Found while revising the Contingency 2027 prep deadlines. The house standard
(docs/house-standards.md in the convention repo) allows 3h30 of play inside the
four-hour slot plus a ten-minute break -- about 3h40 wall clock against roughly
3h15 of content. This document has always budgeted 4h00, which is the whole
slot with nothing either side, and never said that was over.
Worse, the Pacing Note's ~25 minutes of cuts read as slack and are not: desk
pass 1 ran 4:25, so taking every cut lands at 4:00, still 20 minutes past the
house budget. A GM reading "4h00 including a break" alongside "the Pacing Note
carries cuts" would reasonably conclude there was room to spare. There is none.
STATUS now carries the overrun, and the two honest ways out are written down
rather than left implicit: find another 20 minutes, most likely in Act Two's
65, or declare it a deliberate exception and run it where nothing follows --
which at Contingency 2027 it does, Sunday afternoon with only a reserve behind
it. Not decided; that is Tim's call.
Until then the instruction is explicit: assume an overrun and take the cuts
from the start rather than deciding at the break.
npm run check: 17 guards, exit 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
