Commit Graph
100 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 67e76639f3 R-285: scope the defence-stacking rules to the section that owns them
R-284 scoped the factored-rating rule to the creature's entry and left the
defence-stacking rules matching anywhere on the page, so the exemption sentence
and the "Across N creatures that spend defences" count were accepted wherever they
happened to sit. Moving the exemption line out of its section into the redcap's
statblock -- the page silent exactly where a GM reads the stripping advice --
passes at R-284 and fails here; confirmed by running HEAD's copy against the same
tree.

The owning slice is not always the creature's entry. A factored rating belongs to
the creature; the ladder exemption is an answer to the paragraph it sits in and is
generated into "## Shooting at something that moves", so scoping that rule to
"### Redcap" would have failed a correct page. sliceOf now takes a heading at any
level and each rule names the slice that owns its claim.

A renamed section fails by name rather than scoping to nothing, which is the shape
of every guard that passes because it found nothing to check.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 15:22:04 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 aa3ae24ef2 CLEAN GROUND v0.16 — the fight it was never measuring, and R-283
Applies desk pass 6's seven fixes.

1. EXPOSURE now measures the fight the table will have. Every row in the old
   table was one force fighting alone, and the six at the back are never
   alone — they walk inside forty-one refugees. Six hollow men wipe 0.0%;
   with two of the column joining, 7.8%; with three, 28.7%. Two is now the
   stated default, because two people out of forty-one losing their heads
   while their neighbours are shot is not a large number.
2. The four-player block has hollow-man rows: 0.3% at three, 58.7% at six,
   99.9% with two of the column. Its only hollow-man figure before was the
   six-player 0.0%, so a GM running the cut was reading somebody else's
   table — for the encounter the party is likeliest to choose, because the
   six at the back are the only figures the scenario says are not people.
   GM ESSENTIALS item 3 carries the same correction.
3. Act Three's warning named a roll that does not exist. Its twenty-minute
   bomb hangs off "Anomaly Lore — what a peg is"; the depot entry is a
   Research roll. Pass 4's post-pass inherited the conflation from this
   warning and is corrected too.
4. GM ESSENTIALS states the real fumble band. fumbleStart is
   101 - ceil((101-band)/20), tested before the 96-99 clause: 00 at 85,
   99-00 at 63, 98-00 at 53, 97-00 at 40. Four times what "00 always
   fumbles" implies, in a case that rolls Spot 40 across two acts. Pass 4's
   correction was right at 63 by luck and would have been wrong at 53.
5. Sixth EXPOSURE lesson: a fight costs the session. Median 13 rounds on the
   printed row, 24 mixed, 30 at four players — sixty to ninety minutes in an
   act budgeted at fifty. The Pacing Note now says what to do when one
   starts, and not to absorb a fight and the peg fumble in the same act.
6. The fumbled Xenology is written. At 53 it fumbles on 98-00 and Braithwaite
   puts his name to a baseline human in front of everybody. The un-gated tell
   still arrives; it now costs the party its expert.
7. R-283: simulate.mjs described a mixed force as N of whichever spec came
   first, so six hollow men and six of the column printed as "12 x Hollow
   man" — two fights 88 points of wipe rate apart under one label. The
   composition was always right and the report was not. Uniform and --spread
   output are byte-identical, so nothing already published goes stale.

Every figure re-run before writing rather than carried over. npm run check:
18 guards pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 15:16:17 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 1a2ca44c52 R-284: report a wrong figure as a wrong figure, and read the right entry
R-283 left the intact-sentence-wrong-number case falling through to omission, so
the guard said BESTIARY "does not state" a rating the page was stating. reads()
now has a shape tier between strict and loose: the strict pattern with its value
slot loosened, reporting which of the two numbers moved.

Scoped the per-creature rules while adding it. They read the whole page, and each
is the only rule of its kind today, so a page-wide match found the right line by
luck; a second attackFactor creature would have let the courier's rule match that
creature's sentence and report the courier correct. They now read the creature's
own "### Name" entry -- proved by deleting the courier's line and planting an
identical one under the redcap: still omission, where before it would have passed.

Five discriminations plus the decoy, proved in a worktree with the message read.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 15:15:24 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 327d060eb1 R-283: tell a reworded bestiary sentence apart from a missing one
R-282 matched the page with String.includes, so rewording the exemption sentence
reported "BESTIARY never says it is off the stripping ladder" -- sending a
maintainer after a sentence that is sitting right there, and never naming the
real problem, which is a pattern that has silently stopped reading.

Each textual rule now reads twice. Strict is the sentence as it stands and is
tighter than before (the bold and the full stop, not the bare clause a substring
accepted); loose is the same claim in any wording. Strict passes, loose-only is
reported as a reword with the line quoted and the page presumed right, neither is
the omission.

The loose anchor was wrong on its first pass in the way that matters: "a sentence
with 40% and 80%" also matched the courier's own statblock line, so deleting the
sentence reported a reword and quoted the statblock back. It now excludes that
generated marker, which makes it a test of the claim and not of the digits, and
degrades to omission rather than to a false reword.

Four discriminations proved in a worktree with the message read in each.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 15:12:33 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 1a80d3637c R-282: guard the bestiary against the powers, including the next one
check-bestiary proves the page matches its generator, and the generator had never
heard of powers.mjs -- so the redcap sat in "the ones that take the most
stripping" under eighteen green guards while its own entry said it never spends a
defence. Two files agreeing with each other while both disagree with the engine
is a quorum, not a check.

check-powers now asserts per effect kind what the page must say: defenceStacking
requires the creature off the stripping list, named as exempt, and the "across N
creatures that spend defences" count reconciled against powers.mjs; attackFactor
requires the rating the simulator actually uses printed as a number, which the
courier's entry now carries.

The clause that matters is the failure on an unknown effect kind -- a wired effect
with no DOCUMENT_RULE fails the build, so the next one cannot arrive without
somebody deciding what the document owes it. Without that this would guard the
mistake already made and nothing else.

Proved three ways in a worktree, exit codes read directly.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 15:01:04 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 81ff44e70e The bestiary was still describing the fight R-275 changed
Two things in the generated document had gone stale the moment powers reached the
simulator, and eighteen guards were green over both because nothing connects
powers.mjs to bestiary.mjs.

The dodge-ladder section listed Redcap among "the ones that take the most
stripping" and counted it in "across 47 creatures", when NOT TIRED means it never
spends a defence at all -- the exact opposite of what its own entry says three
pages down. It is off the ladder now, the count reads 46 that spend defences, and
the page names it: stripping is not a plan against it, killing it is.

And the paragraph listing what the harness does and does not model never mentioned
that it fights 39 of the 41 creatures with a power without it. It now says so, and
counts from powers.mjs rather than stating it, including the 14 that are fight
rules it cannot express -- so every figure for one of those is the creature with
its best trick taken away.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 14:55:36 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 303472f0ab The bestiary said "in doubt" and the rule no longer means that
R-280 widened admission from a [15,85] band to "the spread rate stands clear of
both ends by more than its own noise", which admits fights that are nearly
settled -- the_choir at 99.3%, the_stanchion at 6% -- as long as their noise is
smaller still. The page went on saying "whose outcome was ever in doubt", which
was a fair description of the band and is a loose one of the rule.

It now says "whose odds leave room for a difference to show", and the provenance
line prints the admission rule itself, read from the artifact rather than
paraphrased, so the page cannot drift from the guard again. The rule is phrased
as a clause in check-focus for that reason.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 14:41:14 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 fa484071cd R-281: a ratchet, because "helps in all of them" survives the advice decaying
R-280 left the claim satisfiable by a gain of 0.2. The artifact now records how
many measurable packs clear their own noise -- reliable: {aboveNoise: 36, of: 38}
-- and the check refuses if that share falls. It may rise freely.

A ratchet rather than a threshold: any threshold here would be a number I chose,
and choosing one just under the current value is what produced MEASURABLE =
[15,85]. A share rather than a count, so widening admission cannot pay it off.

Proved three ways in worktrees: making focus fire actively bad fires the drift
check first, which is correct; making it unreliable and re-recording fires the
older claim at 37 of 38; and claiming a better past, 38 of 38, is refused by the
ratchet itself. The ratchet bites exactly where the old claim does not -- between
"still helps everywhere" and "helps as reliably as it did", which is where a slow
degradation lives.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 14:34:10 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 3d83fbde93 R-280: the band replaced by the test it was standing in for
MEASURABLE = [15,85] proxied for "can this fight move at all". The direct form,
in the units the guard already uses: the spread rate must stand clear of both
ends by more than its own noise. Deliberately blind to the gain -- admitting the
sizes where focus fire clears its noise would make the guard's claim true by
construction. Size is still picked on nearest-an-even-fight.

31 measurable became 38. the_arrears returns at 6.3, and switchboard arrives at
8.1 -- the second largest gain in the artifact, thrown away for being one point
past a round number. Four of the eight carry effects larger than most rows the
band already admitted.

Two of them do not clear their own noise: the_choir has 0.7 points of headroom
and used 0.2, the_stanchion has six and used 0.2. Above-noise falls 31/31 to
36/38 and the bestiary prints 36. That is two measurements reporting no
detectable effect, which the band suppressed by refusing to take them.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 14:27:13 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 a7eca91a9c R-278: raising SCAN_RUNS found that SCAN_RUNS had never been read
Asked to raise the scan until the redcap's pack size stopped flipping. Measured
the threshold -- unstable at 3000 and 4000, stable across twenty seeds at 6000 --
raised it, and the re-record took fifteen seconds, which was impossible.

winRate takes three parameters and pickSize passed SCAN_RUNS as a fourth.
JavaScript discards it, so every scan has always run at RUNS and SCAN_RUNS has
never been read by anything. The fix I was asked to make was inert in the same
way as the thing it was fixing.

winRate takes runs now. The redcap is still n=3 with gain 6.3, arrived at stably
rather than luckily; the_arrears drops out of the measurable band at an honest
scan, 31 packs to 30; the_committee moves 2 to 6 and stays pinned. Claim check
still passes, bestiary regenerated.

The only signal was a number being too small. A fifteen-second re-record is good
news, and good news is what nobody investigates.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 14:18:46 +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 9f3a63174f CLEAN GROUND v0.12: convention one-shot, the print pack, and the real opposed roll
Tim settled the last two questions: convention one-shot, and rules.mjs gains a
real opposed roll (landed by a peer session at R-273). Both decisions change
the document, and the one-shot unblocked the print pack.

THE PRINT PACK — docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_HANDOUTS.html, guard 17.

Four A4 sheets, self-contained, no external fonts or assets: H01 the coroner's
note on white, H02 the 1962 committee minute on cream with photocopy grain,
H03a and H03b the almanac on ruled paper. 11pt floor throughout.

The binding constraint is that H03a and H03b must print identically or the
almanac trick dies, so that is structural rather than careful: they share one
`.almanac` class and every dimension comes from a variable defined once. There
is no selector anywhere that names one page and not the other, and
check-handouts fails the build if one appears, if their markup structures
diverge, if their columns differ, if any row stops reading "41 mi", if the
counts stop being forty-one now against fifty-three then, or if the pack and
the scenario drift apart.

It earned itself immediately: its first run failed my own pack for five rules
at 10.5pt, under the house 11pt floor. Rendering was checked visually too,
which caught two things no guard would have — the "TO CLEAN GROUND" header
colliding with NOTES, and the writing crossing the red margin rule instead of
starting right of it.

THE ONE-SHOT. Countdown step 6 said "and this is a campaign", which the
decision contradicts. Rewritten, and the Close's "leave it filed" ending now
says how to land it tonight: do not end on "you'll be back", because the table
never will and a hook they cannot take reads as an unfinished scenario. Name
the next agent who gets sent, and have Registry thank them.

THE OPPOSED ROLL. The scenario-local ruling is deleted; GM ESSENTIALS points
at the game. Both beats were re-priced against the real rule by enumerating
all 10,000 roll pairs -- exact, no seeds -- and two things fell out:

  THE OFFER IS PRICED. Ashcroft refusing is taken 21.9% of the time, the
  safest file at the table. Accepting: 48.7%, past Braithwaite's 37.6%.
  Accepting does not make him a bit more vulnerable, it makes him the easiest
  person in the room, and the countdown reaches for the easiest.

  STEP 5 CAN COME TO NOTHING, 14.5% of the time against an Ashcroft who
  accepted, and that row fires once and is marked permanent. Previously a
  silent gap in a climactic beat. It is now a written outcome with read-aloud
  text: the reach fails, it wears the wrong face for a moment, the party learns
  what it is and cannot prove it, and the clock still turns to step 6.

Also: update-readme's count-word list ran out at sixteen, one guard after its
own comment warned about hardcoded lists going stale. It failed loudly rather
than silently, so it is an inconvenience and not a defect. Extended.

npm run check: 17 guards, exit 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 10:50:03 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 cdbb2e34ee R-273: the opposed roll, built where the authority lives
The content has called for 'opposed POWx5' since before the rule existed -- the
hollow man's tactics, CLEAN GROUND twice, slice-text three times -- and rules.mjs
defined none. A scenario carried a local ruling that said in its own text it was a
ruling and not a rule.

Generalises that ruling rather than inventing another: both sides roll, the better
band wins, only the ladder the game already has. Ties go to whoever is being acted
upon, which is what defenceOutcomeFor has always said; the scenario's 'favour the
agent' gave the same answer only because no agent ever initiates one. Neither side
succeeding leaves the contest unsettled rather than won, which the two beats need
in opposite directions.

Two exports at the scenario session's request: opposedOutcomeFor compares graded
levels and carries both, so a caller can price a fumbled attempt without this file
deciding what a fumble costs; opposedContestFor runs it from ratings and rolls with
per-side difficulty, so 'resists at Difficult' does not put applyDifficulty back
into a document. Spot-checked against the real Act Four beat: 55 against 85 at
Difficult, which is 42.

Page 1 states it by asking it -- the tie-break and the margin are computed from the
rule at build time, so the book cannot drift from the engine.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 10:42:17 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 d03b3208e5 check-cited: the counter watching for invisible markers was itself case-blind
Fourth variant of the same defect, found by the peer session probing sideways.
Neither CITE nor ANY_CITE carried the `i` flag, and ANY_CITE required a literal
"cite:" with no space before the colon. So three plausible spellings were
invisible to the reader AND to the counter that exists to catch invisible
markers:

  <!-- Cite: first-blood cut.swing -->     OK 25, exit 0
  <!-- CITE: first-blood cut.swing -->     OK 25, exit 0
  <!-- cite : first-blood cut.swing -->    OK 25, exit 0

Each of those was verified carrying a citation printing 41 against an artifact
holding 40, and each reported OK with a count byte-identical to a clean tree.
The count check could not see them because it was looking for the same literal
the reader was. Capitalising the first word of a comment is not an exotic
mistake.

The two patterns are now deliberately asymmetric, which is the actual fix:

  CITE      tolerates case and spaces around the colon, so those spellings
            simply work when correctly placed.
  ANY_CITE  stays looser still, so a spelling neither of us anticipated is
            counted and named rather than skipped.

The reader accepts only what the format specifies; the counter recognises
anything a person might have meant as a citation; the difference is reported.
The failure text now covers misspelling as well as misplacement, since the
unread set can be either.

Matrix verified, exit codes read directly: a wrong value fails under all four
spellings including no-spaces; a right value passes under all of them, counting
26; a misplaced-and-capitalised marker fails; a marker missing its path fails;
clean tree OK 25 with no false positive.

Four iterations of this guard, four variants of one defect -- something that
exists and is never read -- and all four were found by the session that did not
write it.

npm run check: 16 guards, exit 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 10:33:17 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 0de463c470 check-cited: make the regex match its own error message, and name the right lines
Two residual defects in the marker check added at 4d7d93a, both found by the
peer session that found the original.

1. THE REGEX WAS LOOSER THAN ITS DOCUMENTATION. The failure text has always
   promised the comment must follow its figure "immediately, with nothing but
   markup between", but CITE's separators were \s*, which spans newlines — so
   a marker on the line after its number resolved and was checked, contrary to
   the stated rule. Tightened to [ \t] throughout.

   Verified safe before changing it: matched under the loose pattern 25, under
   the tight pattern 25, so no citation in CLEAN GROUND relies on crossing a
   newline. There is no finding in the document.

2. THE OFFENDER REPORT WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE COUNT AND WRONG ABOUT THE LINES.
   It filtered line by line, so a valid cross-line citation was printed as an
   offender whenever some other marker was genuinely unread — a maintainer
   told "line 15 is broken" would have edited a working citation. That is the
   headline defect fixed an hour ago one level down: correct verdict, wrong
   reason.

   Offenders are now located by position across the whole text, so the lines
   named are exactly the markers no CITE match covers. This is the fix that
   matters independently of the regex: a marker spanning lines would still be
   counted once by ANY_CITE and named nowhere, so tightening alone leaves a
   narrower version of the same bug, and position-based reporting stays
   correct if anyone ever loosens the separator again.

Placement battery, exit codes read directly: clean tree OK 25 no false
positive; one word between number and marker fails; bare marker alone fails;
two on a line with one attached fails naming only the unattached; cross-line
now fails rather than silently passing.

Three iterations of this guard, three variants of one defect — a marker or a
message that exists and is not read — and all three were found by the session
that did not write it.

npm run check: 16 guards, exit 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 10:29:45 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 4d7d93abc8 check-cited: a citation marker nothing reads now fails the build
A misplaced marker failed open. CITE requires the comment to sit immediately
after its figure; put one word between them and the citation is silently
skipped while the run still reports OK with the same count as a clean tree:

  The longest fight seen ran **67** rounds.<!-- cite: fight-tail cut.longest -->
  check-cited: OK — 25 cited figures ...

That marker names a field the guard is supposed to refuse outright, and the
guard never saw it. Worse than an absent citation, because whoever wrote it
believes they added a check — and worse still in a guard written yesterday to
catch exactly this shape of defect.

Every `<!-- cite:` occurrence is now counted and compared against what the
parser actually read; any difference fails and prints the offending line.
Verified on both placement failures: a marker one word from its number, and a
marker on its own line with no number at all. The failure headline was also
wrong for this class -- it claimed a figure mismatched its artifact -- and now
covers both.

Found by a peer session writing a bad citation by accident while testing.

npm run check: 16 guards, exit 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 10:24:32 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 8279cdfda8 R-272: guard the tail, and stop prose drifting from its artifacts
Three things Tim asked for together: measure the long end of a fight, make the
swing check bite on stale prose, and record in rules.mjs the coincidence that
hid an invented rule from two readers.

GUARD 15 — check-fight-tail, on tools/fight-tail.mjs.

Fourteen guards measured this scenario's combat and none could see a long
fight, because every one of them averages. The cap is the measurement here, so
the tool passes its own (400, not runFight's default 40) and --update refuses
to record anything reaching it. Verified by lowering it back to 40: the cut
loses 20 fights to the ceiling, the six-a-side 117, 107 of those ending
neither won nor wiped, and the recorder stops.

Two claims, both read from a fresh measurement rather than the baseline, so
--update cannot silence them. "The long end is twice the median" was rejected
as a claim because it is true of both encounters and so distinguishes nothing.
Instead: a fight past 15 rounds wipes the party materially more often than a
short one, and the SIX-A-SIDE fight is the longer one (median 14 vs 10.7) --
R-270 showing up as duration, since a disabled fighter keeps fighting 30
points down. The cut is shorter because it is decisive, not safer.

GUARD 16 — check-cited, on tools/check-cited.mjs.

check-firstblood and check-attackers catch the game changing; neither reads
the document. Re-record after a re-cast and the artifact updates, the guard
goes green, and the prose keeps printing the old number under a citation
saying where the new one lives. So citations are now machine-readable --
**40**<!-- cite: first-blood cut.swing --> -- and resolved on every build. 25
of them. It failed three times on its first runs, all real: a config keyed
"column" that the prose called "line", two figures rounded 32.3 -> 32, and a
vacuous pass on zero citations, now fatal in its own right.

It also refuses citation of unstable fields. fight-tail.longest may not reach
prose: same party, same seeds, same runs, and renaming a config moved it 71 ->
90 rounds, because seedFor derives the stream from the id. Across seven
labels -- median spread 0, p95 1, p99 3, longest 21. A sample maximum reads
like a bound and is a property of the label. EXPOSURE states p99 instead.
Same discipline on the deadlier ratio: 2.42 with seed spread 1.1, so the
document gives its direction and declines to quote its size.

RULES.MJS — one comment, no rule change.

Over resolveLocationHit: its two thresholds are unrelated and usually agree.
disabled is a fraction of the pool per location; majorWound is ceil(hp/2) and
feeds only dyingLimitFor; neither removes anyone from a fight, which is
conditionFor at 2 hit points or a destroyed head. At 10 hp, leg/abdomen/chest
capacity is 5 and majorWoundFor is 5, and those locations take 12 of 20 melee
results and 15 of 20 ranged -- so two readers reconstructed a rule that does
not exist, checked it against the log, and were confirmed by it. The note
says to test an arm, the only place the difference shows.

Guards verified to bite, not assumed: drift, re-cast, censoring, the longest
refusal, the rounding catch and the vacuous-pass catch were each forced and
each failed the build with the right guidance, then restored.

npm run check: 16 guards, exit 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 10:20:25 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 74e45b15e7 R-270: a rule I invented, and the coincidence that hid it
R-266 said a fighter goes down at half maximum hit points and called it one rule
in both directions. conditionFor puts someone down at hp <= 2; majorWoundFor is
ceil(hp/2) and feeds only how long the dying last; a location is disabled by
resolveLocationHit at its own locationMaxHp capacity.

The reason it survived reading: for a 10-point neighbour majorWoundFor is 5 and a
leg, abdomen or chest holds exactly 5, and for a 12-point agent both are 6. On the
locations that get hit most the invented rule returns the real one's answer, and
the narration prints MAJOR WOUND and disabled on the same line. Arms and heads are
where they part, and I had not looked at an arm.

Found by the scenario session going to rules.mjs to verify a different correction
of mine and reading the next function along. Both errors made the fight look
easier than it is.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 10:03:34 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 765b3518db R-269: the fourth quadrant, and a disable does not remove anybody
Seed 16 is the missing corner -- party takes first blood in round 1 and is wiped
anyway -- and it runs 24 rounds. Its last five are Neil dropped by a critical
through armour, then Dominic alone at 1%, failing three times, then dying. That
is what three effective attackers costs at a table when a fight goes long.

Corrects a mechanism I had written twice: a disabling hit does not remove an
attacker, it charges 30 points off physical or manipulation per locationEffectsFor.
Bhattacharya keeps swinging at 10 for four rounds. A slope, not a cliff.

Neither guard fired and neither was wrong: the fight sits in the 25.5% the swing
does not cover, and no guard measures the tail because all of them average.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 09:59:06 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 0b86c5ffc3 R-268: guard the sentence that names a player's character
CLEAN GROUND prints that the four-player cut is three effective attackers and
that Ashcroft is not one. Nothing checked it, and a GM reads it aloud to decide
who a real player spends four hours being.

effective-attackers.mjs measures per attack, not per fight: counted per fight
Braithwaite leads on disables, but only because his armour buys him a third more
swings -- per attack he is the weakest of the three. Both rates are recorded and
only the per-attack one is reasoned from. Asserts exact drift, then the sentence:
three clear 5% of attacks disabling, one does not, and that one is Ashcroft.
Re-recording does not silence the claim check; verified in a worktree.

declared-cast.mjs holds the cast marker reading both scenario guards need, rather
than a copy in each. It was briefly named scenario-cast.mjs, which check-scenarios
sweeps into the scenario corpus -- its own example marker was read as a real cast.

update-readme dropped any guard that exited non-zero, so check-rollable vanished
from the README and the count word fell to thirteen while fourteen guards ran. A
missing line is now fatal.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 09:56:01 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 60995b28c2 R-267 addendum: read the cast, do not copy it
I told the scenario session that this guard turns a silent re-cast into a build
failure, and it accepted the coupling on that basis. The cast was hardcoded, so
a re-cast would have left it measuring the old six and reporting success.

Reads the <!-- cast: --> marker check-rollable established, drops the two the
scaling note drops by name rather than by position, and refuses to run if the
marker is gone. Verified by re-casting CLEAN GROUND in a throwaway worktree and
watching the guard name the change.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 09:45:38 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 ce1103ec0d R-267: a guarded home for the first disabling blow
Another session verified R-266's measurement, agreed the frame was better than
its own, and declined to publish it because the figure had no guarded lineage a
doubter could re-derive. It was right, and the fix costs 0.7s of build time --
which is the number I should have checked before calling it a reading tool and
not a guard.

first-blood.mjs gains --update/--check and is now both the reader and the
measurement of record; check-firstblood.mjs is a thin wrapper over it, the same
shape as check-bestiary. Compares the recorded figures exactly, then asserts only
what a page would claim: first blood lands within 5 points of even in the cut,
and its swing exceeds the six-a-side line's by more than both noises.

Recording it moved the swing from the scratch run's 43 to 40 against a
seed-to-seed spread of 2.1 -- high by more than its own noise, which is the
argument in miniature. update-readme's COUNT_WORD could not reach thirteen.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 09:42:31 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 19ed0b5f0f R-266: the coin is the first disabling blow, and it lands in round two
Reading both ends of the four-player cut — seed 5's sweep and seed 2's wipe —
says the fight is not decided by round five but by whoever lands the first
disabling hit, on average in round two. Both sides disable on one good blow, so
each one thins the return fire and makes the next likelier; nothing pulls a
fight back toward the middle.

tools/first-blood.mjs measures it: 49.7/50.3 on who strikes first, and 23.1% vs
66.5% wipes on either side of that. Six against six is the control at 8.6% vs
22.4%. A reading tool, not a guard — it records nothing, and no figure from it
goes on a generated page.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 09:36:05 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 8627fa3536 One generator, so a citation names one fight (R-265)
tools/playthrough.mjs exists to show a reader why a measured number is what it is. I cited
it to another session — read seed 2, see the wipe the 45% row is made of — and the
reproduction failed in front of them. They reported different outcomes at both seeds and
guessed the cause correctly from outside: the two tools were not drawing from the same
stream.

They were not. simulate.mjs used a private mulberry32 makeRng; playthrough.mjs had its own
LCG written to look like it. Both deterministic, both reproducible alone, and "seed 2"
named a different fight in each — which breaks the only thing the tool is for. Its own
comment claimed a seed here names the same fight there. check-focus carried a third copy of
that LCG, so the two guards described the same game with different dice.

makeRng is exported and both files use it. A playthrough seed is now exactly the first
fight of simulate.mjs --seed <n>: --runs 1 --seed 2 and the playthrough give 9 rounds, 4 of
4 down, 1 dead, both.

The other half was my citation rather than the code: the command I sent omitted --mode, so
it plays both targeting arms and prints two fights. They read the last line, I quoted the
first. The summary line now names the arm.

check-focus re-recorded under the shared stream; figures move a point or two. What it buys
is that the bimodality analysis now reproduces the published means exactly — 2.31, 3.03,
0.40, 0.42 against the four rows CLEAN GROUND publishes. Under the old LCG it agreed to
within a decimal, which looked like corroboration and was two experiments landing near each
other.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 01:11:41 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 6e3ea8fa19 playthrough: read a scenario's own encounter, against its own cast
The tool could only narrate the guard's fight — the frozen four, at the pack size
focus-baseline records. CLEAN GROUND's EXPOSURE table measures something else entirely: a
declared cast of six at counts of 1, 3, 6, 10 and 15, which is the fight a GM running that
case will actually referee and the one whose numbers we have just re-pinned.

--creature, --count, --party, --seed and --mode now mirror tools/simulate.mjs, so a row
measured there can be read here in words. Positional form still works.

  node tools/playthrough.mjs --creature quiet_neighbours_npc --count 6 \
    --party ashcroft,bhattacharya,renshaw,braithwaite,pollard,okonkwo --seed 11

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 00:55:45 +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 5dcaaf519a The simulator can be read now, not just totalled (R-263)
Every guard here reports a number per creature, and a number cannot say why a fight went
the way it did. That gap is what produced R-258 through R-260: each written from a side
harness built to watch a fight, each modelling something slightly different from the game,
two of the three wrong in ways no guard could catch because no guard was involved.

runFight takes an optional `say` sink. It reports what the simulator already decided — the
attack roll and its target, a defence and the penalty it was made at, the landing level
after a dodge downgrades it, damage against armour before and after armourAgainst, the
location, major wounds, disablement, death. It never touches the generator, so a narrated
fight and a silent one are the same fight; check-lethality and check-focus both still
match their baselines exactly with the hook in place.

tools/playthrough.mjs (npm run play) is its consumer, in the same commit deliberately: a
hook with no reader is the exact defect this project keeps finding in its own rules, and
adding one to the measurement pipeline with only a scratchpad file calling it would have
been committing the thing I have spent the session removing. Pack size comes from
focus-baseline.json so the fight you read is the fight check-focus measures; creatures
recorded as pinned are played solo.

Three redcaps, seed 20260913, same seed both ways. Spread fire: wiped in 10 rounds, 3
dead, and all three redcaps still standing — 39 hit points spread three ways so that none
of it finished anything. Focus fire: same opening, diverging at one target choice in round
1, party wins in 20 with two up. The +13.2 points check-focus records, seen once instead
of averaged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 00:30:14 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 1d915c55cf check-focus: the focus-fire claim is an artifact, not a sentence (R-261)
R-258 put a tactic on a GM-facing page from an unguarded harness, R-259 found it worth
nothing, R-260 found the replacement right for the wrong reason. Three corrections, each
landing as prose with nothing checking it — the arrangement that let ddc4f99 describe a
game nobody was playing.

tools/focus-baseline.json records, per creature, the pack size and the spread-fire and
focus-fire win rates. check-focus re-measures all of it on every build and compares
exactly, with the party, seeds, run count and seeding scheme recorded alongside so numbers
taken under different conditions are refused rather than compared. The bestiary READS the
artifact instead of restating it, and check-bestiary refuses a page that has fallen behind
it. Page, guard and simulator cannot disagree.

The pack size is recorded rather than re-chosen: a fight at 0% or 100% cannot show an
effect, and a guard that picked again each run would let a changed creature move quietly
to a different question and pass. 31 of 47 creatures land in the measurable band; the
other 16 are recorded as pinned, with the rate that pinned them.

It guards the claim as well as the numbers. The page says focus fire helps in every fight
in doubt; check-focus fails if any row's gain reaches zero or stops clearing its own
noise. That failure means rewrite the page, not re-record the baseline.

The run count was chosen by evidence. 1000 x 3 seeds costs 8.5s and takes the suite from
2.5s to 13.7s. I tried 500 to halve it and the claim-check failed — at 500 runs one row
no longer clears its noise, so "without exception" is not supported by that much
sampling. Recording twice at 1000 gives byte-identical files.

Negative-tested four ways, all firing: a creature quietly made nimbler (redcap dodge
75 -> 85, spread 40.6% -> 27.6%), a baseline under different seeds, a hand-edited page,
and the claim failing at 500 runs.

Guard eleven (check-rollable) arrived from another session mid-build; this is twelve.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 00:13:28 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 555fa761c0 check-rollable: guard eleven, because a real skill is not the same as a route
check-scenarios resolves every skill a scenario NAMES against the catalogue, which
is a different question from whether anybody present can roll it. CLEAN GROUND
shipped four commits with three clues gated on Track (base 10), Navigate (base 10)
and Science (Botany) — base 1, so the 1% floor was the whole of it — and every
guard passed, because all three are perfectly real skills. A desk playtest found
it by auditing the acts against the sheets the scenario casts. That audit is
mechanical, so it belongs in the build.

Two tiers. Corpus-wide, some roster agent must reach VIABLE for every skill any
scenario names. Per scenario, a document that DECLARES its cast is held to that
cast instead, and that is the tier that catches this defect class.

The cast is declared rather than inferred, and that is the interesting part. The
first version scraped pc_ keys out of the prose and swept up the substitutes named
in CLEAN GROUND's player-count scaling — a cast of nine instead of six, which put
Sandoval and his Track 35 in scope and made the guard pass the very bug it was
written for. A guard that guesses the cast is worse than none, because it reports
success. CLEAN GROUND now carries a cast comment and the guard reads it off the raw
text, since scenarioText strips HTML comments.

Verified load-bearing rather than assumed: re-injecting the original Track tag into
the real CLEAN_GROUND.md fails the guard, naming the skill, the base chance and the
declared cast. Worth recording that the corpus-wide tier would never have caught
it — Lindqvist trains Botany at 40, so it is rollable by the roster and simply not
by the six who were cast. The first fixture test passed for that reason and misled
me; only the declared-cast tier finds this.

VIABLE is 25 and is justified, not picked: it is the commonest base chance in the
catalogue, what an untrained agent brings to Spot, Listen or Brawl, so it is the
level the game itself treats as worth attempting. Below it a clue is not gated, it
is buried.

check-scenarios exports its tag parser rather than growing a second copy, behind
the invokedDirectly pattern simulate.mjs already uses; a duplicated parser is
exactly what this repository's one standing law forbids. update-readme then caught
me fairly — it cross-checks the advertised guard list against npm run check — so
the guard is registered there too and the README advertises eleven in all three
places.

No REVIEW_LOG entry: the log is clean at R-260 and is being appended to every few
minutes by concurrent work, so the end of that file is the likeliest place to
collide. Left for whoever next touches it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 00:10:00 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 48216bae10 Focus fire across all 47, and the same confound one turn later (R-260)
Measured in simulate.mjs. For each creature, the pack size whose spread-fire win rate
lands nearest 50% — a fight at 0% or 100% cannot show an effect, which is why R-259's
first sample was three-quarters useless — then focus versus spread, 2000 fights across
three seeds.

31 of 47 creatures had a pack size that could show anything. Focus fire helped 31 of 31,
by more than that row's own noise 31 of 31 times, mean +12.8 points. Best is 6x The
margin, 40.4% -> 61.1%. The other 16 are unmeasurable rather than unaffected: eleven are
trivial six at a time, five are hopeless in pairs.

R-259's decomposition was confounded, and I wrote it while correcting a confound. It
credited the defence ladder with 4-5 points by comparing dodge <=30% against dodge >=55%
— but the low-dodge samples were PAIRS and the high-dodge ones TRIOS. Held at a fixed
pack size, dodge is worth 1-2 points. Pack size is the driver: 8.0 points for a pair,
14-15 for three or more, then flat. What focus fire buys is that a dead creature stops
attacking and a half-dead one does not attack any less.

Two failures, one cause: comparing groups that differ in more than the thing being
measured. The control is cheap and I did not run it until the third time.

The bestiary advised concentrating fire and gave the ladder as the reason — right advice,
wrong reason. It now gives the reason that survives measurement.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 00:03:02 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 995f3fa94e The firing order was worth nothing, measured properly (R-259)
R-258 put a tactic in the bestiary on the strength of a table-side harness — cheapest
weapon first, best weapon last, 10.7 points of win rate across 24 orderings. Measured in
simulate.mjs, the pipeline every published number comes from, it is worth +0.27 points,
with per-seed differences of -1.5 to +1.8 against 2.6 points of noise on a single arm.
Zero.

The toy lied for two reasons, both mine. Its party had one uniquely valuable weapon (an
anti-materiel rifle the borough does not own, so unhalved, worth double anything else) so
there was something to sequence around; the frozen party is 4.09, 3.98, 1.43, 1.43 —
two near-identical pairs. And the toy fixed the order every round, while the game
re-rolls Reaction every round and has no rule for holding an action, which I checked
before measuring. The order is not a decision the rules offer, and I had written table
advice for it.

The page is corrected: the ladder stays, because it is derived and true, and it now says
you cannot choose who goes first.

What is worth doing, measured the same way: committing a round's attacks to one target,
in fights that can actually move (a fight at 0.2% or 100% cannot show an effect and three
of my first four samples were pinned there). Against dodge <= 30% focus fire gains 7.6
points, which is just killing attackers sooner; against dodge >= 55% it gains 12.2, so
about 4-5 points is the defence ladder and the rest is arithmetic unrelated to dodging.
Separating them needed contested fights at both ends of the dodge range — without that
control I would have credited all 13.8 points against three redcaps to the ladder, which
is R-255's mistake again.

runFight gained two hooks, off by default and unused by the baseline: partySequence
rearranges the party within the slots initiative already gave them, leaving enemies where
they fell so the experiment isolates agent order from who acts before the creature; and
partyTargets "focus" concentrates fire. Both roll the same dice, and check-lethality
confirms all 47 creatures still fight exactly as recorded.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 23:58:22 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 f932a79121 The firing order, in the bestiary, generated (R-258)
DEFENCE_STEP is -30, so a creature's Dodge is not a percentage it has for a round — it is
one it has once or twice. The median dodge in the book is 45% and goes 45 -> 15 -> 1
inside a single round. No player-facing document said so, which hid a real decision:
what order the party shoots in.

The bestiary now has a section on it. Only a landing hit spends a defence, so a miss
strips nothing; each landing hit makes the next attack of that round easier; therefore
the cheapest reliable weapon fires first and the one you most need to land fires last —
against the supporter, the weapon the borough does not own.

Everything it states is generated from DEFENCE_STEP, resolveBands and the statblocks: the
step, the ladder, the median, the spread (13 of 47 creatures stripped by one landing hit,
25 by two, 9 by three) and the list of the hardest to strip. Negative-tested by setting
the step to -15 and -20; the page rewrites itself both times. No win rates are published:
the ordering measurements come from a table-side harness that ignores wound penalties,
bleeding and dying, so the page states the mechanism and quotes no percentages.

My first draft used the dodgiest creature in the book as the worked example — 80%, three
landing hits to strip — directly beneath a claim that the first attack of the round eats
the dodge. True of a modest dodge, false of a good one, and both were on the same page.

tools/bestiary.mjs --check has existed since the document did, with the comment "(for the
guards)", and no guard ever ran it: a check written and wired to nothing, the same shape
as every rule found computed and never read. That was tolerable while the page restated
statblocks and is not now that it derives from rules — change DEFENCE_STEP and the
document lies to a GM. check-bestiary.mjs is the tenth guard, negative-tested both ways
it can fail: a rule change that staler the page, and a hand-edit of the page.
update-readme flagged it as "run by the build, not advertised" before I listed it, and
the README's count word went from nine to ten by itself.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 23:51:04 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 c3a337314f One armourAgainst, in the authority, shared with the harness (R-257)
Left open by R-256. Two rules decided how a hit meets armour — armourAgainst (a critical
ignores it, a special halves it, rounded down) and damageAfterArmour (what is left never
goes below zero). Both lived in ringbrp.mjs, which is the game. Neither lived in
rules.mjs, which is the authority, so the guard that forbids redefining a rule had
nothing to forbid. tools/simulate.mjs applied armour from its own inline copies of both,
as it had since it was written.

They agreed, which is the whole point. Nothing published was wrong and no guard could
have said they were two things rather than one. But every number in BESTIARY.md, every
row of the lethality baseline and every measurement quoted from R-251 onward comes out of
that harness: change how a special hit meets armour and the game changes, the numbers
describing the game do not, and all nine guards still pass. Same shape as ddc4f99, with
no tolerance to blame and no reason it would ever have surfaced.

Both rules now live in rules.mjs. ringbrp.mjs imports and re-exports them because they
are public API at game.ringbrp. The simulator imports them. Verified live in the world
that game.ringbrp.armourAgainst and the rules.mjs export are the same function object,
not two that agree.

Proof it changed nothing: check-lethality replays 47 creatures over 2000 fights each and
every one fights exactly as recorded — no tolerance, no drift — across roughly four
million resolved attacks, all of which now go through the moved rule.

check-rules fails any file outside rules.mjs that halves armour or subtracts it inline,
naming file and line. Negative-tested by restoring the harness's original three lines
verbatim (both patterns fire) and by redefining armourAgainst in ringbrp.mjs, which the
name-based guard now catches because the rule finally lives somewhere it belongs to.
Arriving in rules.mjs also tripped the spot-check requirement immediately: eight new
spot-checks, and what a special does to hide 9 is now written down once.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 23:33:58 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 f847cb2171 The sheet header said 9 while the body said 4 (R-256)
Verifying R-255 on a live sheet found the rule working everywhere it was built and
contradicted in the first place a GM looks. The header's ARMOUR field is the hide the
creature HAS; on a grounded beast the hit-location table under it read 4 and the header
still read 9. Nothing computes off that field, so nothing in the code was wrong. It was
wrong at the table.

The field stays editable and stays 9 — that is the creature's hide and what a GM types
into. Under it, when system.grounded is set, the sheet now says what is in play:
DOWN: 4 · CHEST 9, derived from exposedHideFor rather than from a second opinion, with
the reason on the tooltip. Verified live: no badge in the air, and grounded the badge and
the location table agree at 4 with the forequarters at 9.

check-rules forbids redefining a rule by NAME, which misses how this goes wrong in
practice — nobody redefines exposedHideFor, they write Math.floor(hide / 2) in the sheet
because it is cheaper than an import. I wrote that version first and check-rules passed
it. It now fails any file outside rules.mjs that halves a hide inline, naming file and
line; check files are exempt because stating the expected value independently is what a
test is for.

That guard also turned up something I have not fixed, recorded in R-256: armourAgainst
lives in ringbrp.mjs rather than rules.mjs, and tools/simulate.mjs has its own inline copy
of it. They agree today so no published number is wrong, but every figure in the bestiary
and the lethality baseline comes out of that simulator.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 23:29:41 +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 ca040b7926 The belly is not armoured (R-254)
R-95 made losing a wing change the animal. R-96 took the hide off the
wing so losing one was possible. Separately each was right and each was
measured. Together they gave the party a soft target and deleted it the
moment the party hit it:

  winged     6/20 ranged faces land on armour 0 (a bare wing)
  quadruped  0/20

A service round on borough ground averages 3.75 after halving — 3.75
through a bare wing, 0 through hide 7 — so grounding the creature took
the party's chance of winning from 44.9% to 1.4%, while its own tactics
told the GM that grounding it was the fight they could actually win.

Found by measuring something else. Every aimed-shot configuration made
the party worse, and the most aggressive was the worst: aiming at a wing
at -20% grounds it in 99% of fights and HALVES the win rate to 10.1%.
Buying the objective reliably was the fastest way to lose, which only
makes sense if the objective is a trap. So no aimed-shot rule; the
problem was never the lack of one.

It also retires the "+31 points" I reported for grounding at 1.7.3. That
was win-rate-if-grounded against win-rate-if-not — selection bias, since
the parties that grounded it were the ones shooting well. Forcing the
grounding gives the causal value and it was -43. A correlation of +31
and a causation of -43 out of the same mechanic.

The fix: a heraldic beast is armoured the way it is drawn, across the
back and the flanks. On its belly half that hide is no longer in the
way, so exposedHideFor halves natural armour while system.grounded is
set. Hide 7 becomes 3.

                      flying   grounded   worth
  on borough ground    45.3%     51.7%    +6.4
  off borough ground   90.6%     97.9%    +7.3

Modest deliberately. Grounding should help, not decide — the borough is
still the real answer. Losing its damage modifier was worth +26.5 and
would have made the wing the whole fight.

check-anatomy gains a sixth property: a flyer must not be harder to hurt
on the ground than in the air. The first version probed at a single
4-point round and declared the fix broken, because 4 sits inside the one
band where a bare wing beats a halved hide — below 5 damage the creature
really is better off grounded, above it much worse. Integrating across
1-12 gives 2.83 flying against 3.75 grounded and reads it correctly.
Negative-tested against 1.7.8's behaviour, which it names.

The lethality baseline is unchanged: its simulation never grounds
anything, so system.grounded never comes up there.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 22:57:31 +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 4cfacd47fe check-lethality compares exactly, because it already seeded per creature (R-97)
I asked for this on a false premise of my own: I reported that adding a
creature shifted a shared random stream and perturbed every other
creature's recorded number. That is not true and the code never did it.
measure() builds its own mulberry32 from the seed on every call, and
check-lethality calls it once per creature, so a creature's numbers do
not depend on its neighbours or its position. Measured rather than
argued: inserting a creature ahead of the barghest changes 0 of 47
existing entries. The file's own claim — "the only thing that can move
the number is a change to the rules or to the creature" — was accurate
all along, and my last commit message says otherwise. It is wrong.

The real cause, found by replaying each commit against the baseline as
committed at 4b71859:

  4b71859  baseline recorded            0 of 46 differ
  322389b  bestiary                     0 of 46 differ
  ddc4f99  hit locations reach combat  26 of 46 differ   <-- here
  a90c4f3 .. e5dc9b5                   26 of 46 differ

ddc4f99 routed every ordinary blow through the hit location table. That
is the largest change the combat system has had and it moved 26 of 46
creatures, which is correct and expected. What is not correct is that
nobody noticed for four commits: each creature moved by one or two
points, the guard allowed six, and it reported OK while describing a
game nobody was playing.

So the tolerance goes. It exists for sampling noise and there is no
sampling noise here — same party, same seed, same counts, and two
recordings of unchanged code are byte-identical. Anything that moves is
a real change, which is the entire point of the file. `rounds` is now
compared too; it was recorded and then never read, so a creature could
take a round longer to kill forever without a word.

Because exactness only means something if the measurement is exact, the
guard now proves it instead of assuming it: one creature measured twice
must come back identical, and it says so plainly if a future change
reaches for Math.random.

Negative-tested. A 2% change to locationMaxHp now trips 8 creatures at
+1.5 and +0.5 points of wipe rate — every one of which the old tolerance
would have passed. Breaking determinism is caught and named.

Also fixes update-readme, which advertised 8 guards while the build ran
9: check-anatomy was added without touching the list, which is precisely
what the comment above that list already warned had happened once. The
list is no longer trusted — it is checked against the `check` script in
package.json, and refuses to write a README advertising a different set
than the build runs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 22:22:19 +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 77465baa30 A flyer with a hole in a wing is a quadruped (R-95)
The supporter's tactics have said this since it was written: "It is a
flyer, and a flyer with a hole in a wing is a quadruped: disable either
wing and it is on the ground for the rest of the scene, which is the
fight the agents can actually win."

Playing a full combat against it showed the sentence was decoration.
`flightLost` was computed, printed on the NPC sheet as GROUNDED, and
read by nothing. Both wings disabled cost 20% off PHYSICAL rolls, and
Brawl is a MELEE category, so woundPenaltyFrom returned 0 and a grounded
supporter attacked at exactly the 75% and exactly the 1d6+1+2d6 it had
in the air. In the played fight it was grounded from round five and went
on to kill one agent, knock out a second and leave a third dying.

Losing a wing now changes the animal. A plan declares what it becomes —
winged says `grounded: "quadruped"` — and hitLocationRoll drops the
creature onto that plan the moment a wing is disabled or destroyed. The
wings leave its hit chart and the six ranged faces they covered go back
to the body: vital hits rise from 3 faces in 20 to 5. Every other wound
moves across on the R-94 remap with its severity intact.

The wing's own damage is deliberately dropped rather than carried, and
cleared in its own update so the remap never sees it. A ruined wing must
not arrive as a ruined foreleg — the creature is not lamed, it is
earthbound, and the injury has already been paid out as the change of
shape.

check-anatomy gains a fifth property: a declared landing must exist,
must have no wings of its own, must not itself be a flyer, must have
room for every wound the flyer was carrying without two collapsing onto
one location, and must not heal a disabled location on the way down.
Three induced failures confirm it fires; the third — landing somewhere
with too few locations — passed at first because I had not stated the
capacity property, and the guard was sharpened until it caught it.

Measured, and reported honestly: this does NOT deliver the fight the
tactics text promises. Over 4,000 simulated fights the win rate moves
12.7% -> 12.1% on borough ground and 85.8% -> 86.3% off it, because
grounding only happens in 9% of fights there and arrives late. What
actually decides this encounter is ARGENT AND GULES: 11.4% win on
borough ground against 85.4% off it. The wing rule is now real and
mechanical, but the creature's advice still points the GM at the wrong
lever.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 22:02:30 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 4a80cc1eca Body plans keep what a wound MEANT, not just its number (R-94b)
1.7.1 carried wounds across a change of body plan by moving the raw
points. Playing it showed that is the wrong invariant. A location is
disabled at its maximum and destroyed at twice it, those maxima come
from `frac`, and the plans disagree — an arm is 0.35 of the body and a
foreleg 0.42 — so moving the number silently changed the meaning.
Measured across the 20 plan changes: 234 severity flips, 138 of them
turning a location that was merely disabled into a destroyed one. A
destroyed arm arrived as a working-ish foreleg; two disabled arms
stacked onto one Vesh grasping limb and arrived destroyed.

So severity is now the invariant. A hurt location arrives hurt, a
disabled one disabled, a destroyed one destroyed; the points are
rescaled to the destination's own maximum to keep that true, and two
wounds sharing one location take the worse rather than the sum, because
relabelling a creature's anatomy must not destroy a limb that nothing
in play destroyed.

Correspondence is now stated rather than inferred. Every location gains
a plan-independent `slot` (lowerR, upperL, vital, head...), and the
remap matches on slot first. The previous version inferred it from
`kind` plus table order, which inverted left and right on every
crossing: a wounded right arm came back as the opposite hind leg. Where
a destination has no matching slot the fallback prefers the same side
and the same height, so a wing becomes a foreleg rather than a hind leg
and a left wing becomes a LEFT arm. The vesh and the cadence are not
bilateral — one grasping limb, five interchangeable units — so their
slots carry no side, which is a fix to my own first pass: giving them
sided slots was a category error the side guard caught.

check-anatomy now proves all four promises over every ordered pair and
severity band: nothing is stranded, severity is preserved, left never
becomes right and fore never becomes hind between bilateral plans, and
no update deletes a wound it is also setting. 432 carried wounds, 0
flips, down from 234. Five induced failures confirm each assertion
fires; two of my first attempts at those did NOT fire and were sharpened
until they did.

Played through in a live world: a church grim filed as a humanoid with a
destroyed right arm, a disabled left arm and a hurt chest becomes a dog
with a destroyed right foreleg, a disabled left foreleg and hurt
forequarters, and converts back to exactly the wounds it started with.
Its penalties correctly stop being manipulation and start being
movement — a man with two ruined arms drops his weapon, a dog with two
ruined forelegs cannot run.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 16:42:57 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 a90c4f3e71 Carry wounds across a change of body plan (R-94)
locationDamage is keyed by location id and prepareDerivedData reads only
the keys belonging to the current plan, so changing speciesProfile on a
wounded actor stranded every wound it had. Found on a live Barghest that
had been shot in the leg and chest as a humanoid and then switched to
quadruped: 5 points under `legR` and 7 under `chest`, exactly its 12
missing hit points, sitting under keys no quadruped location answers to.
It read on the sheet as a badly hurt dog with eight pristine locations.

Stored and never read — the same defect this system keeps producing.

rules.mjs gains remapLocationDamage, which carries wounds across by KIND,
because kind is what the rules act on. Exact-kind matches are claimed
first in table order, so the obvious pairings land before any fallback
competes for them; that ordering is what makes the arms become the
forelegs going one way and the forelegs become the arms coming back.
Overflow past a location's destroyed ceiling is reported, not dropped.

It also gains locationDamageReplacement, which exists because the first
version of this fix had the bug it was fixing. Foundry merges object
updates so the outgoing keys must be deleted by name (R-93), but a
deletion and an assignment of the SAME key do not both apply — the
deletion wins. quadruped and winged share every location but the wings,
so switching between them emitted `-=hindLegR` alongside `hindLegR: 5`
and threw the wound away. Caught in live testing, not by reading.

Guards, both negative-tested before being wired in:
  - check-anatomy now walks all 20 ordered plan pairs and asserts every
    wound lands on a location the destination has, the arithmetic closes,
    the round trip does not leak, and no update both sets and deletes the
    same key.
  - check-rules gains 13 spot-checks over both new rules.

Verified in a running Foundry: baseline -> quadruped -> winged ->
quadruped -> baseline conserves all 12 points with no orphans, returns
to exactly {legR: 5, chest: 7}, and whispers the GM a receipt of what
moved each time.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 16:29:16 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 ddc4f99ff4 Hit locations reach ordinary combat, and creatures get a body
THE DEFECT. locationFor had ONE caller in the engine, hitLocationRoll, and
hitLocationRoll was called from fall, burn, detonate and burstAttack. Falling,
fire, explosions and automatic fire. Nothing else. rollWeaponDamage rolled dice,
printed a number and returned it, so the chat Damage button, the character
sheet's damage button and the item sheet's all stopped there.

A grenade knew which arm it took off. A sword did not.

Every individual piece was already correct - the tables, per-location armour and
coverage, disable and destroy thresholds, Major Wound, dying, death, the figure
on the sheet. They simply were not joined up, which is why this reads as a wiring
change rather than a new subsystem.

- rollWeaponDamage now carries through to hitLocationRoll: it rolls the location,
  applies that location's armour, applies the wound, and handles the rest through
  the machinery that already owned it. Nothing here re-implements any of that
- locationModeFor picks the melee or ranged column from the weapon's class. The
  two columns have always differed and nothing was choosing between them
- with no target it does exactly what it did before and SAYS SO on a card, rather
  than failing quietly
- burstAttack opts out with locate:false - it rolls its own location per round,
  and letting both fire would have applied every round of a burst twice

BODY PLANS. Two new tables: quadruped (four legs, fore/hindquarters, neck, a head
that is hard to reach) and winged (that, plus wings). Forequarters are the vital.
DISABLE EITHER WING AND IT CANNOT FLY, which is the fight a party can win.
Barghest, Kelpie and Church grim were all species "baseline" - a black dog, a
horse and a grave-hound, each hit-located with two arms and a chest. Fixed. Added
"The supporter", a winged heraldic beast, so the new table is exercised by real
content instead of existing unused.

Body plan is a NEW FIELD, not a species. A bear is not a playable people with
characteristic dice and talents, so creature specs take bodyPlan and the playable
species list is untouched.

THE NPC SHEET had no hit locations at all - 102 lines against the character
sheet's 627 - while every NPC in the game had them derived and wired to
consequences. It now carries the body-plan selector, the figure, the per-location
table, the condition and a GROUNDED flag. The sheet class already extended the
character sheet, so it already HAD the context; the template never used it.

FOUND IN PASSING, by the new guard: kind "body" - the abdomen, the trunk, the
hindquarters - did nothing whatever. Its printed effect has always promised "-30%
to all Physical actions and bleeding 1 hit point per round until First Aid" and
the code delivered none of it, on every body plan including the humanoid default.
It now bleeds 1, or 2 destroyed, exactly as bodyX says.

NEW GUARD: check-anatomy. Every body plan must cover 1-20 exactly once in BOTH
modes, every location must be drawn and every drawn shape must be a location, and
every kind must be one locationEffectsFor acts on, has effect text for, and has a
destruction outcome. Verified it fails on a d20 gap, a shapeless limb and an
unhandled kind before wiring it in. Ninth guard.

VERIFIED IN A RUNNING FOUNDRY, not just unit-tested: melee bar reads the Melee
column and the rifle reads Ranged on the same creature; forequarters graded as a
vital hit; a maxed wing set flightLost and the sheet said GROUNDED; the real chat
Damage button rolled 1D20 15, found the right foreleg, applied 12 through armour,
disabled the leg and took the dog from 16 to 4; and with nothing targeted nothing
was touched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-12 15:46:11 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 322389bc8a A bestiary a GM can actually read, and the defect it found immediately
Forty-six creatures and no way to look at them. They live in content.mjs, which is
source code, and in the compendium, which shows one actor at a time behind two clicks.
A GM prepping a case can browse neither, so in practice the bestiary was whatever the
GM happened to remember writing.

docs/BESTIARY.md is generated, never hand-written, for the reason the rules journal is
generated from rules.mjs: a reference that can disagree with the thing it references is
worse than no reference. It opens with a one-page table sorted by how much of a party
each creature puts on the floor - the part that gets printed - then an entry each with
characteristics, attack, the POWER line pulled out of the tactics, and the measured
figure read straight from the lethality baseline. Every number is derived, so the
document cannot drift, and check-lethality already refuses the build if the measurements
move.

IT FOUND SOMETHING IN ITS FIRST RUN. The generic heavy natural attack is keyed `grasp`
and was NAMED "Vesh grasp limb". Twenty-two creatures carry it and five are Vesh, so the
at-a-glance table cheerfully printed "Vesh grasp limb" against a black dog, a kelpie, a
church grim and an apple tree. Renamed to "Grasping limb"; the key is untouched, so
every kit reference and every built pack still resolves. That defect was invisible for
as long as nobody could see the bestiary in one place, which is the argument for the
document.

The caveats are given more room than the numbers, deliberately. The measured column is
SOLO against ONE frozen party, and the document says so three times: encounter lethality
moves with how many there are and, much harder, with who the players brought - the same
fight runs 0% to 100% across party choice. It points at --spread rather than pretending
a single figure is an answer.

Also records the real remaining gap: 21 creatures fight with nothing but their own
bodies and still carry human anatomy, so the barghest can be shot in the left arm. The
machinery to fix that is built and measured; what is missing is anatomy tables for the
shapes they actually are - a quadruped, an immobile object, a swarm.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-01 16:43:39 +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
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 414dbd7037 simulate --spread: one number was the wrong instrument
THROUGH TRAIN Act Three publishes a single figure for its standoff - "the party is
wiped in 24% of runs" - and tells the GM not to soften it. Measured against every party
the duty roster can field, that fight runs from 0% to 100%.

It is not that the published number is wrong. It is that no single number can be right
for this fight, because the answer was settled at character selection: four armed
postings walk it, four trades are massacred, and the GM reading one figure is reading
somebody else's session.

--spread measures the encounter against every C(16,4) party - 1820 of them, exhaustive
rather than sampled, about a minute - and reports the floor, the median and the ceiling
with the parties that produce them. Exhaustive on purpose: a GM planning a session
wants the actual worst case, not an estimate of it.

It also prints each agent's effect on the wipe rate averaged over every party they
appear in, which is the line that gets used at the table. For the Act Three standoff:

  okonkwo   -43.2 points        ashcroft  +16.1
  sandoval  -17.7               nkemdirim +13.5
  holloway  -15.9               ferriby   +12.4

Okonkwo is worth forty-three points of wipe rate on his own. That is a scene-shaping
fact about the encounter that no amount of re-measuring the median would surface.

The published tables are NOT rewritten here. What to do about a 100-point spread is a
design decision - constrain the party, print a range, or rebalance the fight - and it
belongs to whoever wrote the scenario.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 21:17:28 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 2d4f7f18be Twenty-four new creatures, and the anatomies finally get used
The bestiary goes 22 to 46: eight more FOLKLORE, eight more HORROR, eight more
FORWARD. Ten of the forty-six are now Vesh or Cadence, up from two.

That ratio is the point. Both anatomies have had complete hit-location tables, body
geometry, species talents and location effects for the whole life of this project and
nothing used either, so none of it ran outside the character generator. They are now
written to be WORTH the anatomy rather than to wear it:

- The relay is five Cadence bodies holding a crossing open, and the crossing closes
  as they are destroyed. No vital, no head, 10% off everything per body lost - it
  cannot be dropped and cannot be ignored, which is the species argument entire.
- The courier is a Vesh that fights at half rating while its one grasp limb is full.
  Disable the limb and it drops the consignment and fights properly. The whole
  encounter turns on a trade the party has to work out.
- The census cannot be usefully fought at all: no head means no killing shot, so the
  fight lasts until somebody opens the ridge, by which time it has counted everyone.
- Knockers are the only folklore Cadence, and the committee is a Cadence because a
  committee IS several bodies and one decision.

The rest is written to the house line that most of these are arrangements rather than
fights, because a bestiary where every answer is a gun has one page. The washer at the
ford will not fight and cannot be made to; the apple tree man wants a drink it has been
owed since 1961; the waiting room's exit was never locked and nobody stands up.

Measured, 250 runs against four duty-roster agents, seed 11. Nothing accidental turned
up: the non-combat entries sit at 0.0-0.1 agents hurt, the fighters at 1.4-2.3, and the
only creature over a 10% solo wipe is the stanchion at 14.4% - which is a fixed object
with 12 armour whose own tactics say it is a demolition problem and not a fight. The
harness can only force a fight, so read that number as "the party punched the pillar".

Art regenerated: 24 new portraits, and the eight new non-humans verified to draw
exactly as many body parts as their location tables have entries.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 21:11:04 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 94479641b3 simulate: locate the damage
The harness measured a game in which every blow went to a general pool. That was
tolerable while every creature was a baseline human and merely wrong once the bestiary
had a Cadence in it: a creature whose entire mechanical identity is being whittled down
body by body was being measured as a person with an odd portrait, and the number it
printed was about nobody.

locationFor and resolveLocationHit move from ringbrp.mjs to rules.mjs, and the
category mapping inside woundPenaltyFor becomes woundPenaltyFrom beside them, for the
reason applyDifficulty and resolveBands moved before them: node cannot load the engine,
and the harness may not own a second copy of a rule. All three arrive with the
spot-checks they never had - 103 rules now, 346 formulas verified.

What the loop does now: 1d20 against the DEFENDER's own species table, melee finding
limbs and shooting finding centre of mass; damage to that location and to the general
pool, so the two agree; disabled at the location maximum and destroyed at twice it,
cumulatively. Then the consequences actually apply - a destroyed head is unconscious
immediately (conditionFor has always accepted that flag and was never passed it, so a
headshot used to leave the target swinging), a ruined arm costs -30 to every attack
including shooting, a ruined leg costs -30 to dodge, and each Cadence body lost costs
the whole creature -10 to everything.

Verified as mechanics rather than as numbers that moved: no species can return a
location it does not have across all 40 rolls; vesh and cadence have no head at any
roll and cadence has no vital either; a vesh ridge is hit 3/20 where a human head is
1/20, which is the "long target rather than a small one" the tables were designed for.
A built Cadence has five bodies at 4 points each and no vital; a built Vesh has six
locations with the ridge the largest.

Measured consequences, seed 11, 400 runs, four duty-roster agents:

  keepers x6      31.0% -> 36.5% wiped
  the_choir x11    0.3% ->  0.0% wiped, and now degrading as bodies go rather than
                   being a person who cannot be shot in the head
  long_walker      42.0% wiped, which nothing had ever measured

Still no bleeding, panic, Coherence, cover, range bands or fire modes. Still a floor.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 21:05:25 +01:00
slaguru666andClaude Opus 5 f88c31649c The bestiary's first non-human creatures
vesh and cadence have had complete hit-location tables, body geometry, species talents
and location effects since they were written, and no creature had ever used either. So
none of that had run outside the character generator, and the whole bestiary was
hit-located as a person - including a black dog and a stack of paper.

THE CHOIR IS A CADENCE. It always was: its tactics say "run them as ELEVEN separate
bodies with one initiative between them", which is Distributed and Quorum described in
prose because the species that models it had no users. Retagged, and given the two
talents. No scenario prose refers to it, so nothing else moves.

PRECEDENT is new, and is a Vesh - the first. Built to exercise what makes the species
different rather than to be another sack of hit points: no head, so no fight against
one ends on a lucky roll, and a sensory ridge for a vital that runs the length of its
back and is correspondingly easy to hit. It is also not hostile, which is the point;
the encounter is a conversation with something that answers questions about an event
that has not happened yet.

Two things left deliberately unfixed and written down rather than fudged:

- The choir is eleven in the fiction and five in the location table. Reconciling it
  properly means giving cadence a per-creature body count, which stops the table being
  a constant and makes the paper doll follow it. That is the right fix and it is not a
  small one. A note on the spec says so.
- Precedent gets unblinking but not out_of_step, though SPECIES.vesh grants both. An
  npc actor has no Coherence track, and out_of_step costs 1 to use.

Also corrects a comment in creature-schema.mjs claiming Out of Step is vesh-locked. It
is not - five postings and a roster agent offer it to humans, and locking it would take
it off all six. SPECIES[x].talents is what a species is GRANTED; TALENTS[].species is
what only that species may HAVE. Two different fields, and only the second locks.

Simulated: Precedent 0.68 of 4 hurt over 3 rounds, no wipes. The choir alone is
trivial; at the eleven its own tactics call for, 3.05 of 4 hurt, median 18 rounds, 0.3%
wipes. Read both as floors - the harness does not model hit locations, so a Cadence's
entire mechanical identity is exactly what it cannot yet measure.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 20:57:17 +01:00