Measuring the tier knob showed it works — one creature against the four
agents check-lethality freezes, deaths per fight climb 0.01, 0.04, 0.32,
0.91, 1.43 across the five tiers for a large brute, and monotonically for
hunters and flyers too.
It also showed the labels oversell. "Deadly" at tier 3 kills a third of an
agent and wipes the team three times in a thousand. A GM reaching for a word
like that is owed the figure behind it, and the forge's whole argument is
that its output can be interrogated — the tier list was the one part of it
that could not be. Each tier now carries a measured `worth` line, printed by
`forge list` and under the tier selector in the dialog.
check-forge measures the ladder and fails if it ever goes down, across three
roles and five tiers. Both the labels and the worth lines are claims about
behaviour that any change to the skill bands, the hide base or the
characteristic multiplier could falsify without touching a word. Proved by
weakening tier 4: three roles report the inversion by name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CREATURE_FORGE_PLAN Part 5. A third button on the Actors sidebar, beside New
agent and New NPC. Pick what it does, how big it is and how bad it is; the
card underneath describes what those settings will actually produce, because
the argument for a derivation over a form is that it can be interrogated, and
choosing between "brute" and "sentinel" from two nouns is not interrogating
anything. The card is itself forged rather than written, so it cannot
describe a creature the derivation would not make.
generateCreature reads the catalogues out of the packs and calls the same
forgeCreature the CLI calls. Natural attacks carry their body-plan
declarations into flags.ringbrp.plans so the engine can read them.
The plan asks that the panel and the CLI cannot diverge, and importing one
derivation was most of that guarantee but not all of it: the two feed it from
DIFFERENT catalogues — content.mjs on one side, the built compendium on the
other. check-forge now builds the engine's view straight out of packs/weapons
and requires both to forge the same creature.
It found a divergence on its first run, in 40 of 90 pairs. The fallback took
the first usable natural attack from the caller's list, and that list arrives
in declaration order from content.mjs and in id order from the pack, so a
tiny vesh brute was punching for the CLI and constricting at the table. The
derivation may not depend on its caller's iteration order; it imposes its
own now.
Not yet verified in a running Foundry. The pure derivation is covered by 450
guarded combinations and the catalogue seam by the agreement check above, but
Actor.create, the pack reads and the dialog itself are the part
check-behaviour says outright it cannot reach. They need a world open, and
that has not happened yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CREATURE_FORGE_PLAN Part 3. `new` prints a spec as source in the shape the
bestiary files are written in, `explain` prints the rule behind every value,
`measure` fights it against the party check-lethality freezes, and `list`
shows the knobs.
The derivation is forge.mjs at the ROOT, beside rules.mjs and postings.mjs
and under the same law: pure, no Foundry, no catalogues. Part 5 asks for an
in-Foundry panel that forges a variant at the table and says it must not
diverge from the CLI. One derivation in a module both import is the only way
to guarantee that rather than argue it.
Natural attacks now declare which body plans can make them, in the weapon
catalogue, for the same reason a weapon already names the skill that fires
it: the weapon is the thing that knows. Anatomy cannot answer it — a body
plan records that a creature has a head, not that the head has horns.
`explain` earned itself on the first run. A large brute derived with a
baseline body could not gore, trample or hoof, and the trace said so; the
finished statblock alone would have shipped bulls that bite. The role picks
the body now, a non-baseline species overrides it, and --body beats both.
check-forge (guard 26) derives all 450 combinations of role, size, tier and
species and puts each through the bestiary's own validate(). Three mutations
were planted in the forge to test it, and it caught one. Dropping the seed
was caught. Dropping the brawl grant was a genuine no-op, since every role
already lists brawl. Dropping the body-plan filter left all 450 rows green
while the success line read "armed with something its body can use" — the
guard read the location table and never used it. It checks each issued weapon
against the catalogue's own declaration now, and the same mutation produces
500 failures.
check-rules' inline-armour pattern matched any clamp containing the word, and
false-positived three times in one evening on counts that were never damage.
damageAfterArmour is a subtraction, so the pattern requires one. A guard that
makes people contort working code to keep it quiet is training them badly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
