Five fixes from desk playtest 4. One of them was wrong and the correction is
the more useful half.
1. A SPECIAL ON THE COLUMN PERSUADE NOW BUYS SOMETHING PORTABLE. It bought
more conversation, which the line's rest clock then took away -- a player
in pass 4 said "I rolled a 7 and got less time", which is a good roll
punished by a timing device. It now buys the almanac early, or a name from
1962, or "the six at the back don't eat". Each travels out of the scene, so
the line still stands up on schedule and the roll still paid.
2. ACT THREE'S TWENTY-MINUTE BOMB IS NOW BUDGETED -- and this is the finding
that was wrong. The pass said the re-cut-the-peg fumble had "no duration and
no ender". It has both, and always did: the text says a table will spend
twenty minutes on it and to let them try it exactly once. What was missing
is that ACT THREE IS BUDGETED AT 50 AND THE TEXT PREDICTS 50 + 20, with
nothing connecting the fumble to the cut that pays for it. Act Three now
opens with that warning and makes the northern-seam cut compulsory the
moment the fumble lands. The clause itself is untouched; it was already
right.
3. A FUMBLED PERSUADE ON SWINBURNE HAS AN ANSWER. She does not produce the
photocopy -- she produces the dog, walks them to the stump in silence, and
H01 reaches them later from the coroner, confirming rather than revealing.
Better staging than the drawer, and the GM should not regret the fumble.
4. THE SLACK CLAIM IS HONEST NOW. The Pacing Note said ten minutes. Pass 4 on
a hostile seed finished at ~3:46 with one cut unspent: four minutes and a
cut. Ten is the friendly-seed number and is what a GM would have planned
against.
5. THE OFFER'S STAGING ACCIDENT IS NOW DELIBERATE. Moving it inside the column
scene was purely a time saving; the side-effect is that the offer has no
audience and Ashcroft returns to a conversation that carried on without him.
Written down so nobody moves it back.
The correction to 2 is recorded in the playtest document as its own lesson: a
reading made while looking for faults finds faults that are not there about as
readily as ones that are. Apply fixes against the source, not against the notes.
npm run check: 17 guards, exit 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
