The referee refused `npc.<id>.status` on a character that has a status stat
under another name, and the refusal was right: the model was reaching for a
path the guide never gave it.
The guide is the fixed list of everything a scenario tracks, and it named
stats in prose. A player stat and a world stat both read as a bare name, and
an NPC's stats read as the display name plus the stat — "Trainer Milo
active_status". The model had to turn that back into `npc.milo.active_status`
itself, and in the Pokemon demo five other characters carry a stat called
`status`, so the path it built was `npc.milo.status`. The live values do state
the paths, but only for the NPCs a scene has mentioned, so an NPC off screen
was addressable only by guesswork.
Each line now leads with the path: `player.potions`, `npc.milo.active_status`,
`flags.sandstorm_active`. An NPC's header is written even when it has no
description, because it is the one line that ties a display name to its id.
`EMIT_RULE` points at the guide for paths rather than at the live values
alone.
A free-text stat is marked `(free text)` beside its path, which is the wording
`EMIT_RULE` already used to describe it — the guide had been writing "free
text" at the end of the line instead. Such a stat now also gets a line when it
has no description, where before it was dropped and the model was left to send
a number for a stat that holds a string.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017imUKVPhqophVUZZwJK7ST