RingBRP/docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_6.md

CLEAN GROUND — desk playtest 6 (the four untested branches)

Scenario version: v0.15, at commit 8705b00 Date: 13 September 2026 Method: branch pass, not a session pass. Seeded roller, seed 3319, banding from rules.mjs. Earlier passes were 4271, 9314, 5580/7731, 6142, 8815.

Why this pass. Five passes closed with the same four lines, unchanged each time:

Still untested after five passes: the Swinburne fumble branch, the re-cut-the-peg fumble, a failed Xenology in Act Four, and any fight at all.

Three of those are rare — a 2% band, a 2% band, a 47% miss nobody happened to roll — and waiting for a sixth honest session to walk into them is waiting for something that may never arrive. So this pass forces the trigger and then plays honestly from there: for each branch the roller draws from the seed's stream until the roll lands in the target band, and every roll downstream of it is taken as it falls. The draw counts are printed so the forcing is visible. Nothing after a forced trigger was chosen.

Every rating was read out of roster.mjs through expandFromRegister, not recalled — the standing consequence of pass 4 typing six of sixteen from memory and pass 5 overstating one of its own. The sheet is printed below so the next pass can check it rather than trust it.

Ashcroft      anomaly_lore 63 · insight 63 · listen 63 · dodge 63 · spot 40 · research 40   POWx5 85   NO WEAPON
Bhattacharya  research 63 · anomaly_lore 63 · insight 40 · spot 40 · dodge 43               POWx5 75   pistol_light
Renshaw       insight 63 · persuade 63 · listen 63 · psychology 40 · spot 40 · dodge 43     POWx5 70   pistol_light
Braithwaite   medicine 53 · xenology(baseline) 53 · insight 53 · research 53 · spot 35      POWx5 60   dagger
Pollard       listen 53 · spot 53 · dodge 53 · brawl 53 · anomaly_lore 35                   POWx5 65   cudgel
Okonkwo       firearm(rifle) 53 · brawl 53 · dodge 53 · spot 35 · anomaly_lore 33           POWx5 55   rifle_med, prybar

Verdict: all four branches work as written. What this pass found is not in the branches — it is that the scenario measures a fight nobody will have, and prices no fight in minutes.

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The rolls, in order

seed 3319

ACT ONE — the Swinburne fumble, FORCED
  Renshaw       Persuade — Swinburne                    100 vs  63  FUMBLE  [27 draws, band 99-100]
  Braithwaite   Medicine — the body                      63 vs  53  failure
  Bhattacharya  Research — Corrigan's paperwork          85 vs  63  failure
  Ashcroft      Spot — the stump, walked to in silence   85 vs  40  failure

ACT TWO — the column
  Renshaw       Persuade — the column                    78 vs  63  failure
  Pollard       Spot — the same six, and the same six yesterday  93 vs 53  failure
  Ashcroft      Insight — it is offered, not remembered  27 vs  63  SUCCESS

ACT THREE — the re-cut peg, FORCED
  Bhattacharya  Research — RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN)      27 vs  63  success
  Ashcroft      Anomaly Lore — what a peg is            100 vs  63  FUMBLE  [103 draws, band 99-100]
  hollow man swap   75 rolled 58 success  vs  Okonkwo 55 rolled 31 success
                    → equal band, goes to the resisting side. OKONKWO HOLDS.

ACT FOUR — the Xenology that fails, FORCED
  Braithwaite   Xenology (Baseline) — the understudy     91 vs  53  FAILURE [2 draws]
  Renshaw       Insight — it is word-perfect             39 vs  63  success
  Renshaw       Psychology — it thinks it is the file    42 vs  40  failure

  COUNTDOWN STEP 5 — Ashcroft REFUSED, so it takes the lowest POW
  understudy 75  rolled 34  success
  Okonkwo    55  rolled 59  failure
  → winner ACTIVE · settled TRUE · OKONKWO IS TAKEN

A hostile seed, and deliberately not re-rolled. Act One returned nothing at all: the body, the paperwork and the stump all missed, on top of a fumbled Swinburne. That is the worst opening any pass has produced and it is the right conditions for a branch test.

Two things happened here for the first time in six passes. Ashcroft refused THE OFFER — passes 4 and 5 both had him accept, and every published figure about him assumed that. And a player character was taken, which is the one Act Four outcome the text writes instructions for and no pass had reached.

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The four branches, one at a time

1. The Swinburne fumble — WORKS, and the text is right to like it

She produced the dog. The walk to the stump in silence is a better Act One than the drawer and the document's claim that "the GM should not regret the fumble" survives contact.

• ⚠ But this seed found the compounding case the branch does not consider. Medicine failed, Research failed, the Spot at the stump failed. The party leaves Act One with a hostile witness, no coroner's note, no Corrigan, and nothing from the stump — and the fumble branch's compensation, "H01 still reaches them, later and from the coroner", is then the only thread out of the act. The branch is written as though it is the one thing that went wrong. It is the branch most likely to be surrounded by other failures, because a table that rolls badly rolls badly all evening.
• Not a defect in the branch. A missing sentence: when the fumble lands, the GM should pull H01's arrival forward to the break rather than leaving it floating in Act Two.

2. The re-cut peg — WORKS, and it costs exactly what the text says

Fumbled Anomaly Lore, the agent concluded with complete confidence the peg could be re-cut, and the table spent twenty minutes on it. The instruction "let them try it exactly once" is the right instruction and the silence at the end of it does teach what the text claims.

• ⚠ The warning at the top of Act Three names the wrong roll. It says the bomb fires "if anybody fumbles Anomaly Lore on the depot entry". The depot entry is a Research roll — [CUS: Research — RESERVE ENTRY (NORTHERN)]. The twenty-minute branch hangs off a different beat entirely: [CUS: Anomaly Lore — what a peg is, and what losing one does]. A GM who reads the warning and watches the depot-entry roll is watching the wrong die.
• This is not new. Pass 4 inherited the same confusion — its post-pass says it re-checked "98 against Anomaly Lore 63" on the depot entry, which is a roll that does not exist. The correction was right about the band and wrong about the beat, and nobody noticed because the warning it was checking against had the same error in it.

3. A failed Xenology in Act Four — WORKS, and the v0.14 fix is CONFIRMED

Braithwaite rolled 91 against 53. The tell arrived at beat 3 as written, un-gated, in front of the whole cordon, and the act had a route. This is the exact failure that killed desk pass 1, and the fix that was written for it has now been tested rather than reasoned about.

• Renshaw's Insight succeeded and the GM said the sentence out loud — you read him carefully, and there is nothing wrong with him. From the chair it lands as the thesis and not as a bug, which is what desk pass 1 doubted.
• Psychology failed, so "it thinks it is the file" surfaced in beat 3 unprompted, per the missed-case. Both of Act Four's gated lines failed in the same run and the act still worked. That is the strongest thing this pass has to say.
• ⚠ Xenology has no fumble case and its fumble band is wider than the GM thinks — see finding 4 below. At 53 it fumbles on 98–00, and the document says nothing about what a fumbled Xenology on the understudy produces. It should: the obvious wrong answer — "this is a baseline human, I am certain" — is available, useful and unwritten.

4. A fight — PLAYED, and it is the wrong fight

See the two findings below. This is where the pass earned its seed.

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⚠ FINDING 1 — the fight the table produces is not the fight the document measures

The honest trigger arrived on its own: a hollow man tried the swap on Okonkwo in Act Three and failed in front of everybody. The column is present in that act. The six at the back walk with it. A party that has just watched something try to climb into a colleague is a party that shoots, and what they shoot into is forty-one refugees.

EXPOSURE measures "six hollow men" and "six of the column" as separate encounters. The table produces them added together, and the document never says what the column does when somebody fires into it.

tools/simulate.mjs, 2000 runs, seed 11, the cast of six:

What they actually fight	Hurt	Down	Wiped	Deaths/run	Median rounds
Six hollow men, column stands off	3.48 of 6	0.42	0.0%	0.04	13
+ two of the column	5.02 of 6	2.78	7.8%	0.98	21
+ three of the column	5.55 of 6	4.07	28.7%	1.56	24
+ six of the column	5.99 of 6	5.88	92.0%	2.33	16

Two of forty-one taking a swing moves the encounter from "nobody dies" to one wipe in thirteen. Three moves it to better than one in four. The printed row is 0.0%, and the printed row assumes a crowd that stands still while its neighbours are shot.

• Stable across seeds, so this is not one cold stream: wiped at 11 / 4242 / 90210 / 8815 is 7.8 / 7.5 / 7.3 / 7.5% at two, and 28.7 / 29.1 / 27.8 / 28.5% at three.
• The document already knows the shape of this — "the curve between six and ten is almost vertical and a GM improvising bodies will cross it without noticing" — and then prints a hollow-man row that invites exactly that improvisation from the other direction.
• Fix direction: one row and one sentence in EXPOSURE. The six at the back are never fought alone, and the GM's real question is not how dangerous are they but how many of the column join in. Two is the number that matters.

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⚠ FINDING 2 — at four players, six hollow men wipe 58.7%, and the only figure printed is 0.0%

This one is worse, because it is a number the document prints for a table it explicitly supports.

Four-player cut	Hurt	Down	Wiped	Deaths/run	Median rounds
Three hollow men	2.80 of 4	0.33	0.3%	0.03	13
Six hollow men, column stands off	3.94 of 4	3.40	58.7%	0.42	30
+ two of the column	4.00 of 4	4.00	99.9%	1.11	9

EXPOSURE's four-player block contains no hollow-man row at all. It lists three of the column and six of the column, and its whole purpose is to say the cut is a different game. A GM running four players looks up the hollow men, finds 0.0% wiped, and is reading the six-player table.

• Stable: 58.7 / 60.5 / 60.3 / 59.8% across the four seeds.
• The curve from three to six is near-vertical at four players — 0.3% to 58.7% — which is the same cliff the document warns about for the column between six and ten, in a place it does not warn about.
• And the hollow men are the ones the party is most likely to shoot, because they are the only figures in the valley the scenario tells the players are not people. The encounter with the lowest moral cost is the one that wipes the smaller table.
• The four-player block's own explanation applies unchanged and should be borrowed: Ashcroft carries no weapon, so the cut is three effective attackers against six.

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⚠ FINDING 3 — GM ESSENTIALS understates every fumble band in the scenario

GM ESSENTIALS says: "96–99 never succeed; 00 always fumbles."

Both halves are true and together they read as a fumble is a roll of 00. The rule in rules.mjs is fumbleStart = 101 - ceil((101 - band) / 20), tested before the 96–99 clause, so the fumble band widens as the skill falls:

Rating	Fumbles on	Chance
85	00	1%
63	99–00	2%
60, 53	98–00	3%
40, 35, 25	97–00	4%

At Spot 40 a fumble is four times as likely as the essentials line implies, and the cast rolls Spot 40 repeatedly through two acts. Every fumble branch this pass was written to test is commoner than the document's own rules summary suggests — which is an argument for the branches, not against them.

• Verified with gradeRoll: 98 against 63 is a failure; 98 against 53 is a fumble; 97 against 40 is a fumble; 96 against 40 is a failure.
• Pass 4's post-pass got its own case right — 98 against Anomaly Lore 63 is a plain failure — but got it right from the 96–99 clause rather than from fumbleStart, which is the same answer by luck. Had the rating been 53 the correction would have been wrong.
• Fix direction: one clause in GM ESSENTIALS. A fumble is the top 1/20th of the failure range — 00 at high skill, 97–00 at 40 or below.

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⚠ FINDING 4 — EXPOSURE prices fights in bodies and never in minutes

The whole section is built around what a fight costs, and the cost it never states is the one that ends conventions.

	Median rounds
Six hollow men, six players (printed row)	13
Six hollow men + three of the column	24
Six hollow men, four players	30
Six of the column, six players (printed row)	14

A d100 round with six agents and nine opponents is not a fast round. At three to four minutes each — an estimate, not a measurement, and it should be measured — the encounter this scenario warns about is a sixty-to-ninety minute encounter. Act Three is budgeted at fifty minutes and already carries a twenty-minute bomb.

• This pass hit both in the same act: fumbled peg plus the fight it triggered. With the northern seam cut taken the act still cannot absorb them together, and nothing in the Pacing Note contemplates a fight at all.
• EXPOSURE's five numbered lessons are all about lethality. There should be a sixth: a fight in this scenario costs the rest of the session, and that is a better reason not to have one than the wipe rate. A GM who is told the party probably survives has been told the less important half.

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Minor — simulate.mjs mislabels a mixed fight

--creature a,a,a,b,b builds the right force and prints the wrong name for it. Six hollow men and six of the column print as "12 x Hollow man", taking the first spec's name and the total count. The composition is correct — 12 hollow men wipe 3.5% of parties and the mixed twelve wipe 92.0%, so the two are not being confused internally — but anything pasted out of that header into a document is false, and every figure in findings 1 and 2 came out of a run whose header lied about what was fought.

Caught only because the header was read. It is the same shape as R-278's unread parameter and R-264's summed armour: the tool was right and its report was not.

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Timing

This is not a session timing pass — passes 4 and 5 measured the clock and nothing here supersedes them. These are branch costs, measured against v0.15's budgets:

	Budget	This pass	Note
Act One, everything failed + the dog	45	~40	Fewer clues means fewer conversations, not more
Act Three, fumbled peg, seam cut taken	50	~55	Exactly as the warning predicts
Act Three with the fight	50	~115	The act cannot hold it. Nothing says so
Act Four, both gated lines failed	45	~45	On budget, un-gated tell carried it

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Player-hat verdicts

Archetype	Verdict	Score
Methodical veteran	Act One returned nothing and the dog was still the best scene of the night	8/10
Roleplay-first talker	Walking to the stump behind a woman who will not speak to you — best silence in the case	9/10
Quiet tactician	Shot the six at the back, and would do it again. Nobody at the table knew what that cost	4/10
Lore-digger	Spent twenty minutes re-cutting a peg and learned more from it failing than from the depot	8/10

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Fix list

1. ⚠ Measure the fight the table will actually have. (EXPOSURE) Add the mixed rows — six hollow men with two and three of the column joining, 0.0% → 7.8% → 28.7% — and say plainly that the six at the back are never fought alone and the GM's live question is how many of the column join in.

2. ⚠ Give the four-player block a hollow-man row. (EXPOSURE) 58.7% wiped against the 0.0% currently printed, with the 0.3%-at-three row beside it so the cliff is visible. The encounter with the lowest moral cost is the one that wipes the cut.

3. ⚠ Fix the Act Three warning's roll name. The twenty-minute bomb is on Anomaly Lore — what a peg is, not on the depot entry, which is a Research roll. Correct pass 4's post-pass in the same breath; it inherited the error.

4. ⚠ State the real fumble band in GM ESSENTIALS. "00 always fumbles" reads as 1% and is 4% at Spot 40. One clause: the top twentieth of the failure range, so 97–00 at 40 or below.

5. Add the sixth EXPOSURE lesson: a fight costs the session. Median 13 rounds on the printed row, 24 mixed, 30 at four players. Price it in minutes beside the wipe rate, and put a line in the Pacing Note about what to cut when one starts.

6. Write the fumbled Xenology. At 53 it fumbles on 98–00 and the document is silent. "This is a baseline human, and I am certain" is the obvious wrong answer and it is worth more than a shrug.

7. Minor: label mixed fights in simulate.mjs. A run of a,a,b prints as "3 x A".

ALL SEVEN FIXES APPLIED in v0.16, including the fumbled-Xenology branch this pass asked for and the simulate.mjs label (R-283). Pass 4's post-pass corrected in the same commit — it inherited the misnamed roll from the scenario's own warning.

Still untested after six passes — the list is finally shorter, and honest about why: a fight that the players choose rather than one this pass reasoned them into; Act Four with a PC taken and Ashcroft having accepted, which is the pairing the countdown was written for; and the first human run, which remains the only thing that can settle whether any of this survives a table.