openings-and-impact-plus-the-finished-palette-sep-15-26
written 2026-09-26 12:45:33 · claude-opus-5
Your directive: You are a fork with the whole design conversation in context. The developer has refined the combat rule and completed the stat palette. Write it into the four documents you own. Project root: /mnt/cmdo/ritz/games/tq/ai-stuff/double-diaper-dungeon.
YOU OWN EXACTLY FOUR FILES:
- docs/009-combat-in-a-room.md
- docs/011-equipment-gold-and-the-basecamp.md
- docs/014-haunted-furniture-and-puzzles.md
- docs/017-the-viewing-layer.md
Edit only these. Do NOT touch any other document, the balance table, any issue file, or docs/020-open-questions.md. Do not run git. Other writers own the others.
HER WORDS, VERBATIM, settled design:
On combat: "Imagination should give you more potential openings, while dexterity should increase the impact of exploiting an opening."
On the stat she had not defined: "spirit is resilience to pride losses. However it increases regression gain, and recovery, in equal proportion. It also contributes a bit to health and speed. Strength is where speed comes from mostly, maybe 80/20 strength/spirit. And health is 80/20 constitution/spirit. Also spirit increases imagination gain, but also increases susceptibility to hypnosis. It also gives a minor bonus to exp gained."
WHAT THIS SETTLES ACROSS YOUR FILES.
Five primary attributes, not six: strength, dexterity, constitution, intellect, spirit. Speed and health are derived: speed four parts strength to one part spirit, health four parts constitution to one part spirit. Another writer is putting that into the record and the mind document; you use it. Five primaries is exactly the five colours she gave, so the palette is complete: strength pink, dexterity green, constitution dark red, intellect blue, spirit yellow.
docs/009, the opening and the impact. This refines what you already have. The avoid value is defensive attention. An OPENING is a moment when the attention is not where the blow is going, and a landed hit is an opening exploited. Imagination produces more openings: it widens the decay of the defender's avoid value, so an imaginative attacker gets more of them. Dexterity makes each one count for more: it raises the DAMAGE of a blow that lands, not the chance of landing it. Rewrite the rule so there is ONE roll rather than two: the avoid value decides whether an opening appears, and dexterity multiplies what happens when one does. Say explicitly that the separate to-hit roll the document previously described is removed, and why one roll is better here: an opening either exists or does not, and a second roll to decide whether a hero notices the opening they created is a coin flip nobody was asking for. Dexterity keeps its defensive half, armour, which dampens a blow the way her vision described. So dexterity is impact on offence and dampening on defence, which is one idea seen from both ends.
Also fold in: imagination's gain is raised by spirit, so a spirited hero becomes a better attacker as they regress, and a hero's damage type still splits physical from strength and magical from intellect.
docs/014, hypnosis. Spirit increases susceptibility to hypnosis, and willpower already resists it. Write the mirror roll as two forces: willpower resists, spirit tempts. A hero who is high in both is dramatic rather than safe. Flag in Still open whether willpower survives as its own attribute now that spirit exists.
docs/011, the sliders and classes. The priority slider's closed list of stats is now known and is exactly the five primaries. Say so, and say that this is why the slider's list could not be closed before. Speed and health are not on it, because they are computed from stats that are. Classes are read off the shares across those five, so the class space is five-dimensional. Also fold in spirit's small bonus to experience gained, which means a spirited guild levels slightly faster and is the one place spirit touches the economy.
docs/017, the palette and the sliders on screen. The palette is complete and the startup validator can now refuse to run when a stat has no colour, which it could not before. Give the five colours. The slider offers exactly five stats, so a hero can carry at most five dividers, and with the minimum share that is a comfortable fit rather than a crowd; say what that means for the widget. The name-colouring bands are drawn from the same five.
House style: plain English, mechanism-level, no balance numbers in prose. Name balance entries in words and link ../assets/023-balance-table.info.md. Every branch says what each path leads to. Errors not fallbacks, nothing nil. Keep each document's Still open section updated and its Related line.
When done, reply with: the word count of each file, the balance-table entries you named that do not exist yet (dotted name, one line of meaning), and any new open questions (topic plus one sentence). Nothing else.
I'll read the four documents I own, then rewrite the affected sections.
Now the combat document. The to-hit roll comes out and dexterity becomes impact.
The file changed on disk since I read it. Re-reading before the next edits.
Combat is done. Now the sliders and classes, where the stat list can finally close.
Now the mirror, where spirit tempts and willpower resists.
Now the viewing layer, where the palette can finally be complete.
Checking for stale references across all four and confirming links resolve.
Wrote the opening-and-impact rule and the completed five-stat palette into the four documents I own. The other modified files under docs/ are other writers' and the parent's; I touched only mine. No git run.
Word counts
| File | Words |
|---|---|
| docs/009-combat-in-a-room.md | 3316 |
| docs/011-equipment-gold-and-the-basecamp.md | 3016 |
| docs/014-haunted-furniture-and-puzzles.md | 2951 |
| docs/017-the-viewing-layer.md | 3525 |
Balance entries named that do not exist yet
dodge.dexterity_impact— damage multiplier per point of the attacker's dexterity, applied to a blow that lands. Replaces the to-hit entry, which should be retired: the separate roll is gone.mind.imagination_gain_per_spirit— how much a point of spirit raises the rate at which imagination accrues with regression.class.experience_bonus_per_spirit— the small levelling bonus, and the only place spirit touches the economy.furniture.mirror_willpower_resist— how much a point of willpower helps the look-away check.furniture.mirror_spirit_tempt— how much a point of spirit hurts it.speed.strength_share/speed.spirit_share— the four-to-one derivation of speed. Named in 011; owned by the record.health.constitution_share/health.spirit_share— the same for health.
Note: dodge.dexterity_to_hit and any combat.dexterity_to_hit are now dead names. The second roll is removed from 009, which means the design-time Monte Carlo figures are correct again rather than owed a re-run, and I said so in the document.
New open questions
- One dexterity entry or two. Impact on offence and dampening on defence are the same idea from opposite ends; one number would say so, two allow separate tuning.
- A ceiling on impact. Whether a very precise hero landing a rare opening for enormous damage is the intended shape of that build.
- Whether willpower survives. Nothing else in the record reads it now that spirit exists; keeping it buys the hero who is hard to catch and terrible once caught, folding it away buys one number on one roll. Flagged in 014 as hers to settle.
- Whether the secret phrase reads spirit as well as the hypnotic stack count, which decides if a spirited hero is a liability in every fight or only near mirrors.
- Whether spirit has gear behind it. Every other primary has an obvious equipment ladder and spirit may not, which would make its slider share mean something different from the other four.
- Whether the experience bonus is personal or guild-wide.
- Exact colors. Five names, no hex values; the dark red and the pink are the pair most at risk of collapsing together for a colorblind reader or in one of the two themes.