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
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
The MVP is playable: a turn screen, a career retrospective, an optional
feedback widget, local-storage autosave with file export/import, and a build
that flattens everything into one self-contained HTML file.
A turn has two phases — the scenario and its options, then what the choice did
and, separately, what the day cost regardless. Numbers that move without the
player seeing why are most of what makes them meaningless. Locked options are
shown greyed with the requirement spelled out rather than hidden, so a player
can see the door they cannot open yet.
The interface is named entirely by the pack. `pack.display` maps a state path to
a label, a format and an order, which is why the header reads "Standing" for a
path called `reputation` and why debt disappears while it is zero.
The first playtest then found three things, all of them fair.
*"Wasn't clear what daily drain was for."* The ledger was labelling changes by
the path that moved — "Money −$18" — when the upkeep entry that caused them had
a perfectly good name. It now says "Coffee, transit, lunch". The labels were in
the data the whole time and never reached the screen.
*"Should probably pay rent weekly / get paid every other week… would be good to
have day of week and week # shown."* Packs can now declare a calendar, and the
engine derives the day name, cycle and index from the turn number before the
event is drawn — so content can require a Friday and the header can say
"Thursday · Week 2 · Day 12". Upkeep entries take `every` and `offset`, making
wages fall on alternate Fridays and rent every Monday. The turn screen carries
a diary line — "Wages tomorrow · Rent in 4 days" — computed generically from
whatever a pack schedules.
*"Always in debt — could never get ahead."* The old economy bled $25 a day
regardless of play. It is now roughly break-even at baseline, with a
`spare_shift` event that appears *because* you are broke: the way out of a hole
should be visible from inside it. Across archetypes a careful player ends around
$1,400, an unplanned one treads water, and a careless one sinks into real debt.
That retune broke the coverage test, usefully. Random play stopped reaching hard
times at all, which made the entire debt branch look dead — it was not, since
random play is not a plausible player. Coverage is now the union across five
archetypes, including one that is broke *and* well-liked, because the "ask a
friend for money" options sit in a state no single-axis strategy reaches.
Not covered by any of this: styling and dark mode, which only a human with a
browser can check. This machine has none that can render a page.
109 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §14-21.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
