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Desk playtest 8: the cold read, and the outcome nobody wrote

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Two halves: the document taken as a GM meeting it thirty minutes before a
slot, measured rather than impressioned; and an honest session, six players,
seed 5108, nothing forced. Three versions of fixes had landed since anything
was played, every one written by somebody who already knew the document.

1. The climactic roll has three outcomes and the document describes two.
   opposedContestFor returns taken, resisted outright, and unsettled. The
   taken and unsettled figures are printed and both reproduce exactly, so the
   source has always been right. Resisted outright appears nowhere — 48.1%
   against the default target, 74.3% against an Ashcroft who refused, which
   v0.17 established is what most tables have. It is the single most likely
   result of the scenario's climax. Worse than an omission: the paragraph
   below is headed WHEN STEP 5 COMES TO NOTHING, is entirely about unsettled,
   and carries the beat's only read-aloud — so a GM whose agent simply won
   finds text written for a different outcome. Enumerated over all 10,000
   roll pairs; no seed.
2. EXPOSURE's "five things" are six and run 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 5. Introduced in
   my own v0.16 (aa3ae24) and survived two versions, five guard additions and
   a peer's sweep. The insertion anchored on the end of item 4's block, which
   sits before item 5 in the file; asserting a unique match protects against
   editing the wrong text and not at all against inserting in the wrong
   place. No guard can see this and none should be built for it — seven
   passes of dice found nothing here because dice never read a heading.
3. EXPOSURE is 3,176 words, 18% of the document, 2.5x the act it sits inside,
   in a scenario whose thesis is that the fight is not the point. Recorded as
   a judgement, not a defect: nothing in it is padding and I wrote the largest
   block of it. But it is sixteen minutes about the encounter the document
   exists to prevent.
4. An open question the fixes already answered — Xenology has not been on the
   critical path since v0.14 un-gated the tell, and pass 6 ran the act with it
   and the Psychology both failed.
5. check-outcomes measured 85% of sessions hitting an unwritten special; the
   next honest session hit one, on Act Four's Psychology. One session is not a
   rate, but the number describes something real.

Working: v0.17's Swinburne special fired and is right. No broken cross-
references; every counted claim but EXPOSURE's checks out. Swap failed a
third time running and Ashcroft refused a third time — both what the numbers
predict, recorded so the next pass reads no streak into them.

Five fixes listed, unapplied. npm run check: 19 guards pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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co-authored by Claude Opus 5
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# CLEAN GROUND — desk playtest 8 (the cold read, and the outcome nobody wrote)
**Scenario version:** v0.18, at commit 8a051f7
**Date:** 13 September 2026
**Method:** two halves. **A cold read** — the document taken as a GM meeting it thirty
minutes before a slot, measured rather than impressioned: section sizes, counted claims,
cross-references, and whether the STATUS block still tells the truth. **And an honest
session**, six players, seeded roller, **seed 5108**, nothing forced. Earlier passes: 4271,
9314, 5580/7731, 6142, 8815, 3319, 7742.
**Why this pass.** Three versions of fixes (v0.16, v0.17, v0.18) have landed since anything
was played, and every one of them was written by somebody who already knew the document.
The only thing left before a human run is whether a GM who does *not* know it can run it
from the page — which no dice pass can reach and which a human run will punish first.
**Verdict: the most likely outcome of the scenario's climactic roll is not written down.
It is not the one that is taken and it is not the one that is unsettled; it is the agent
simply winning, which happens 48.1% of the time against the default target, and the
document describes the other two and not that one.**
---
## The rolls, in order
```
seed 5108 — no forcing
ACT ONE
Bhattacharya Research — Corrigan's paperwork 92 vs 63 FAILURE
Braithwaite Medicine — the body 87 vs 53 FAILURE
Renshaw Persuade — Swinburne 8 vs 63 SPECIAL
Pollard Spot — the stump 39 vs 53 success
Bhattacharya Knowledge — the squared notch 53 vs 63 success
ACT TWO
Renshaw Persuade — the column 52 vs 63 success
Pollard Spot — the same six at the back 86 vs 53 FAILURE
Ashcroft Insight — it is offered, not remembered 19 vs 63 success
→ ASHCROFT REFUSES THE OFFER (third pass running)
ACT THREE
Bhattacharya Anomaly Lore — the sky has not moved 20 vs 63 success
Bhattacharya Research — RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN) 49 vs 63 success
Ashcroft Anomaly Lore — what a peg is 30 vs 63 success
hollow man swap 75 rolled 56 success vs Okonkwo 55 rolled 17 success
→ resisting. OKONKWO HOLDS. Third pass running.
ACT FOUR
Braithwaite Xenology (Baseline) — the understudy 28 vs 53 success
Renshaw Insight — it is word-perfect 38 vs 63 success
Renshaw Psychology — it thinks it is the file 5 vs 40 SPECIAL
COUNTDOWN STEP 5
understudy 75 rolled 23 success vs Okonkwo 55 rolled 19 success
→ RESISTING WINS OUTRIGHT. Nobody is taken.
```
**The luckiest seed in eight passes, and it walked straight into the gap.** Nobody is taken,
which is neither of the two outcomes Act Four writes.
---
## ⚠ FINDING 1 — the climactic roll has three outcomes and the document describes two
Step 5 of the countdown is the moment the case has been building to. `opposedContestFor`
returns three things, and only two of them are on the page.
Enumerated over all 10,000 roll pairs — no seed, reproducible from the rule:
| Step 5 against | Taken | **Resisted outright** | Unsettled |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Okonkwo, POW×5 55 — the default target** | 40.7% | **48.1%** | 11.3% |
| Braithwaite, 60 | 37.6% | **52.4%** | 10.0% |
| Ashcroft, 85, refused | 21.9% | **74.3%** | 3.8% |
| Ashcroft, 85 → 42, accepted | 48.7% | **36.8%** | 14.5% |
**The taken column and the unsettled column are both printed in the document and both
reproduce exactly**, so the source is right and has always been right. The middle column
appears nowhere. Against the default target it is **the single most likely result of the
scenario's climax**, and against an Ashcroft who refused — which is what most tables will
have, as v0.17 now says — it is **three outcomes in four**.
- ⚠ **And the framing makes it worse than an omission.** The paragraph under the table is
headed *"WHEN STEP 5 COMES TO NOTHING"* and is entirely about **unsettled**: *"the rule
returns unsettled, which is not the agent winning"*. It then gives the one piece of
read-aloud the beat has — *for a moment it is wearing the wrong face*. A GM whose agent
simply **won** has come to nothing too, finds the only nearby text, and reads a
passage written for a different outcome. The document warns against confusing the two and
then supplies nothing for the commoner one.
- **This is not a rules problem.** The rule is right, the tie goes to the resisting side,
and GM ESSENTIALS says so. It is that the scenario priced the reach in *how often it
succeeds* and never wrote the far likelier case where a person holds.
- **Fix direction, and it wants to be good rather than merely present.** A clean resist is
the only moment in the case where somebody beats the thing on their own, and it should not
be a shrug. The material is already there: the understudy has practised for thirty years
and it is **not stupid** — it takes the easiest file. Being the file it could not open is
the one win the party gets all night.
---
## ⚠ FINDING 2 — EXPOSURE's five things are six, and they run 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 5
Introduced in **v0.16 (aa3ae24)** — my own commit — and survived two versions, five guard
additions and a peer's sweep without anybody noticing.
```
999 #### The five things a GM needs from that table
1001 1. Do not fix the understudy
1006 2. Adding hollow men buys rounds, not danger
1013 3. The column is the lethal encounter
1020 4. The four-player cut is a different game
1070 6. A fight costs the session <- inserted here
1096 5. Their sheets read twice as effective as they are
```
The insertion anchored on the end of item 4's block, which in the file sits **before** item
5 rather than after it. The edit asserted a unique match and got one; a unique match
protects against editing the wrong text and not at all against inserting in the wrong place.
- **No guard can see this and none should be built for it.** It is a numbered list in prose.
What it argues for is the cold read itself: seven passes of dice found nothing here,
because dice never read a heading.
- The heading also still says **five**.
---
## FINDING 3 — EXPOSURE is 18% of the document and larger than any act
Measured, not felt:
| Section | Words | |
|---|---|---|
| **EXPOSURE** | **3,176** | 18% of the document |
| Act Two | 1,635 | the longest act |
| Act Four | 1,267 | **the act EXPOSURE sits inside** |
| Act One | 1,127 | |
| Act Three | 1,050 | |
| GM ESSENTIALS | 605 | |
| **Whole document** | **17,776** | ~90 minutes to read once, carefully |
EXPOSURE is **two and a half times the act it is filed in**, in a scenario whose stated
thesis is that the fight is not the point. Its own heading concedes the filing is wrong —
*"Read before Act Two, not before Act Four."*
- **This is a judgement, not a defect, and it is recorded as one.** Every figure in there was
added because a pass found a GM would get something wrong without it, and I added the
largest single block of it in v0.16. Nothing in it is padding.
- **But 3,176 words is sixteen minutes**, and it is sixteen minutes about an encounter the
document spends its whole length telling the GM not to have. A convention GM with thirty
minutes of prep who reads EXPOSURE has read half their prep budget on the fight they are
being told to avoid.
- **Fix direction:** not deletion. A **hundred-word summary at the top of EXPOSURE that a GM
can read instead**, with the body left as reference for the GM who has time or whose table
has already reached for a gun. The five — six — numbered lessons are nearly that already;
they are just at the bottom, after the tables.
---
## FINDING 4 — an open question the document has already answered
*"Scent is unusable... I moved Act Four's working test to Xenology (Baseline), which puts
Braithwaite on the critical path. Worth deciding whether you want the whole scenario's one
reliable test sitting on a single sheet."*
**It no longer is.** v0.14 made the tell un-gated — *"Anyone who examines him properly finds
this, with no roll"* — and desk pass 6 ran the act with **both** Xenology and Psychology
failed and it held. The question was answered by the fixes and never closed, so it is still
sitting in Open Questions asking the author to decide something that has been decided.
- Small, but it is the section where a reader is told what still needs their attention, and
a stale item there costs more than its word count.
- The other open item — *how hard do you want the PC-replacement, default NPC-first* — is
genuinely open and should stay.
---
## FINDING 5 — the guard's 85% landed on the first honest pass after it was built
Renshaw rolled **5 against Psychology 40 — a special** — on a beat that states a failure case
and nothing above it. `check-outcomes` measures the chance of a session hitting a special on
a beat with nothing written at **85%**, and the very next session hit one.
- **Not evidence of a rate**; one session is one session, and the 85% is enumerated from the
rule rather than counted from play. It is a demonstration that the number describes
something real.
- The obvious special here is worth writing: *it is not pretending to be human, it thinks it
is the file* is already the best line in Act Four, and a special should buy **which file it
thinks it is** — that it corrects the agents on Prichard's service history, in the tone of
a man who has read his own record more recently than they have.
---
## What worked
**v0.17's Swinburne special fired, and it is right.** Renshaw rolled an 8. She produced the
note, walked them to the stump, and talked on the way — the dog in June, the vet who wrote
*suspected poisoning*. That is four months of the case's history arriving in Act One because
somebody rolled well, and it is exactly the shape GM ESSENTIALS now prescribes: portable,
private or early. **The fix pass 7 asked for works and needs nothing.**
**The cold read found no broken cross-references.** All six pointers (*GM ESSENTIALS has*,
*EXPOSURE has*, *See Act Two*) resolve to sections that exist. Every counted claim except
EXPOSURE's checks out: three things, three clues, four beats, six revelations, five acts —
all correct.
**Third pass running the swap has failed** (75 against POW×5 55, and the tie goes to the
resister), and **third running Ashcroft has refused.** Both are what the numbers predict —
refusing needs a 63% Insight — and neither is a defect. Recorded so the next pass does not
read a streak into them.
---
## Timing
Not re-measured. Passes 4, 5 and 7 own the clock, and this pass forced nothing and cut
nothing that would move it. Act One ran long on improvisation again — two failures and an
unwritten special — but within the ±5 the last three passes have shown.
---
## Fix list
1. **⚠ Write the outcome where the agent wins.** *(Countdown, Act Four)* **48.1%** against the
default target, **74.3%** against an Ashcroft who refused — the likeliest result of the
scenario's climax, and the only moment all night somebody beats the thing on their own.
Give it read-aloud of its own, and stop the *"COMES TO NOTHING"* paragraph from being the
nearest text to an outcome it is not about.
2. **⚠ Fix EXPOSURE's list: six items, in order, under a heading that says six.**
3. **Put a hundred-word summary at the top of EXPOSURE.** 3,176 words is sixteen minutes about
the encounter the document exists to prevent. Do not cut the body; give the GM in a hurry
somewhere to stop.
4. **Close the stale open question about Xenology.** v0.14 un-gated the tell and pass 6 proved
it; Braithwaite has not been on the critical path for four versions.
5. **Write the special on Act Four's Psychology** — which file it thinks it is.
**Still untested after eight passes:** a fight the players choose; Ashcroft accepted *and*
taken; a hollow man that succeeds at the swap, now failed three times running; and the human
run, which is still the only thing that can settle whether a GM who did not write this can
run it.