`_create_due_memories` sent six actions of second-person prose and
nothing else — no protagonist, no cast, no setting, and no instruction
about what person to write in. So for `You push the door open. She grabs
your arm.` the only honest memory was "You entered a room and she
stopped you", which names nobody when it is retrieved forty turns later.
The framing wandered too: with no rule, the model picked a person per
call, and one bank ended up holding "You entered the crypt", "The player
entered the crypt" and "He entered the crypt" for the same kind of
event.
Both prompts now carry a cast brief and a framing rule: third person,
the protagonist by name, other characters named rather than left as bare
pronouns. The rule states its reason, because a memory really is read in
isolation much later and a model told why complies far more
consistently than one handed a bare instruction.
The cast comes from the story cards, not from `stat_schema`. Every
schema NPC is already turned into a card at adventure creation,
deduplicated against the hand-written ones by name, so the cards cover
schema NPCs, an author's own cards, and an adventure with no RPG layer
at all through one path instead of three.
Keyword matching alone was not enough, and finding that out changed the
design. Built that way first, the brief for "She grabs your arm" listed
the protagonist and nobody else: the block that most needs a cast is
exactly the one written in bare pronouns, and Gwen's trigger keys
include "her" but the text says "she". So matched cards come first and
the remaining slots are filled with the other character cards. Places
and items are not topped up — an unmentioned tavern is not who "she"
was — though a place that is mentioned still matches normally. The
asymmetry with the turn prompt is deliberate: an untriggered card is
wrong as lore and right in a roster, because the roster answers "who
could these pronouns be" rather than "what is on stage".
Fixed descriptions only, never live values. `Gwen: trust 40 (wary)` in
the brief would make the same event summarized at two different times
come out framed differently, which is the fault this removes.
An adventure with no persona still gets the cast and the setting, and
the model is told to write "the player". One with nothing to say sends
byte for byte the prompt it sent before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NPyQN926gkZTAYfgugcaok
Chromium against a fresh database with the demo scenarios seeded. No API
key needed: Insights assembles the prompt without calling a model, so the
checks run on the real assembled context rather than a stub.
21/21. The two request failures in the run were the sandbox — Google
Fonts is blocked by the egress policy, and the analytics beacon is
aborted on unload — not the app.
The case worth naming: a blank adventure with no RPG layer produced
sections `['narrator', 'persona', 'length_hint']`. That is what the
persona was added for, and it is the one thing no unit test in this repo
would have caught if the section had been gated behind `has_ws`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NPyQN926gkZTAYfgugcaok
The player had stats but no identity. `stat_schema.player` carried hp and
mana beside `npc.gwen.trust`, but where an NPC has a name and a
description the player had neither, so the block rendered as
`You: hp 100/100` and nothing in the prompt said who "you" was.
Three columns on `adventures`: name, pronouns, description. All
user-only, all optional, and an empty name means the app behaves exactly
as it did before — no backfill, no special case for an adventure that
predates the migration.
They are adventure columns rather than part of `stat_schema` for two
reasons. An adventure with no RPG layer still has a protagonist, and
that is the case this was added for. And `worldstate.schema._initials`
treats every dict inside a stat section as a stat definition, so a
persona placed there would be instantiated, rendered in the guide, and
handed an `initial` value as though it were one.
The paths do not change. `player.hp` stays `player.hp`; only the label
moves, to `Kaelen (player): hp 100/100`, the same way NPC lines already
print a display name beside the id. A path carrying the persona's name
would break the moment a player renamed their character, because
`_history_text` replays every past turn's stored delta into the prompt
and those blobs hold literal `player.hp` strings.
The section sits in the system block. Only the user can edit it, so it
never changes mid-story and stays inside the cached prefix. That is what
makes it free, and it is why the AI must not be able to move it — a
delta aimed at `persona.*` is already refused by `_resolve`, and there
is now a test holding that in place.
The modal that used to appear only for scenarios with `${Placeholder}`
tokens now always opens, and is where the character is named. Persona
and placeholders stay independent: a scenario asking for `${Name}` is
asking its own question. No scenario in the repo uses placeholders at
all, so the overlap is hypothetical.
Phase 2, which feeds the persona and the cast to the summarizer, is
written up in plan/18 and not started. That is where the memory-quality
problem actually gets fixed; this change is what gives it a name to use.
Not yet driven in a browser — plan/18 lists what to check by hand.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NPyQN926gkZTAYfgugcaok
Claude