A narrow verification pass rather than a session: does Act Two land where v0.6
budgets it now that a failed filed-clue roll costs a scene instead of ten
minutes? Seed 4471.
THE RETRY FIX WORKS AND DOES NOT DO WHAT v0.6 ASSUMED. Forced both filed clues
to fail — about one table in seven, since each is a 37% miss at these ratings.
Under the old rule that was twenty minutes and a party standing in Registry
waiting; under the new one Pennyfeather fetches each while they do something
else and it costs nothing, while the roll still means something. So the fix
removes up to twenty minutes of VARIANCE. It does not shorten the typical case,
and Act Two uncut is 75 minutes whether or not anybody fails a filed roll.
AND v0.6 CONTAINED AN ARITHMETIC CONTRADICTION I PUT THERE. The Runtime row
budgeted Act Two at 65 — pass 4's figure, measured with nineteen minutes of cuts
taken — while the Pacing Note two screens later said the correct number of cuts
to plan for is zero. Both cannot be true; it was a ten-minute overrun written in
on purpose. The three prior passes reconcile exactly (75 uncut, and pass 4's 66
is 75 − 19 + 10), so the number was never in doubt, only which configuration it
belonged to. I measured under one configuration, changed the configuration, and
kept the number.
Act Two is now budgeted at its uncut base of 75. Acts of 45 / 75 / 50 is 2h50 of
play, 3h00 wall with the break, in a 3h15 slot — fifteen minutes of real slack
rather than twenty-five claimed ones. The cuts stay optional, which keeps Kit
Marlow's scene, which pass 4 showed is the price of the likeliest ending.
The timing section now records that 75 is the uncut base three passes agree on,
and that the retry fix moved the worst case and not the typical one, so nobody
re-derives the same error the next time the slot moves.
All twenty-one guards pass. Five passes; what is left is human beings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
