An option used to do exactly what it said. Now it may carry a check: one of
four attributes (Nerve, Wits, Charm, Resolve) against a set difficulty or
against a named person's own attribute, leaning on how they regard you, with a
success and a failure. The player sees only the odds in words ("a long shot",
"likely"), never a number. The roll is one draw from the run's generator, so a
run still replays exactly from its seed and choices.
A character may be a role with several authored candidates, one drawn per run,
or a group of two to four drawn into numbered slots. Everyone carries a name, a
description and the same four attributes as the player, so a replayed pack
meets a different office. Text names people as {partner} or {clerk}, and an
event about "a clerk" binds one present clerk for the turn. The draw and the
binding are saved with the run, and a save from before a pack drew a cast gets
the same one every time it is loaded.
All of it is generic and optional: Corporate Ladder and the Frontier use none
of it and play as before. The Counting House, a one-stage office about 1910
built from the story-to-pack catalogue, exercises it, and was tuned against the
conformance suite by measurement. DECISIONS #41. Version 0.4.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018MhABSrqkwTdcybXmheDPr
A debt repayment took its whole instalment even when less was owed: four
dollars owed at the store cost twenty. Content could not express "pay what is
owed", so an add effect's amount may now be read from state, with a cap. Five
repayments across both packs use it, and a conformance test holds every pack to
it. The turn record now says which options were hidden, so the analyser stops
counting doors nobody saw, and it reads only feedback logs.
From the same session: wages are labelled as wages, a clamped change says where
it stopped, two unreadable option labels are rewritten, the sale barn no longer
offers what the player already owns, Ward hints at what the promotion waits for,
and the office has five more events. DECISIONS #38-40.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01C6UDQ9o6L6Ey173U7XVou6
Both settings now carry a charge levied by standing itself, which no purchase
ends. Corporate Ladder's steps on money (1200/-60, 2400/-120, 3600/-240): a flat
charge cannot flatten a slope, since late income scales with how well the player
plays, and the flat charge needed to stop an optimiser accumulating put ordinary
archetypes below zero for 44% of a run. Stepped, the balance settles around
$4,250 and ordinary play comes out better than before it existed. The Frontier's
is flat at -4 a run, because its late game never accumulated in the first place.
Found in the first two human sessions of this work:
- A career saved before a pack gained a stat had no path for it, and conditions
compare numbers only, so every event, option and upkeep entry gated on a new
stat silently did not exist for that run. Loading now fills those in.
- 'Wrap up my career' sat immediately after the last option in tab order, so one
Tab too many and Enter read as the game ending at day 31. It goes last, and
the retrospective says plainly that it is a summary.
- A 181-turn session ran against a stale bundle and the change under test never
fired. Every logged turn now records app_version and build.
- src/version.js had reported 0.3.0 since 0.3.0, while playtesters were told to
check the status bar. A test now holds it to package.json.
- 'Put money against the book' was shown locked to a player who owed nothing,
six times. Options gated on a state the player cannot choose to enter are now
hidden rather than greyed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxdJFbLq1rBKsUeticGV1g
Each pack declares a lifestyle tier, bought on the second rung and charged for
every cycle after: Corporate Ladder's car and address, the Frontier's bay and
the room over the Ellis place. Falling behind what the job expects costs
standing, in steps that steepen as standing rises. A Dispatch coordinator
keeping up fully nets -21 a week and earns the difference out of the days. No
engine change; the only interface change is a tier display format.
Sized by measurement, not feel (DECISIONS #36): a -2/week penalty is invisible
against Dispatch's standing gains, and a player who chases standing every turn
beats any flat penalty — 99 standing while buying nothing, and $2,245 richer
than one who kept up. Hence the top step.
Two defects fixed on the way. The conformance suite excluded debt from the
economic baseline by matching /debt|owed|loan/i on path names, which would have
counted every lifestyle tier into it; packs now declare tuning.baselineExcludes.
And 'the promotion leaves a player better off' pooled end balances across
archetypes that do not spend alike, so it measured the mix — it is now derived
from the upkeep arithmetic.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxdJFbLq1rBKsUeticGV1g
Cold Fork is a freight yard: 29 events across two stages, a four-day cycle, and
its own relationship and skill vocabulary. src/engine/ was not touched. Adding it
needed three changes outside the engine: one save slot per pack, app.js holding
the current pack, and turn.js no longer naming the mailroom (DECISIONS #34).
build.js now handles imports wrapped across lines. A conformance suite runs over
every registered pack. DECISIONS #35 records three calls on open questions.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxdJFbLq1rBKsUeticGV1g
The stamping scheme was wrong in a way worth recording. tools/stamp.js rewrote
src/build-info.js before every serve and build, so after each commit the
committed stamp named the *previous* commit — as it does right now, reading
76072ed+ while HEAD is 5c1784d — and the next serve rewrote it and dirtied the
tree again. A generated value does not belong in a tracked file if anything
routinely regenerates it.
src/build-info.js is now permanent and reads `commit: 'dev'`. tools/build.js
substitutes the real commit into the bundled output only, and fails loudly if
the substitution finds nothing to replace. So dist/theladder.html names the
commit that produced it, running from source honestly reads "0.3.0 · dev", and
the working tree never churns. tools/stamp.js is gone and `npm run serve` is a
plain static server again.
Also here, for picking this up later: a "Where things stand" section in the
README with the five open questions in the order they are likely to matter —
whether money stops mattering late, the negotiation gate that four early options
sit behind, the feedback widget nobody uses, how thin Dispatch is next to the
mailroom, and third-tier versus second-pack.
121 tests. docs/DECISIONS.md §25 corrected to describe what the code now does.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
Five things from the second playtest.
A status line at the top of every screen: the game, the pack, your current
title, and the version plus the commit it came from. `tools/stamp.js` writes the
commit into src/build-info.js before serving and before building, so a
distributed dist/theladder.html states exactly which commit produced it. An
uncommitted working tree gets a `+` suffix — "4cab9fc+" is honest in a way a
bare SHA would not be.
The whole game is now playable on Enter. Every screen marks one control and the
app focuses it after each render: the first *available* option while choosing,
the next-turn button once the result is in, "keep going" on the retrospective.
Tab and Shift+Tab reach the other options. Locked options needed no special
handling — the browser's tab order already skips disabled controls, so they stay
visible without being in the way.
"What is notable? under What changed?" — two fixes. `notable` is the
retrospective's own list of moments; a display rule can now say
`inLedger: false` and it is left out, because "Notable — changed" tells nobody
anything. Flags are the opposite and stay, but as sentences the pack supplies
rather than as booleans: "The envelope is in your locker." instead of "the
envelope: now true".
Exported logs live in logs/, gitignored, and `npm run analyze` reads the newest
one there when given no argument. A log records what a real person did turn by
turn, including whatever they typed into the feedback box — committing one once
would put it in the history for good.
Version set to 0.3.0 on the reasoning that the engine was 0.1 and the interface
0.2; say if you want a different scheme and I will renumber.
119 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §25-28.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
The mailroom is no longer the whole game. Around turn 50, a player who has
built standing and either Marlene's goodwill or the nerve to ask gets offered
the Dispatch post — and can take it, take it and put Trevor up for the mailroom,
or turn it down, which is a real strategy rather than a mistake and comes back
after a cooldown.
Dispatch is eleven events of its own. The money problem is largely solved up
there and replaced by other people's days depending on yours, including the
mailroom's — which you used to be. Trevor branches on whether you recommended
him: he either runs the mailroom and has opinions about how it used to be run,
or he stays put and starts addressing you by your full title, kindly, in front
of people.
None of this is a promotion mechanic in the engine. It is
`{ path: 'stage', op: 'set', value: 'dispatch' }` on an option, since `stage`
was already how events are filtered. The reserved-write rule now allows it
narrowly — `set` only, and only to a stage that has events, both checked by the
validator, so a typo cannot strand the player in an empty pool. Wages differ by
rank through two upkeep entries gated on `stage`. The hard-times events dropped
their stage entirely: rent is due wherever you work.
The second half of this is the thing the last playtest asked for. A 183-turn
session, and no way to see how much of it was new ground.
`npm run analyze <exported-log.json>` now reports turns against distinct
situations, how often each recurred, which options were most used, which locked
gates players kept meeting, and anything they typed. The retrospective shows the
player-facing version.
It found a regression in this very change on its first run. Dispatch started
with eight events against the mailroom's nineteen, so its two floor events were
46% of every promoted run — one every three turns. Promotion was moving the
player into *thinner* content. Three more events and a weight rebalance took the
top two to 24.5%, and the heaviest recurrence from every ~3 turns to every ~5.
A test now holds that line.
Also corrected: the coverage test was asking whether an archetype ever *took* an
option, which is a property of the bot, not the pack. It had flagged
`rent_bounced.ask_trevor` as dead content when it had been offered, unlocked,
419 times across a sweep and simply never chosen. Options are now checked on
availability; events are still checked on firing.
114 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §22-24.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
The planning docs commit to one thing above all: adding content must never
require touching the engine. This lays the foundation that makes that true.
All game state is addressable by dotted path (money, skills.negotiation,
relationships.boss.likes_you, flags.took_loan), and conditions and effects are
generic operations over those paths. The schema in the planning docs had
`requires: { skill, min }` and `effects: { money, skills, relationships }`,
both of which hardcode the state shape into the engine; the first gate wanting
a relationship threshold or a flag would have meant an engine change.
There is deliberately no "random event" category. Every turn filters the whole
event pool by stage and conditions and draws by weight, so a routine turn, a
rare interruption and the hard-times branch differ only in their data.
Also here, neither in the planning docs but both cheap and load-bearing:
- A seeded, serializable RNG. Runs replay exactly from seed plus choices, which
makes tests deterministic and playtest reports reproducible. The generator's
position is one uint32 living in the save.
- A load-time content validator. Undeclared paths, unknown character ids, ids
that cannot be path segments, events that can never fire and stages with no
fallback event are all caught on load instead of forty turns into a game.
The turn loop is a pure function, so a saved game resumes into exactly the run
it left — covered by a test that plays thirty turns, plays the same thirty with
a JSON round trip in the middle, and deep-equals the two.
72 tests, no dependencies. Reasoning recorded in docs/DECISIONS.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
