8 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 4d591f635d check-lethality: read the shared seam, not content.mjs
It imported NPCS directly, so once the bestiary moved into its own files it
measured 47 of 147 and printed OK. A guard blind to two thirds of what it
guards is not a guard, and this one failed silently — the worse kind.

Now reads collectSpecs(), the list check-creatures, make-portraits and
mj-queue already share. Scenario casts come in with the bestiary: they were
never measured, and they should have been, since the Act Three standoff
this repository publishes wipe rates for IS a scenario cast. 184 specs at
roughly 47ms each, about nine seconds.

Switched BEFORE re-recording, to prove the change moved nothing: the run
against the old baseline reported all 47 existing creatures fighting
exactly as recorded. The --update is then verifiably additive — 47 to 184,
137 added, 0 changed, 0 lost.

Still fail-open on arrival: an unbaselined creature is a note, not a
failure, so this printed "OK, 137 new" while 137 creatures were unguarded.
Left as the author wrote it rather than changed under a content drop, but
it is the same shape as the three classifier bugs in 00f6a1e and worth
closing.

First thing it found, invisible until now: march_stone is authored "it
kills perhaps one person a century" and measures 43.5% wipe, 2.72 of 4
down, over 22 rounds. naturalArmour 14 is the highest in the game — the
Apex tier is 7 — so the party cannot hurt it and it grinds them down. The
prose and the statblock describe different creatures.

All 23 guards pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-22 23:14:37 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 32ca982369 R-275: the harness had never read a creature's power
41 statblocks carry a POWER in their tactics and simulate.mjs read none of them,
so a redcap that ignores the cumulative defence penalty has been measured as a
creature that tires -- in check-lethality, in check-focus, and in every figure
published about it. The defect was not that the powers were unimplemented, it was
that nothing said they were not.

powers.mjs classifies all 41: 2 wired, 14 notSimulable with a stated reason, 25
not fight rules. check-powers refuses an unclassified POWER and refuses a
notSimulable without a reason -- and it does not test that the harness imports a
power, it fights the creature with and without and requires the two to disagree.

Moved: the courier 9.4% to 1.0% wiped (it attacks at half while carrying), the
redcap 0.7% to 0.9% (small, because these fights rarely spend a second defence).

ARGENT AND GULES was wired and then un-wired: it tripled the supporter's wipe rate
to 75.2% because the harness has no ground and applied the borough-ground condition
unconditionally. Same reason THE PULL is not wired. I had wired one and refused the
other on identical facts.

Lethality and focus re-recorded, bestiary regenerated.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 11:05:11 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 ad5fd57568 The harness was fighting a different animal (R-264)
Reading a narrated supporter fight showed it being hit on armR and head. It has wings; it
has never had arms. Three defects, all in the pipeline every published number comes from.

1. It located hits by species, not body plan — simulate.mjs read defender.species where
   the game writes spec.bodyPlan ?? spec.species ?? "baseline" into speciesProfile
   (build-packs.mjs:294). The barghest, kelpie and church grim were fought on two legs
   with arms, and the supporter with no wings, so the fight its tactics call the one the
   agents can win could not occur in a measured fight.
2. Armour was one scalar for the whole creature, and the harness's locations had no
   armour field. Bare wings, the grounded halving and the vital exemption — R-254 and
   R-255 — were invisible to every number. Worn armour was summed the same way, which put
   a stab vest on a cleaner's head.
3. Nothing was ever grounded: a wing could be ruined and the creature kept flying.

Fixed in the game's order — locate, then apply what that location carries, every term
imported from rules.mjs. A ruined wing calls groundedPlanFor and the wounds carry across
by severity through remapLocationDamage, the function _preUpdate uses.

A bug of mine no guard would have caught: remapLocationDamage returns { damage, moved,
rescaled } and my first draft passed the whole object where a damage map was expected, so
every wound a creature carried was forgiven the moment it came down. check-lethality would
have passed it — fewer wounds means a longer fight, which reads as a number moving, and
this commit moves numbers. Found by probing a landing by hand.

20 of 47 creatures moved, 18 deadlier and 2 less. The supporter goes 69.3% -> 25.1% wiped,
3.38 -> 2.16 down, second deadliest to fourth: it was being measured as a 30-hit-point
creature in uniform armour 9 that could not be grounded. The small rises elsewhere are the
party's armour no longer covering locations it never protected.

check-focus then caught the page overclaiming, which is what it is for: focus fire still
helps in all 30 but only 28 clear their own noise where 31 of 31 did. The guard was
asserting more than the page needs — the bestiary prints that count from the artifact and
cannot overstate it — so it now checks only what the page asserts outright, and the page
rewrote itself to "in 28 of them".

Both baselines re-recorded. Minor version, not a patch: the published numbers changed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 00:42:52 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 c0d33ee81d Hide 9, grounded 4, vital exempt — the borough is worth 56 points again
R-254 shipped the belly rule and called +6.4 points "modest on purpose". That read the
wrong statistic. +6.4 measured whether grounding helps; the question was whether the
borough still matters, and the gap between fighting the supporter on borough ground and
off it had fallen from 60.6 points to 44.9. Half damage from every departmental weapon is
meant to be the fight's central problem, and I had quietly taken sixteen points off it
while reporting a small number about something else. Same error as R-251.

Three changes that only work together:

  - hide 7 -> 9, restoring the weight on the axis that should hurt
  - grounded still halves it, 9 -> 4, which an ordinary round beats
  - exposedHideFor now takes the location's kind and leaves `vital` unhalved: a beast on
    its belly is not presenting its chest to the floor

Measured: 28.4% on borough ground flying, 68.4% grounded, 84.6% off it — a 56.2 point gap
against 44.9 before. Predicted 28.4 / 84.3 / 55.9 before building.

The composition of the three hide functions lives in prepareDerivedData where no test
could reach it, and check-anatomy's guard 6 is deliberately one-sided so it would not
have caught the vital losing its exemption. check-behaviour now composes the same
expression from the real supporter spec and the real tables. Negative-tested four ways:
removing the exemption, un-baring the wings, removing the halving, and inflating the hide
past what a round can beat each fail it with the right message.

Cost: the supporter goes from fifth to second deadliest creature in the book (2.84 -> 3.38
down, 46.8% -> 69.3% wiped). check-lethality refused the build until that row was
deliberately re-recorded.

BESTIARY.md printed the new hide and said nothing about it halving, because the body-plan
blurb predates the rule. The README said "eight guards" in three sentences above a
generated block listing nine. Both are the signature defect in prose: a number written
down that nothing reads. Both now generate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 23:15:35 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 97fe2704e8 Measure creatures over 2000 runs, not 200 (R-253)
R-252 established that a recorded figure carried several points of slack
at 200 runs and that only more runs narrows it. This is that.

Measured by taking every creature under four different base seeds and
looking at how far the four answers sat apart, which is the noise a GM
reading the bestiary is unknowingly trusting:

                   mean spread    worst creature
  200 runs          1.28 points     11.5 points
  2000 runs         0.36 points      2.7 points

The worst case is what mattered. One creature's published wipe rate
could be eleven points from the same creature rolled with different
dice, on a figure printed in docs/BESTIARY.md for somebody to plan an
evening around. Under three now.

It corrected 19 of 47 published figures, mean 0.35 points: the arrears
6% -> 8.9%, the supporter 44% -> 46.8%, the nuckelavee 13.5% -> 16%.
Each was a sampling artefact printed as a property.

The cost is the part worth recording, because it is why this was never
done. I guessed "maybe a minute of build time" when I suggested it,
which was wrong by a factor of thirty and would have been a fair reason
to say no:

  check-lethality alone   0.29s -> 1.88s
  whole nine-guard suite           2.55s

BESTIARY.md regenerates from the baseline, so its run count follows
automatically; its header now also says the seeds are derived per
creature, since "at seed 11" stopped being the whole truth in R-252.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 22:33:40 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 2dbea88d4b Seed the lethality sim per creature (R-252)
Each creature now derives its own seed from its key, FNV-1a mixed into
the base seed, instead of every one of them being measured against seed
11.

This is the second reading of the request and the one I had not tested.
What I checked before was position independence — whether a creature's
numbers depend on its neighbours — and that was already true and still
is: inserting a creature ahead of the barghest changes 0 of 47 existing
rows under the new scheme, same as the old. What was NOT true is that
each creature had its own dice. All forty-seven faced the same two
hundred sequences.

Measured, because the argument for doing it is better than the result:

                                  shared 11   per-creature
  mean wipe rate across bestiary     5.67%        5.67%
  mean agents down                   0.538        0.522
  rows changed                         --        34 of 47

Seed 11 was not biasing the book. There was no systematic luck to
remove, and the aggregate is unmoved to two decimal places. What the
change buys is decorrelation: the error in each row no longer comes from
the same draw as every other row.

The useful number fell out of the comparison rather than the change.
Individual creatures moved up to four points of wipe rate purely from
being handed different dice — the courier 3.5% -> 7.5%, the long walker
66.5% -> 62.5%, quarantine unit 84.5% -> 88.5%. That is the sampling
noise inside any single recorded figure at 200 runs, and it means these
numbers are an exact regression fingerprint and a loose description of a
creature at the same time. Only more runs narrows the second; more seeds
does not. R-252 says so on the page.

seedMode is recorded alongside the numbers and checked, because changing
how a seed is derived moves every row without changing SEED itself. A
baseline from the old scheme is now refused rather than compared against
this one silently and wrongly — verified by running the new code against
the old file before re-recording.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 22:28:45 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 e5dc9b5299 Hide does not grow on membrane (R-96)
Option H, measured before it was built. Losing a wing already mattered
once it happened — a grounded supporter was 40.5% to be killed against
9.3% for one still flying, a swing of thirty points. It almost never
happened: the wings carried the creature's own six points of heraldic
hide, so folding one meant beating armour six eight times over, and it
occurred in 9% of fights. The rule was reachable, not weak, and every
option that made grounding HURT more moved the win rate by under five
points because you cannot spend a state you never reach.

So the lever is the wing, not the consequence. A location may now be
`bare`: worn armour still covers it — barding a wing works exactly as
before — but the animal's own hide stops at the edge of the membrane.
The supporter's wings are bare, and it gets the toughness back where a
six-hundred-year-old record should carry it: hide 6 -> 7, CON 20 -> 36,
so 22 hit points become 30. STR and SIZ are untouched, so the damage
modifier stays +2d6.

Measured over 20,000 fights against the same four agents:

                        grounded    on borough    off borough
  before                     9%       12.5% win    85.6% win / 14.4% wiped
  after                     67%       22.1% win    83.5% win / 16.5% wiped

The wing shot becomes the play. Fighting it on borough ground stays a
losing proposition, so ARGENT AND GULES is still the real answer and
grounding improves a bad fight rather than replacing the solution — and
the fight off borough ground keeps its teeth, marginally more lethal
than before rather than less. Bare wings ALONE was the trap: it made
grounding routine and turned the off-ground fight into a 96% walkover
with a 3.8% wipe rate, buying the text at the cost of the encounter.

check-anatomy gains the property this whole thread was about: a plan
whose behaviour turns on losing a wing must not armour that wing with
the creature's own hide, or the rule is decoration. Negative-tested by
putting the hide back.

Also re-records the lethality baseline, which was ALREADY stale: HEAD's
own code reproduced 27 of its 47 entries differently, because the
supporter joined NPCS in ddc4f99 and shifted the shared random stream
for every creature measured after it. Every drift sat under the guard's
six-point tolerance, so it passed while being wrong. Worth knowing that
the file's claim — "the only thing that can move the number is a change
to the rules or to the creature" — is not currently true: adding any
creature perturbs the rest. Seeding per creature would fix it and is
not done here.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 22:16:54 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 4b718595fe check-lethality: guard eight, and the README stops advertising a subset
Seven guards checked that content is WELL FORMED. None checked what it DOES, so a
change to a damage modifier, a hit-point formula or the armour value on a service vest
could double a creature's lethality without touching one line of that creature - and
nothing in the build would notice, because the creature did not change.

Built as a regression test rather than the hand-declared bands the creature-forge plan
described. Bands are the wrong shape here: declaring "keepers: dangerous" across
forty-six creatures means inventing forty-six judgements, and after --spread it is
clear the interesting question is not "is this dangerous" - that has no single answer -
but "is this the same as it was". A recorded baseline answers exactly that, needs no
authoring, and cannot be argued with.

Every creature is measured solo against a FROZEN party of four, two armed postings and
two trades, at a fixed seed, so the only thing that can move a number is a change to
the rules or to the creature. Tolerances are 6 points of wipe rate and 0.35 agents,
which is outside the noise floor of 200 runs - a guard that cries wolf gets deleted.

Verified by tampering: told the baseline the nuckelavee was harmless and the guard
caught it at +16.5 points and +1.67 agents down, exit 1. Runs in half a second, so it
joins the pre-build checks rather than being something to remember to run.

Also: the README's guard block was a hardcoded list of four while the suite was seven.
It had silently stopped mentioning every guard added after it was written, including
check-creatures and check-scenarios. Now all eight, and the prose says eight.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 21:20:09 +01:00