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 ad5fd57 and moved two of its four creatures. Not done
here, because it was a note in pass 2 rather than one of the seven.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
