vanity-delve/paper/playtest-02.md

PLAYTEST 02 — The Vault of the Gilded Court v2 (contrarian)

Pass: 2 of 2 (contrarian: Court Door · nobody bows · ally the gang · take the portrait) Scenario version: v2, absorbing playtest-01 fixes 1–8 Result: PASSES. Runnable. Four fixes to carry into v2.1, none blocking.

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1. Method

Same instrument as pass 1 — same four pregens with real compendium numbers, real bestiary blocks, CSPRNG for every contested beat, damage model per vanity.mjs:163. Contrarian choices taken at every fork, including the ones v1 punished hardest.

Instrument gap, found mid-run: my opposed-roll helper did not check for Stumbles, so combat Banes went uncounted. I re-scanned the log by hand and found two (Pinch [1,4,1,3,1] in A2, Bram [2,4,1,1] in A6). Corrected below. Pass 1's Bane count was likely understated for the same reason — its headline finding still stands, but "one Bane" should read "one Bane plus any combat Stumbles I failed to log".

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2. Play log

A1 — Court Door · ~10 min

Contrarian: the grand entrance. Clock rolled immediately per the attention trigger: 1d6 [1] → Something comes.

The attention rule works. The party announced itself and the barrow answered within a minute of play. That is exactly the intended cause-and-effect, and it fired on the very first roll.

Fix 4 held: the chisel-mark clue arrived automatically, so the motif seeded even though the party was in a hurry. In pass 1 this clue died on a roll.

A2 — Nobody bows · ~25 min

Three Skeletons (def 2 after fix 5). Wren carried it — 3d6[5,5,6]=3 net 2, then net 1, killing two. Pinch stumbled: 5d6[1,4,1,3,1] — 0 successes, three 1s → +1 Bane.

⚠ Bram missed again: net −1, net −1. Across both passes he has now landed 2 hits in 12 attack rounds. Fix 5 lowered Ghoul and Skeleton defence and it was not enough — the problem is his 4d6 pool, not the opposition.

A3 — Ally the gang · ~20 min

Reaction 2d6 [2,1] → Hostile, again. The contrarian plan to ally was simply not on offer.

Fix 7 worked exactly as intended — the gang fought one round and broke on Nerve 2. Twenty minutes, not forty-five. This is the single clearest win of the pass.

⚠ But Hostile is the modal result. 2d6 needing 5–6 gives ~44% Hostile, and it has now come up in both passes. The scenario offers "ally, rob, or abandon" as though allying is a live option; nearly half the time the dice remove it before the players speak.

Yrsa lingered at a mirror (contrarian) → noticed → +1 Bane. The mirror rule is now a working Bane source, as fix 3 intended.

A4 — One Ghoul · ~15 min

Round 1: both missed. Round 2: Pinch rolled 5d6[5,5,5,4,5]=4 → net 4 → destroyed it outright.

Fixes 5 and 8 worked. Pass 1's two-Ghoul, defence-3 version ran 35 minutes and left one untouched. This ran 15 and resolved cleanly.

A5 — Take the portrait · ~20 min

The door trap fired (gang was hostile, so unwarned): Bram 4d6[2,5,2,5] → 2 successes, clear. The Cantor's silvered blade was found — fix 1's insurance.

Portrait taken. The Queen woke here, on her ground.

⚠ Sim inconsistency: my run notes said "allied, so warned" while the reaction had been Hostile. The roll was made and passed either way, so the outcome is unaffected — flagging it for honesty.

A6 — The Queen, in the Wardrobe · ~40 min

Nobody had bowed and the tab was low, so she offered a Vice — fix 2's fallback. The contrarian party refused, and the fight started. That is exactly the branch v1 killed people with.

Round	Queen Grit	Yrsa
1	6 → 4	untouched
2	4 → 2	−1 Grit, −1 max
3	2 → 1	−3 Grit, −1 max
4	1	−1 Grit, −1 max
5	1 → 0	—

The Queen died in five rounds. Bram contributed two hits with the silvered blade. Bram also stumbled in round 5 ([2,4,1,1]) → +1 Bane.

Fix 1 is confirmed. Pass 1: unwinnable, ~40 rounds, dead mage, Queen at 9/10. Pass 2: won in 5, with the mundane fighter participating.

⚠ Yrsa still goes down. She took 5 Grit against a maximum of 3, plus 3 permanent max Grit drained. Defence 2 against a 5d6 attack that ignores armour is not survivable, and every hit also shrinks her permanently. Lowering the Queen's Grit made the fight winnable but did nothing for the mage.

⚠ Spells deal 0 base damage, confirmed twice more: Yrsa scored net-1 hits in rounds 1 and 3 and dealt nothing both times. Her only real contribution was round 5's net 2. A mage in a straight fight is close to a bystander.

Total: ~2h10.

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3. Player-hat verdicts

Archetype	Verdict	Pass 1	Pass 2
Methodical veteran (Bram)	"The silvered blade finally let me into the boss fight. I still can't hit anything else."	1/5	3/5
Roleplay-first talker (Pinch)	"One roll deleted the Ghoul. Less to talk to this time — my own fault for not bowing."	5/5	4/5
Rules-literate tactician (Wren)	"I killed two skeletons and mattered in the finale. This is a real character now."	2/5	4/5
Lore-digger (Yrsa)	"Both clues arrived free, which was lovely. Then I did no damage for four rounds and got drained to nothing."	1/5	2/5

Average 2.25 → 3.25. The scenario now works for three of four archetypes.

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4. Fix list for v2.1

1. Yrsa dies in every finale. — high Problem: Defence 2 vs a 5d6 armour-ignoring attack that also drains max Grit. Winnable fight, dead mage. Fix: The Queen attacks whoever last looked at her — a stated, thematic targeting rule the table can play around, instead of defaulting to the squishiest. Add: "she turns to whoever last met her gaze." Where: Area 6 stat line.

2. Hostile is the modal reaction, so "ally" is rarely offered. — high Problem: ~44% Hostile, and it landed in both passes. The three-way choice is often a one-way. Fix: Give Pell Quill +1 die on the reaction if the party arrived by the Servants' Stair (they didn't announce themselves) and let a hero spend 1 Vanity to re-roll it as a parley. Where: Area 3 reaction block.

3. Bram cannot hit anything. — high Problem: 2 hits in 12 attack rounds across both passes. Fix 5 was insufficient. Fix: This is a pregen problem, not a scenario problem — Bram's 4d6 is simply low for a fighter. Give the scenario's own §2b a note: the warrior should open with Cleave or a Called Shot rather than trading attacks, and put a shield-wall option in A2 so he has a job that isn't rolling to hit. Where: §2b; Area 2.

4. The tab reached 3, not 6. — medium Problem: Banes: Pinch stumble, Yrsa mirror, Bram stumble = 3. The Reckoning still did not fire — though it is now plausibly reachable, where in pass 1 it was not. Fix: Add +1 Bane for entering by the Court Door (announcing yourself is vanity) and +1 for refusing the Queen's Vice. Both are pure character moments and would have put this party on 5. Where: Areas 1 and 6; §9.

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5. What this says about DELVE (draft 4/5)

#	Finding	Consequence
1	6 areas ran ~2h10 once the fixes landed	Pass 1's "6 is too many" was wrong — it was 2h55 because the content was broken, not because six is too many. Withdraw the recommendation to drop to 4–5. Codex's caution was reasonable but the evidence now says 6 is fine at this heat.
2	The clock fired on the first roll, from a player choice	Attention-triggered clocks work far better than turn-count clocks. DELVE should weight triggers over the 3-Turn timer.
3	acceptanceCost: null is not a temptation — it is an automatic yes	In both passes every free-acceptance item was taken without discussion. The decision only ever appeared at use. Draft 5 should stop describing acceptance as the temptation and put the whole economy at the point of use — or give a minority of relics real acceptance friction. This answers scenario question 3, finally.
4	A "way back in" rescued the branch that killed pass 1	The Vice offer meant a party that ignored the intended route still had an ending. DELVE's generated areas should always emit a fallback route, not just a gate.
5	Two content traps came from stat blocks, again	Confirms the overlay catalog needs a playability field. Add a second: "is this fight survivable by the party's weakest member?" — both passes lost the mage.

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6. Status

The Vault of the Gilded Court v2 is runnable. Apply the four v2.1 fixes before a live table; none of them block a run today.

Build-order step 1 is complete: one handwritten delve, run twice, findings folded back. The scenario went from unwinnable to won-in-five, and produced five structural findings for the design that no amount of further architecture work would have surfaced.

Next: step 2, the seam spike.

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VANITY development notes — part of DELVE.