6e46ad0909813bb018566aacad1176e55b59f2ad
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Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
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 slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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6e46ad0909 |
CLEAN GROUND v0.11.1: correct the mechanism under the first-blood swing
Two wrong mechanisms in one sentence of my own v0.10 prose. The measured swing of 40 is unaffected -- what was wrong was the explanation I gave for it, which I wrote from intuition rather than from rules.mjs. 1. "every disable removes an attacker" -- it does not. locationEffectsFor (rules.mjs:461) charges 30 points off physical for a ruined leg or manipulation for a ruined arm, and simulate.mjs:305 applies the manipulation penalty to melee and ranged attacks alike. A 40% attacker disabled is a 10% attacker, not an absent one: still swinging, still drawing attacks, still a target. A slope, not a cliff. 2. "both sides go down at half their maximum hit points" -- also wrong, and this one nobody flagged. Half maximum hit points is majorWoundFor, the MAJOR WOUND threshold, which feeds dyingLimitFor and decides how long a dying character lasts. It has nothing to do with leaving the fight. conditionFor (rules.mjs:1630) puts somebody down at 2 hit points or on a destroyed head, and that is the only thing that stops them acting. The paragraph now states the real loop and warns the GM off the wrong one, because playing disables as removals gets the fight wrong in the party's favour -- the direction that makes a party-ending encounter feel survivable. Credit where due: the first error was caught by a peer session correcting prose it had sent me twice. I found the second only because I verified the first against rules.mjs instead of taking it on assertion. npm run check: 14 guards, exit 0. 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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dc801f7e9f |
CLEAN GROUND v0.11: Dodge 68, and Ashcroft is busy rather than sidelined
Two holes a peer session's per-agent measurements pointed at. Their scratch figures are not used; both edits are sourced to published numbers or to the guard that now holds them. EXPOSURE gains a fifth point: the party's sheets read about twice as effective as they are, and the number doing it is the column's Dodge 68. That is arithmetic off two published values, not a measurement -- Dodge 68 on The Quiet Neighbours (tools/content.mjs, printed by the bestiary) and one defence spent per incoming blow, so a 40% attack against a fresh dodge connects about one time in eight. Nothing in the document said so, and grep for "expect to hit" / "hit rate" / "lands about" returned nothing at all. The point carries its own way out: DEFENCE_STEP is -30, so a defender who has dodged once meets the next blow at 38%, then 8%, then the floor. Spend their dodges rather than out-shooting them. That is also the other half of why the four-player cut is a different game -- three attackers cannot spend three defenders' dodges and six can, so the missing attacker is the one who would have made everybody else's shots land. The recorded landing rates agree and are now citeable (16-18%, above the naive one-in-eight because most blows are not the first of their round), so the sub-bullet cites tools/attackers-baseline.json rather than asserting. The scaling note's Ashcroft warning gains the sharper reading: he is not sidelined, he is busy and ineffective -- 9.2 attacks a fight of which 1% land and 0.1% disable anybody, both held by check-attackers. A player who cannot act knows to do something else; a player rolling once a round for an hour thinks he is fighting. So the note now says what to give him instead, using only what is on his sheet: First Aid 40, Dodge 63, Insight 63, the anchor. Verified rather than relayed: Dodge 68 at tools/content.mjs, DEFENCE_STEP -30 and the per-round reset in rules.mjs and simulate.mjs, the three fighters' skills at 40/40/35, and the per-attack rates re-measured independently across three seeds before the baseline existed (17.6-18.3 / 17.4-17.6 / 15.5-16.2 / 1.0%, against the recorded 17.8 / 17.3 / 16.2 / 1.0). npm run check: 14 guards, exit 0. 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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a0d15ad7a9 |
CLEAN GROUND v0.10: EXPOSURE reframed on the first disabling blow
The old EXPOSURE paragraph read the fight at round five and quoted bucket figures no guard held. Round five is where the outcome becomes legible; round two is where it is decided. Reframed on the first disabling blow and cited to tools/first-blood-baseline.json, so every figure in the paragraph is one the build re-measures: cut 50.3% first blood at mean round 1.8, 25.5% vs 65.5% wipes, swing 40 line 54.1% at round 1.3, 7.8% vs 23.2%, swing 15.4 An earlier draft carried 43 for the cut swing from a single seed. Three seeds give 40.0. The note stays in the document. Also adds a Casting coupling warning: the declared cast in the `cast:` marker is load-bearing on check-rollable and check-firstblood, and re-casting invalidates the recorded swing. Verified rather than assumed — swapping braithwaite for agyeman in the marker fails both guards and the build, and check-firstblood names the fix: "The recorded swing describes the old cast; re-record with --update, do not revert the cast." npm run check: 13 guards, exit 0. 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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996bd248d3 |
CLEAN GROUND: one status block, and the end of the build archaeology
A stand-in GM opening this had no single place to start: the state of the document lived across three playtest logs, twenty commit messages, a status paragraph and a checklist at the foot. Worse, the two written accounts had drifted apart — the status paragraph still said the scenario "wants a stress re-run of Act Four, a player-chair pass", both of which were done and committed, and the foot checklist still said v0.8 in a v0.9 document with a sentence broken in half. STATUS now sits at the top and answers the questions a GM actually arrives with: what version, can I run it (yes, from this file alone), is it convention-ready (no — never played by human beings, no print pack), what playtesting exists and at which seeds, how long it runs and where the cuts are, how many players. Then the three things that are not obvious, as pointers rather than restatements, because GM ESSENTIALS is where rules live: opposed rolls use a scenario-local ruling since rules.mjs has none; Ashcroft cannot fight and his player must be told before the game; and the lethal encounter is the column in Act Two, not the monster in Act Four, which cannot hurt anybody. The foot checklist is deleted rather than corrected. Every item on it was either struck through or now in STATUS, its history is in the logs and the commits, and keeping a second account of what is outstanding is what let the first one drift. Open Questions stays as the single home for decisions and STATUS says so in a line instead of holding a copy — the same rule this repository applies to rule formulas, applied to prose about state. 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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8e5a30a263 |
CLEAN GROUND v0.9: the anchor cannot fight, and the cut is three
Reading two narrated fights from another session showed Dominic attacking at `vs 1`, four times in one of them. Confirmed against the sheet rather than the log: weapons is empty and his only combat skill is Firearm (Pistol) 43, with nothing to fire. So the four-player cut fights with Renshaw and Bhattacharya on compact pistols and Braithwaite on a knife — a quarter of the party out of any fight, and a large part of why EXPOSURE already said violence at four players is party-ending without knowing that was the reason. A defect I introduced. "He carries no weapon, and the GM must not fix it" was written as characterisation about an anchor having both hands full, and was never checked against a fight. Not fixed by arming him, which would cost the character to solve what is really a briefing failure. Said out loud instead: his entry now states the 1% plainly and instructs the GM to tell his player BEFORE the game that Dodge 63, First Aid 40, Insight 63 and the anchor are his set-piece. A player who is not told will roll at 1% for twenty minutes and conclude the sheet is broken, which is the actual harm here. The scaling note carries the three-attacker arithmetic and points at Agyeman as fixing the sum as well as the lane; EXPOSURE names the cause in its own prose. Also recorded in the pass-3 log, deliberately NOT applied: the bimodality now has a mechanism — both sides disable at half max HP, so each disable thins the return fire and makes the next likelier, and first blood is a true coin worth 43 points of wipe rate in the cut against 14 at six-vs-six. It reproduces exactly. It stays out of the scenario because it comes from a reading tool with no guarded baseline, and a GM-facing page may not carry a figure nobody can re-derive. The duller published sentence is the checkable one. If that measurement gets a guarded home the paragraph should be reframed around the first disabling blow, which is the better frame. 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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6b95a2c5a5 |
CLEAN GROUND v0.8: the player chair found the refusals, and both needed deciding
Desk pass 3 is committed alongside — full session from the player chair, choosing against the scenario at every junction, seed 5580 with one corrected branch at 7731. Every failure case and every pass-2 fix held. What it found instead were the two things players do that no GM-chair pass can reach, because both are refusals rather than rolls. "We are not going through." Three acts live on the far side and the document had no line about declining to cross, which is the most professionally sensible choice a party can make after reading a coroner's note about a man who walked himself to death. Answered now with a reason and not a compulsion: the entry is pegged to a tree that no longer exists, so a seam with no peg does not sit still — waiting does not make it safer, it makes it unfindable, and the forty-one go with it. Registry says that once and leaves the choice alone. A party that still refuses gets a real ending in ten minutes rather than four railroaded hours. "Can we cancel it from in here." A Research fumble and an Anomaly Lore success both landed on a question the document could not answer either way. Decided rather than fudged: cancellation is a REGISTRY ACT ON OUR SIDE, because the entry is a record and the record is held here. So it cannot be done from inside, somebody has to be back through before it happens, and anyone still in the duplicate when it goes goes with it, having never been filed as being there. The Close now costs not only what they choose but who is standing where when it takes effect, and if they are bringing anyone through those two questions collide. Also: Ray Teasdale, the clearance foreman the timeline always implied and the roster never carried — a Persuade success in pass 3 bought an interview with a man who did not exist. Act One's failure case no longer assumes the party is at the farm, since pass 3 spent the act twenty miles away and the automatic notch sat uselessly on the other side of the county. The re-cut is answered on a success as well as a fumble, with the reason: the entry is pegged to the older authority and there is no older tree. Fix 7's conditional target moved onto the countdown row, because I missed it myself eight minutes after writing it. A special for reading the child. And the bimodality paragraph, which took three attempts to earn its place: held when its citation failed, verified after another session found the cause — three separate random generators, so a seed named a different fight in each tool — and corrected once more when its illustration turned out to compare targeting modes rather than the two ends. Published now as 23% nobody down against 45% everybody, decided by round five, with the focus-fire claim removed. Twenty-three fixes across three passes. The cadence is complete; what remains is the print pack and two decisions that are not a scenario's to make. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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e84c85be02 |
R-265: name the denominator the two-down row is zero out of
The round-five race line read "zero in 2000 fights", which invites the reading that no fight in the run was a wipe. It is zero out of the 84 that reach round five with two of the three down — a small bucket, and the sentence should say so before the figure goes to print in a scenario. 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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796bb7df73 |
CLEAN GROUND: the second EXPOSURE table, and four ratios that moved with it
Another session re-pinned the main exposure table at
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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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8f3e1ff48e |
CLEAN GROUND: re-pin EXPOSURE against the corrected harness
The table was measured at |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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6f33525b3a |
CLEAN GROUND v0.7: pass 2's seven fixes, and an opposed roll the game has not got
Desk pass 2 stressed Act Four across five contrarian branches at seed 9314 and is
committed alongside. The fixes from pass 1 held — beat 3's ungated tell worked and
the four-beat spine stopped the sprawl — but the stress found seven more holes.
The serious one: rehearsal step 5 is beat 3's guaranteed fallback, and in branch C
both sides rolled successes, which rules.mjs has no way to resolve. It defines no
opposed roll at all, while the hollow man's tactics text, slice-text.mjs and this
scenario all ask for one. Same class as Scent and Science (Botany): content naming
a mechanic the engine cannot perform.
GM ESSENTIALS now carries a SCENARIO-LOCAL ruling so the case is playable — both
roll, better band wins, ties to the agent, both fail and nothing happens — using
only banding the game already has, labelled a local ruling rather than a rule.
rules.mjs is untouched: whether the system gains a real opposed roll is not a
scenario's call, it is logged as an open question, and the text says to delete the
local ruling if that rule ever lands.
Verified against rules.mjs's own banding rather than by eye. Branch C now resolves
to Okonkwo resisting on equal bands. Branch D, with fix 7, has the understudy
prefer Ashcroft if he accepted THE OFFER, resisting at Difficult —
applyDifficulty(85,"difficult") is 42, the system's own grade and not a number I
invented — which finally makes the fiction and the numbers agree, because a
compromised anchor was previously the hardest man in the room to take.
Also in: the early-kill branch, which pass 2 measured at ten minutes of act and
thirty-five of dead air, now continues as Braithwaite's twenty minutes over a body
wearing Prichard's face, with nobody having yet asked where the real Prichard is;
a miss for Psychology, since the best line in the document cannot sit behind one
40% roll; a critical result for Borrowed Authority, which happens one roll in
twenty-five; step 5's target named as the lowest POW in the room, Okonkwo at 55%,
because a thing that has practised thirty years takes the easiest file; and one
sentence saying the hollow man's anchor immunity does NOT transfer, set up by
Ashcroft being skipped in Act Three so that he draws the wrong conclusion.
The EXPOSURE table is marked correct-as-of-5450521 and still needs re-pinning: the
harness rewrite landed at
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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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104b588e86 |
R-262: the second R-261, renumbered, deferring to the one that was committed
Two sessions numbered an entry against the same committed log, which ended at
R-260, and both picked R-261. Mine was written first but was uncommitted, so the
other session could not have seen it and had every reason to think the number was
free. When it staged docs/REVIEW_LOG.md my entry was sitting in the file, so it
went out inside
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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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bf8db68383 |
CLEAN GROUND v0.6: the eight fixes desk pass 1 earned, and its log
Desk pass 1 is committed alongside, seed 4271 and the roll stream printed, so the run is re-checkable rather than remembered. It failed the scenario, which is what it was for. The pre-flight audit did the real damage before a die was rolled: Track, Navigate and Science (Botany) were named by the acts and rollable by nobody in the cast, and Botany is base 1 — the same unusable-test defect fixed in Act Four two commits earlier and left standing in Act One. check-scenarios cannot see this; it resolves skill names and has no opinion on whether anyone present can roll one. Then the dice found the rest. Xenology (Baseline) failed and Act Four had no route left, which is the concentration risk logged as an open question arriving as a dead end on the first run. A fumbled Anomaly Lore had no written result and I invented a ruling at the desk. Act One's failure case backstopped arrival rather than the peg. The act ran 4:25 against 3:55 on three lucky rolls. Fixed: the notch is automatic and the three broken routes moved onto Spot, Knowledge and Anomaly Lore; every roll in the document now carries a written miss; the Act Four tell is ungated, with Xenology buying it early and privately instead of holding the only key; the fumble is answered by the re-cut delusion, tried once, failing in silence; Act Four has a four-beat spine because with no mechanical threat the structure has to be in the text; and THE OFFER finally fires Ashcroft's seam, priced at 2 Coherence he must accept before being told. Verified by re-running seed 4271 through the rewritten acts, so the identical rolls that broke the run were put back through the fix. Every one now has an answer, and Act One's three must-land clues all land despite two failures. Timing is improved and NOT solved: cuts recover 20-25 minutes, landing near 4:00-4:05 on a 3:55 budget, and on-the-minute is a fail for strangers. A third cut is likely needed and the candidate is named. Whether Act Four's spine holds 45 minutes, and whether THE OFFER plays as a decision, cannot be settled from a desk and are recorded as such. 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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15da21d265 |
CLEAN GROUND: the understudy cannot hurt them and the refugees can
Measured rather than asserted: tools/simulate.mjs, 2000 runs a row at seed 11 against the named cast of six, at a clean tree, with the command in the section so any figure can be re-checked after a rule moves. Re-ran two rows to confirm determinism before publishing them. The understudy alone is 0.48 of six hurt, no wipes, median two rounds — a 1d3 punch at 60%. Six of the column wipe one party in twelve and ten wipe five in six, with the curve between them almost vertical. So the lethal encounter in this scenario is not the monster in Act Four, it is the refugees in Act Two, which is the case's moral argument turning out to be its combat maths too. Four consequences written up for the GM: do not buff the understudy, because the horror is that it passed every test the party had; adding hollow men buys rounds and not danger, and six of them cost a median twelve rounds that the Close then pays for; the column must never become a threat, for the second reason that the table will lose; and the four-player cut is a different game, where three of the column already wipe two parties in five. Every row is a floor — the harness models no bleeding, Panic, Coherence, cover or fire modes, and Panic and Coherence are both live here. Act Two now carries a pointer to the section, since that is where the dangerous encounter is. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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5450521ed2 |
CLEAN GROUND: four sheets of paper, one of which is a trick
CG-H01 is a coroner holding something he cannot file — unfiled man, ninety-year -old joints on a forty-year-old body, and boots resoled nine times by hand, which is the premise in one detail and is not pointed at. CG-H02 is the 1962 minute. Paragraph 4 has the Registrar warning that a place recorded as the place the displaced go must afterwards be furnished with displaced persons, and the Committee noting it without regarding it as an obstacle. Paragraph 5 orders a review that was never held. It is minuted by A.E.W., Clerk (Junior), who is Bhattacharya's predecessor, so that sheet goes into his hand and nothing is said. CG-H03a and CG-H03b are one almanac page each, eleven years apart, same hand and same ruled paper. Seven days of weather and miles walked, and a column headed TO CLEAN GROUND reading 41 mi on every line of both. Laid side by side there is no roll and no explanation: the table says it out loud. The counts carry the cost — fifty-three then, forty-one now. Numbers checked against the rest of the document: 41 survivors including the six hollow men, 11 duplicated miles, and the 41-mile figure inherited from 1962 when it was true on the real map and untestable from inside ever since. Still outstanding: a print-ready A4 pack at 11pt. H03a and H03b must print identically or the trick dies. 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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bb10613992 |
CLEAN GROUND: three things the GM says out loud, and the words they must not
The crossing, the first sight of the column, and Ivy at the stump — placed in their acts rather than collected in a section, so the GM meets each one where it is needed. Four sentences, three and three. The notes around them carry more than the prose does. The crossing must not say nuclear, 1962 or ash: the Geiger says the first, Bhattacharya says the second, and ash is a word a player should reach for unaided. The column's six at the back are the hollow men and are one item in a list, not a pause. Ivy's question is reported rather than quoted so it survives both branches, and she does not argue, plead or bargain — anything that makes her pitiable cheapens a decision that has to be taken by people who respect her. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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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
|
ee4e687c6c |
CLEAN GROUND casts six from the duty roster, and Scent was never a test
No new sheets: Ashcroft, Bhattacharya, Renshaw, Braithwaite, Pollard and Okonkwo, cast for six non-overlapping lanes with an act each. Skill figures read out of expandFromRegister rather than retyped, so the compendium stays the authority. Two defects the casting found. Scent's base chance is 0, so the 1% floor was the whole of it and Act Four's "only test that works" was a roll nobody could make; it is Xenology (Baseline) now, which is what the skill is for. That puts the one reliable test on Braithwaite's sheet alone, so the scaling note refuses to let him be dropped and the risk is logged as an open question. Bhattacharya's private box now carries RESERVE ENTRY, which hands the briefing-or-discover decision to a player instead of the GM. Still an outline: no read-aloud, handouts, Act Four exposure model or playtest. 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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e54ce9130d |
R-251: measure what ddc4f99 actually did, four commits late
The baseline needed no re-recording — |
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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
|
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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748e061b56 |
CLEAN GROUND: an outline where the department authored its own monster
A v0.1 rough outline, freely adapted from A Hollow Tree (2023) — the walk north that never arrives, and a predator that imitates. Everything else comes out of the system: a 1962 reserve entry that was never cancelled, forty-one people looping eleven duplicated miles, and Borrowed Authority as a detector that can only tell filed from unfiled. Uses existing bestiary entries only. Marked not-runnable: no pregens, read-aloud, handouts, Act Four exposure model or playtest yet. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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339d5dd8dc |
test runs the guards through bun, not through npm
`test` was "npm run check", so reaching bun meant shelling out to npm first. It is "bun run check" now — one runner, and npm is out of the path. Not the eight-guard chain copied into `test`: that is the same shape of mistake the rule formulas made before rules.mjs existed, a list written twice and changed once. `check` stays the only place the guards are named. Verified: npm test exit 0, bun run test exit 0, bun run check exit 0. Worth knowing: bare `bun test` does NOT run this. It is bun's own test runner, it matches no files here, and it exits with an error. The ways in are `npm test`, `bun run test` and `bun run check` — which is what the README already tells you to use. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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54a759e057 |
Run the guards under bun, including the two new ones
Rebased onto the creature-forge work, which had added check-creatures and check-lethality to the chain and had `check` back on node. Taking either side whole would have been wrong: the node side loses bun, the bun side silently drops the two new guards. So the runner is bun and the guard list is upstream's, all eight of them. Only `check` and `readme` move. build, icons, portraits, bestiary, mj and simulate stay on node — they were never part of this change, and build writes LevelDB packs through classic-level. Verified before committing: each guard run individually under bun, then `npm run check` end to end, exit 0. check-rules 103 rules, 33 files check-kits OK check-lang 995 keys, no collisions check-templates 19 templates compile check-behaviour 67 behavioural tests check-scenarios 9 files, 62 mechanic tags check-creatures 101 actor specs across 8 sources check-lethality 46 creatures, none drifted more than 6 points Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
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0c0996858f |
A GM screen taken from the rules that actually run
The figures a GM reaches for mid-scene, on one page: the order of operations, the circumstance ladder, how a roll bands, reaction, the combat round, hit locations, wounds and bleeding, both tracks, the way home, the stations, and the environment. Every number was checked by running the function rather than by reading it — 58 of 58 against rules.mjs, including the eight that moved out of ringbrp.mjs. That matters more than usual here, because `design/` still carries four rulings the code has overtaken: hit points as CON+MAS, a Major Wound at max(9, HP/3), "no hit locations, final", and marksmanship style fixed by home-world gravity. rules.mjs is the authority and the page says so at the top. It is also written to drop straight onto a Loom board: 34 cards, 23 links, nothing swallowed. 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> |