteen times.** It is the almanac handout's printed count —
+*Counted this morning: forty-one* — it is the distance in miles on every line of both pages,
+it is the moral weight of cancelling (*forty-one living people*), and it is the number the
+Close's decision is taken over.
+
+**A party that fires on the column kills some of them.** The played fight ran two of the
+column into the ground; the mild version kills up to three. **Nothing in the document says
+the count has moved**, and the count is in the players' hands on a printed sheet.
+
+- **The handout does not update.** H03a is given in Act Two. If the fight happens in Act
+  Three, the table is holding a piece of paper that says forty-one while they can see it is
+  not. That is either the best accident in the scenario or an unhandled error, and the
+  document should decide which.
+- **It is the best accident in the scenario, and it should be written as one.** The almanac
+  is a record kept by somebody who counts every morning. **Ivy will count again tomorrow and
+  write a different number** — and the handout in the players' hands becomes a document about
+  what they did, without anybody saying so.
+- **The Close's arithmetic moves too.** Cancelling kills thirty-nine, not forty-one, and
+  *they already killed two*. A table that has shot people arrives at "the forty-one are not
+  killed, exactly" having already killed two of them, and the scene is different.
+
+---
+
+## ⚠ FINDING 3 — Ivy is unplaced in the one scene that decides whether the Close happens
+
+EXPOSURE says what she does *before* the shooting:
+
+> Ivy holds the line by consent and will spend it to stop a firefight; **she is one woman
+> against a column that has met armed men before.**
+
+**And then nothing.** She is not placed in the fight, not named as a target or a non-target,
+and not accounted for afterwards. Every one of those matters, because **the Close is her
+scene** — she walks south, she asks the question, and v0.21 gave the whole act a failure
+case built around her being dead.
+
+- **A GM running this honestly has to decide, mid-firefight, whether the woman standing
+  between two armed groups is in the target pool.** That decision changes the last
+  twenty-five minutes of the session and the document leaves it to the moment.
+- **She should not be a target, and the reason is not mercy.** She walked *toward* the guns
+  to stop this, which puts her in front of the column rather than in it — and the scenario
+  needs her alive far more than it needs the honesty of a random roll. Say so, once,
+  explicitly, and let the GM stop worrying about it.
+- v0.21's dead-Ivy failure case should stay regardless — she can die elsewhere, and a party
+  that shoots *her* deliberately has made a choice the document should still cover.
+
+---
+
+## ⚠ FINDING 4 — a taken PC gets six lines and a dead one gets nothing
+
+Act Four, for a PC the understudy takes:
+
+> **If a PC is taken:** hand that player the understudy sheet and a private note. **They keep
+> playing. Do not sideline them**, and do not let it run past twenty minutes.
+
+That is exactly right, and v0.21 added six more lines about what it means when the PC is
+Ashcroft. **There is nothing anywhere for a PC who simply dies** — and dying is far commoner:
+a mean of **0.97 agents per fight**, against a taken PC's 40.7% of one beat in one branch.
+
+- **This is a convention one-shot.** The played fight killed two agents in Act Three, which
+  leaves two players with **ninety minutes and no character**, in a slot they paid for.
+- The scenario already has the machinery: **the duty roster has sixteen agents** and the
+  cordon is on the real side. A replacement can walk through the seam in the time it takes
+  to hand over a sheet.
+- **Fix direction:** one paragraph. Registry sends the next name on the roster, they arrive
+  at the seam within the hour, and they arrive *knowing nothing* — which gives the table
+  somebody to explain the case to out loud, and the GM a free recap at exactly the point a
+  four-hour session needs one.
+
+---
+
+## FINDING 5 — the fight's real cost is the act, and the Pacing Note is now nearly right
+
+v0.16 added the instruction to take every cut the moment dice come out. Measured against
+this pass: **23.2 rounds, 70–93 minutes, in a fifty-minute act.** Taking every remaining cut
+saves about twenty. **The act still cannot hold it**, and the Pacing Note's own words —
+*"if a fight starts, none of this is enough"* — turn out to be exactly accurate.
+
+- That is not a defect; it is a correct warning that could be one sentence more useful.
+  **The honest instruction is that a fight in Act Three ends Act Three**, and the northern
+  seam, the depot and the telling-Ivy scene are all gone. The GM should be told which three
+  things they are losing rather than left to discover it at 2:30.
+
+---
+
+---
+
+## ⚠ FINDING 6 — the cooperation block has no answer for the party shooting the door
+
+*Found by the concurrent session (b5) while playing the anchor branch, and verified here
+against `roster.mjs` and `content.mjs` before it was written down.*
+
+v0.21's new block at 1008–1027 handles the thing taking Ashcroft, and it handles it well —
+**it holds the door, correctly and patiently, because that is what the file says an anchor
+does.** But every line of it **assumes the party lets it**: *do not have it sabotage the
+crossing*, *play the gratitude*.
+
+**The obvious player move is not there.** A party that has just watched this thing take a
+colleague, that knows REHEARSED means it acts before whoever it copies, and that does **not**
+know it needs them alive, shoots it. Line 1301 covers killing it in the first ten minutes
+wearing Prichard's face — pre-crossing, and Act Two carries on. **Between that precedent and
+the cooperation block there is nothing.**
+
+**And the cost is exact arithmetic, which is why it wants a paragraph rather than a shrug.**
+Transposition is Ashcroft's alone:
+
+| | Transposition |
+|---|---|
+| Ashcroft | **63** |
+| Bhattacharya, Renshaw, Braithwaite, Pollard, Okonkwo | *untrained — the 1% floor* |
+
+**Five agents, one attempt each, is a 4.90% chance that anybody gets a door open.** Shooting
+it strands the party on the far side with the seam closing, and **the Close cannot happen,
+because cancellation is a Registry act and nobody is back through to perform it.**
+
+- The block already reasons in exactly this register two lines further down — *"Not Scent.
+  Scent's base chance is 0 and the 1% floor is all anybody has, so it is not a route — it is
+  a joke at the table's expense."* **The shape of the answer is already on the page.** It
+  simply never considers the party removing Ashcroft themselves.
+- ⚠ **Same defect as FINDING 1, and as pass 7's, and as pass 10's.** Facts correct in three
+  separate places that have never been stood next to each other — here the new block, the
+  statblock line at 1479, and the Act Two kill-it precedent at 1301.
+- **Fix direction:** one bullet inside the block. If they shoot it, they have shot the way
+  home; play the five 1% rolls honestly and let the table watch what 4.90% looks like; and
+  the GM should know **before** Act Four that this is where that branch ends, rather than
+  finding out with ninety minutes left.
+
+## Timing
+
+| Act | Budget | This pass |
+|---|---|---|
+| Three, with the fight | 50 | **~115** |
+| Three, with the fight and every cut taken | 50 | ~95 |
+
+---
+
+## Fix list
+
+1. **⚠ Delete "use three" and point at the mixed rows.** *(EXPOSURE, "What to do instead of a
+   fight")* It predates the measurement and it contradicts the block two hundred lines above
+   it. Keep *let the survivors keep walking north past them*.
+2. **⚠ Say that the count moves, and make the handout do the work.** Ivy counts every
+   morning; tomorrow she writes a smaller number, and the sheet in the players' hands becomes
+   a record of what they did.
+3. **⚠ Place Ivy in the firefight — out of it, and say so once.** She walked toward the guns,
+   which puts her in front of the column rather than in it. The Close needs her.
+4. **⚠ Write the dead PC.** A mean of one agent per fight, ninety minutes left, and nothing
+   on the page. Registry sends the next name on the roster; they arrive knowing nothing,
+   which buys the table a recap.
+5. **Name what a fight in Act Three costs**, rather than only that it costs: the northern
+   seam, the depot, and telling Ivy.
+6. **⚠ Answer the party that shoots the thing wearing the anchor.** *(Act Four, inside the
+   1008–1027 block)* The whole block assumes cooperation. Killing it is the obvious move and
+   it leaves five untrained agents on a 4.90% chance of opening a door, with no Close.
+   *(Found by session b5; verified here.)*
+
+**Still untested after eleven passes:** the run with human beings. **That is the whole list
+now** — every branch the desk can reach has been reached.