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>
