4d7d93abc8a00cc916004c51fdc84c3d44dfea7d
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Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
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 slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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 |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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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>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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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> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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187a317a0a |
mj-queue: the illustrated upgrade path, without a self-bot
The Mac bridge posts /imagine to Discord with a user token. It is not ported here and should not be: Midjourney's terms since 27 May 2026 forbid automated access, there is no official API, and the bridge's own memory note records Discord silently dropping its interactions from 22 July — which is what enforcement looks like from inside. A Windows clone would be a second self-bot on the same account. So this does everything except talk to Discord, which turns out to be most of the work. `next` derives a prompt from the creature's spec and puts it on the clipboard; you paste it yourself; `file` or `watch` renames the download to the canonical name and retires the generated placeholder. One at a time, because the memory note is explicit that concurrent jobs in one channel steal each other's grids. Prompts are derived, not written — anatomy from the location table, scale from SIZ, build from STR against SIZ, plating from naturalArmour — so they cannot drift from the statblock. Three things learned by reading the data rather than assuming it: - tactics is written for a GM, not an illustrator. "Advances by bounds, 15 m per round" put a rate of fire in an art prompt. role is the one-line essence and is already the sentence you would hand an artist. Sentences carrying mechanics are dropped; dates and ages are kept. - era is the wrong test for whether something is a person. It classified Mr Bewley of the Registry and everyone in 1881 Cordera as monsters, because their kit is old. - 18 creatures are species "baseline" and are not human-shaped — a black dog, a case file that eats case files, a machine that has decided it is the site. The prompt refuses to describe a body it cannot verify, and `list` names them. That is a statblock to write, not something to paper over here. `sheet` emits a prompt sheet that the existing gen-art.mjs parses unchanged, so if the bridge ever works again the whole bestiary drives from it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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9ddea43720 |
make-portraits: every creature gets art it cannot disagree with
Sixty of the seventy-six actors had no portrait. The sixteen that did are the hand-made duty roster; the whole bestiary and every scenario NPC fell back to a generic silhouette. The point is not that this is free. A portrait composed from anatomy.mjs cannot contradict the statblock, because it is drawn from the numbers the hit-location roll uses: silhouette from BODY_ART, height from SIZ, build from STR against SIZ, plating from naturalArmour, a mark for the primary weapon's class. A Cadence would get five bodies because its table has five. Nothing has to be kept in step. Colour carries what a GM wants off a thumbnail — whether the thing is a person, folklore, recovered machinery, or the far side. That reads the shouted category the role lines already carry (FOLKLORE, HORROR, FORWARD), which nothing was using, and falls back to structure for the ones with no tag. build-packs resolves portraits by stem and extension rather than an exact .webp filename, so a creature gains art without an edit to content.mjs and a hand-made raster always beats the generated diagram. A spec that NAMES a portrait and has none is still a hard build failure. These read as diagrammatic field-guide plates and will not match the Midjourney agent portraits. That split is deliberate: the agents are the cast, the bestiary is case material. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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24b183642f |
all-specs: one place that knows where the actors are
check-creatures collects every spec in the repo, including the rule that a scenario cast is any exported array whose entries carry characteristics — so a new scenario is covered the day it is written. That rule is a definition, and two more tools are about to need it. Lifted into tools/all-specs.mjs and imported back. check-creatures reports the same 76 specs across the same 8 sources; this is a move, not a change. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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255b146753 |
Species anatomy moves where node can read it
RINGBRP.locationTables and RINGBRP.bodyArt lived inside ringbrp.mjs, which no tool can import — it touches game, Hooks and foundry at load. So nothing outside Foundry could ask how many hit locations a Cadence has, or what shape a Vesh is, which is exactly what art generated from a statblock needs to know. Moved byte for byte to anatomy.mjs and assigned back, the same move rules.mjs got when the simulator needed the combat rules. One definition, two readers. check-rules matched those tables with a regex against ringbrp.mjs and went blind the moment they moved — it reported "could not read locationTables" and the species check silently stopped running. It imports the value now. A guard that parses source text breaks when the source is refactored; one that imports it cannot. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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b0981008b3 |
No posting may grant a species
Eighteen postings offered vesh or cadence biology to any agent who took them: unblinking nine times, quorum seven, distributed three. That is the root cause behind the six characters check-creatures caught — they were not rogue, they had taken talents their own postings advertised, and every newly generated agent would have done the same. Unblinking is the clearest case. It is cat: species, species: vesh, and its own rule text reads "A Vesh has no face to read and does not need to read yours". Nine postings offered it, including Interview, Pathology and the doctor trade. Each of the nineteen slots is replaced with a talent drawn from what the posting actually does rather than from what was nearest alphabetically: Registry gets Requisition, the Anchor gets Echo Sense, Disposal gets Clean Scene, Signals gets Chain of Custody and Dead Reckoning. No pool gained a duplicate, and no talent is left unused — every legal talent is now offered by at least two postings. The guard lives in check-kits, which is the file that validates postings, and it imports TALENT_SPECIES from creature-schema.mjs so there is one definition of which talents are locked rather than two. check-creatures was looking at characters; nothing was looking at the pools they were picked from. Verified by reintroducing unblinking on the doctor trade and watching it fail, not merely by watching it pass. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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4ded53f9b5 |
Fix: npm run build has never worked on Windows
Both spawners built their argument with a file URL's .pathname, which on Windows is "/C:/Users/...". Node resolves that against the drive root, so the build spawned "C:\C:\Users\...\check-rules.mjs" and aborted on a module it could not find. update-readme.mjs had the same bug and swallowed it in a bare catch, so instead of failing it silently wrote a README whose guard box was empty — "0 guard lines" where there should be four. A Windows build therefore could not happen, and if it had, it would have quietly deleted the guard output from the README. Same root as the packs/ CRLF bug: this repository has only ever been built on macOS and Linux, where .pathname happens to be a usable path. Also adds check-creatures to the pre-build guards, which it was missing, so the build and npm run check now refuse the same things. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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2c547efe72 |
simulate: a lethality harness that uses the real rules
THROUGH TRAIN publishes "MEASURED, 400 runs each" and a 24% wipe rate; the starter publishes its own table. Nothing in this repository could produce either number, so both were claims rather than results and neither could be re-checked after a rule moved. The harness knows no rules of its own. Everything comes out of rules.mjs, because a harness with its own copy of the combat loop measures a game nobody is playing and drifts silently the first time a rule changes. Two things had to move for that to be possible: applyDifficulty, resolveBands and gradeRoll -> rules.mjs. The whole of d100 resolution lived in ringbrp.mjs, which node cannot import. All three are pure, so they moved and the engine re-exports them; no caller changes. check-rules then refused them for having no spot-check, so they now have fifteen, covering the 1% floor, the 96-99 rule and 00-always-fumbles. They had none in their entire life inside the engine. expandFromRegister -> tools/expand-spec.mjs. A roster agent is written as a job and a rank and carries no skills or kit; everything it can do is derived at build time by a function locked inside build-packs.mjs, which cannot be imported because importing it runs the build. A simulated agent expanded by a second copy of that logic is not the agent that gets packed. Moved verbatim; both sides import one copy. Deterministic throughout: same creature, party and seed, same numbers, which is what lets a published table be verified rather than remembered. What it finds: for the Act Three standoff the seed barely matters (0.5-2.8% wipe across five seeds, eight rounds throughout) and party composition dominates everything. Four support agents against the six miners wipe 92.8% of the time; swap in the heavy and the warden and it is 0.3%. The published 24% is not a property of the encounter, and no single figure can be. Models Reaction re-rolled each round, banding, graded defences, the stacking defence penalty, damage by band, major wounds and the dying clock. Does NOT yet model hit locations, bleeding, panic, cover, range bands or fire modes, all of which make a losing fight worse. Read the output as a floor, never a ceiling. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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c3002e93c9 |
check-creatures: validate every actor spec, and fix the vesh talents it found
Nothing validated creature specs. check-kits validates postings and check-scenarios validates prose; buildActor throws on an unknown skill or item key and is silent about everything else, so species, marksmanship style, characteristic blocks, species-locked talents and misspelt field names could all be wrong and still build, pack and play. Every packed actor once shipped as species "hominid" and the whole cast was hit-located as something the rules do not contain. tools/creature-schema.mjs derives every allowed value from the catalogues rather than retyping them: skills from SKILL_CATALOGUE, kit from the item catalogues, species from SPECIES, stats from CHARACTERISTIC_DICE, and the two marksmanship styles out of the language file. It reports every problem with a spec rather than dying on the first, and names the nearest real key. It also reports fields buildActor never reads, because "armours:" is not an error, it is an actor that silently equips nothing. On its first run it found six baseline humans carrying vesh biology. "unblinking" is cat: species, species: vesh, and its own rule text reads "A Vesh has no face to read". Out of Step is reclassified as anomalous with a Coherence cost, which is what every talent in that category has and what the Anchor who is three years older than his birthday says always wanted to be; the other five are swapped to agency and field talents that fit them. Not fixed here: the root cause is upstream in postings.mjs, where twelve posting talent pools still offer unblinking, distributed or quorum to any agent. Picking replacements across those is a design decision, not a mechanical one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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c6924d6ea8 |
THROUGH TRAIN: art prompt sheet, and a runner for it
Prompts for all 43 assets - 16 duty-roster portraits, 14 NPC portraits from TT_CAST, and the 13 scene plates, none of which had a recorded prompt, so none of them could be regenerated. Art direction is frontier newspaper engraving, and the present-day Bureau material is drawn in the same 1881 hand as Cordera with modern people composed as tintype portraits, so the two halves read as one document. Three rules are written into the sheet because they protect meaning rather than style: nothing modern is drawn on the 1881 side, the train is absence rather than a glowing spectre, and nobody is lit as a villain. tools/gen-art.mjs parses the sheet rather than keeping a second copy of the prompts, expands the style tokens and drives mj-gen. Dry run by default, because --run fires paid generations. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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973b4a53aa |
THROUGH TRAIN rewritten into five acts
Act One is now an induction at the Bureau, Act Two puts the players through the crossing and makes them find the train, Act Three is a town-side obstacle, Act Four is the boarding, Act Five is the four minutes. 4h00 in five acts, was 3h30 in three. The restructure earns one thing the old shape could not: THE CROSSING OPENS WHERE THE RECORD SAYS THE LINE IS, which is an empty bench of scrub on the wrong side of the wash. The agents arrive where the paperwork put the railway, not where the railway is, so the fraud is the ground under their feet and finding the train is real work. Registry's file has this wrong and Bewley believes the file. - Act Three: Rance Doyle and five unpaid miners take the agents for company detectives, and they are not wrong to. Resolves on what the players SAY - no roll makes it go away, no roll makes it a fight. Losing costs them the 1881 issue, not their lives. His brother Tom is aboard and dies at minute two of every pass, which is the wiring between the acts - new cast: Bewley, Prosser, Rance Doyle, Shard, Tom Doyle, Cordera man - new handouts: the company notice, and the six names in Ambrose's hand - 8 GM pages, 10 handouts, 15 actors, 13 plates MEASURED, 400 runs each: the Act Three standoff is 0.4/4 hurt from cover and 1.25/4 in the open, both ending early - but FOUGHT TO A FINISH it puts 1.75 of 4 down and wipes the party in 24% of runs. The early stop is what makes the act survivable, not the miners being weak. My first draft of that table was guessed and wrong in all three rows. FOUND AND FIXED: there is no Ride skill in this game and never has been. The boarding set-piece has asked for "[CUS: Ride, then Athletics]" since it was written, through a playtest, which is an instruction to roll a thing nobody has. Horses are now handled by a local and the agent rolls Athletics. NEW GUARD: check-scenarios resolves every [CUS: Skill] tag in every scenario against SKILL_CATALOGUE and fails the build on a skill that does not exist. Verified it fails on the real bug before wiring it in. Sixth guard. NOTE: the three new plates (Bureau, north bench, standoff) are placeholders in this commit - Midjourney is still rendering them. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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24b1aaa682 |
Development: skills improve from what beat you, not what worked
Reversed experience. A skill is marked when it FAILS - failure or fumble - and never when it works, and the improvement roll is the same reversal: roll OVER your rating and the skill goes up 1d6. Nobody learns anything from the lock that opened first time. The two halves pull against each other on purpose, so ratings converge instead of running away. Simulated over 2000 campaigns: a 10% and an 85% skill start 75 points apart and are 11 apart after 60 cases. - rules.mjs owns it: DEVELOPMENT, developmentMarksOn, developmentImproves, developmentCeiling, developmentGainFor - trainingCap has been on the skill schema and the item sheet since it was written and nothing has ever read it. Development reads it now: a skill stops at its own cap, and everything else stops at DEVELOPMENT.ceiling, because a d6 gain could otherwise push a 98% skill past 100 - GM opens the phase from a GM-only toggle in the token controls; it posts a card naming every agent and their marked count, and puts a Development button on each sheet. Players press their own - the toggle re-reads the setting on change, since getSceneControlButtons only fires at load and the button would otherwise lie if the phase were opened by the API or a second GM - rules journal and player primer rewritten from the tables; the old text described the pre-reversal rule on both halves - 7 spot-checks, 4 behaviour tests; verified end to end in a running Foundry Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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c05d488b9d |
Play THROUGH TRAIN end to end; fix three scenes the dice could not reach
Ran the whole case with five agents — briefing, kit swap, Mercy Draw, the
crossing, Cordera, the water tower, the four minutes, the locomotive, the
brakes, the register. It completed, and it exposed one serious defect and two
smaller ones. All three are the same shape: the scenario put dice in front of
things the fiction says should simply happen.
1. THE ENDING WAS UNREACHABLE. Convincing Kell to stop was gated on Persuade
or Status. Only THREE of the ten duty-roster agents have either trained —
the Field Lead has Persuade 15 and Status 15. Three separate attempts on
him all failed and the scenario had no way to end; I narrated it as working
because otherwise there was no ending, which is exactly the improvisation a
scenario is supposed to prevent.
It now takes NO ROLL if the party can tell Kell one true thing about his own
train — the coal, the four minutes, the north bench. He has waited a
hundred and forty-five years for somebody who knows what is wrong to say
so. Only a party that knows nothing rolls, at average, and a failure costs
a pass rather than the ending.
2. THE PAPERS NEEDED PERSUADE. Showing one side the other's document is the
move the scenario is proudest of, and it sat behind Persuade at −30%:
15% became 1%. Both men WANT their paper read — Merritt is proud of his
letter, Ambrose's whole grievance is that nobody has looked at his writ.
No roll, between passes.
3. THE BOARDING SORTED ITSELF BADLY. Athletics runs 25–60% across the roster.
Putting all five on the water tower left the doctor and the Registry officer
missing twice each, carried across on the department's plank, passengers in
their own set-piece, two passes gone. The text now names which route suits
whom before they choose.
What worked, and is worth recording: the automatic clues absorbed two failed
rolls in Act One without the trail stalling; Standing Order 9 caught Okonkwo
checking a wristwatch in an 1881 street and cost a Coherence and a clock tick;
the fumble-is-a-fall rule fired on a 100 at the tower for five damage; the
exposure table held — one hit across the whole fight, on the agent who left
cover to work on Doyle; and the reset landed exactly as intended, with Doyle
standing up at the top of the car and Nkemdirim's hit staying where it was.
Version 1.4.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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5bc46879c7 |
THROUGH TRAIN: put the gunfight inside the loop
The loop is no longer just a train going round. It is FOUR MINUTES with a
gunfight in it, and those four minutes have run about two million times.
Two sides, and neither is the villain. Cass Merritt and three hired men have a
signed letter of engagement from the company telling them to surrender the
payroll to nobody "upon any pretext whatsoever, including the presentation of
any paper". Josiah Ambrose and four Cordera miners have a sealed writ of
attachment from a territorial judge naming that same payroll against eleven
weeks of unpaid wages. Both documents are genuine. Neither man has seen the
other's. The company sold the same money twice and is not aboard. Both are
handouts now, and they only mean anything held in the same hand.
The mission is restated everywhere it appears — briefing page, case brief, GM
essentials: CLOSE IT. Closing the crossing does not kill anybody, it lets them
go. The loop ends, 3 November 1881 resumes from 11:44, and everyone aboard walks
forward into the life they would have had — including Ambrose and a miner named
Doyle, who did not survive the real four minutes. The agents are not choosing
who lives; they are choosing to stop holding history still, having met the
people it lands on.
The standing order is louder in three places: NOTHING MODERN GOES THROUGH.
Two things the playtest found, both now written into the text:
- THE FIGHT WAS A TPK GENERATOR. Modelled with all nine shooters firing at the
party it wiped them 171 times in 200. The model was wrong — the two sides
are shooting at EACH OTHER — so the scenario now carries a measured exposure
table: head down draws nothing, acting from cover costs half a party member
and no wipes over 300 runs, moving in the open costs one, and going for the
payroll box wipes more than half of all parties. The GM is told to say that
last row out loud BEFORE anybody commits to it.
- THE LOOP RESETS AND THE AGENTS DO NOT. Everyone who belongs to 1881 is back
up unhurt on the next pass. The agents keep their wounds. Nothing said so,
and a player who assumes otherwise takes risks that kill them. It is now
stated in capitals in both documents, with the played pass that prompted it
— two of four down at 0 hit points, one untouched because he stayed on the
floor.
Nine cast members, eight handouts, ten plates.
Version 1.4.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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774e95dea8 |
THROUGH TRAIN — the crossing starter, and two more playtest fixes
A train has been running the same four miles of track since 3 November 1881. It
has never stopped. Sixty-one people are aboard and all of them are alive.
The supernatural is science fiction underneath, which is the point. A railway
company laid track to a filed survey instead of to the ground, then described the
line as being where it was not — ten thousand times, in timetables and waybills
and telegraph orders, for six months, at a constant speed. Reality keeps a record
of what belongs where, and that is the most patient argument there is. The record
gave way with No. 9 inside it, and the RUNNING is what holds the crossing open: a
standing wave sustained by its own motion the way a bow sustains a note.
So the players must board a train that cannot stop, and then find that sixty-one
people at six passes is four hours they do not have. The ending is what they
choose to do about arithmetic they cannot beat, in front of a conductor holding
the manifest. No roll resolves it.
It is also the case that teaches Standing Order 9: NOTHING MODERN GOES THROUGH.
Using a modern object across costs a Coherence and moves the clock; carrying it
costs nothing; anchors are exempt. The catalogue already had the 1881 issue —
Webley, Martini-Henry, oil lantern, brass compass, pocket watch, buff coat,
laudanum — so the constraint needed no new content and gives the table something
to feel in the first twenty minutes.
Ships as docs/scenarios/THROUGH_TRAIN.md and a Foundry Adventure: 7 GM pages, 6
handouts including the survey that started it and a manifest deliberately held
back to Act Three, the case file at Containment 6 / Resources 5 / Clearance 4
with its four legs loaded, four of the people aboard, and 7 plates to show.
Two fixes from playing it:
- Bhattacharya's RESEARCH was 1%. Placing the new skills last night I swapped
Occult into Registry's core and took Research out — a records office that
cannot look anything up. Research is back in core; Antiquities gets its
Knowledge back the same way.
- The boarding was unrunnable. At halved skill the set-piece put four agents on
12–31% and all four missed, which stalls the one scene the scenario is built
around. It is an average roll now and only a fumble is a fall, with the
reason written into the text so nobody "fixes" it back. Re-run: 3 of 4 aboard
on the first pass and one waiting for the next, which is the shape it wanted.
Version 1.3.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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37b4043746 |
Play a full case, then fix what it found
Ran THE HOLLOW ROAD with five agents — approach, crossing, contact, the thing on
the road, extraction, debrief — with panic and Coherence both live. It ran clean
and it found one thing that mattered.
ANOMALY LORE 0. Marta Holloway, Field Lead, Senior Field Officer, could not roll
the department's signature skill. Nor could Okonkwo. Induction was gated to
TRADES on the reasoning that a career posting is itself the agency training —
but 17 of the 25 postings do not list anomaly lore, its printed base is 0 on
purpose, and nothing else supplies it. So the people who joined the department
straight out of school were the only ones who never received its basic training,
which is exactly backwards.
Induction is a FLOOR for everybody now, posting or trade, in the live generator
and the pack builder both. It never demotes: Bhattacharya keeps Registry's 63,
Holloway goes 0 → 43, Okonkwo 0 → 33. All twenty built agents verified non-zero.
Two GM tools the case showed were missing, both found by feeling the friction
rather than by reading anything:
- clearPanic(actors). Panic clears when the scene does — one line in the book
and, until now, five sheets edited by hand while the table waited. It leaves
Coherence alone, which is the whole point of having two tracks.
- partyState(). Everybody's hit points, panic and Coherence in one card. With
five agents the alternative is asking "what are you on?" five times a scene,
which is friction a table absorbs silently and then blames on the game.
And the player-facing gap: the primer never mentioned panic. Players got a
one-page aide-memoire for a track they now meet in the first scene. It has a
page of its own and a row on the cheat sheet, both generated from the same
tables as the rules.
One thing I reported as a bug and withdraw: Okonkwo's "Firearm (Pistol) 5%" was
me rolling the wrong weapon. He carries a marksman rifle at 53%. check-kits was
right.
Version 1.2.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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