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>
