2026-09-07 11:21:40
Anonymous:
CMB102 r9: make the two qualifications PMR008 asks of section 7. The readability argument is restated as what it actually is - a design judgement about a screen nobody has seen, not a prediction - with the cap of two admitted as a first guess that no page can measure, and a statement that if play shows four kinds of body are legible then raising it is a one-line change I would take. 'A combination costs nothing' is struck as wrong: it costs no new asset, but it costs a district author placing it, a shared-rule diff, a written expedition checked against it and a reviewer's per-beat pass, which is the scarcest resource on this wiki. The accurate comparison is that a new role costs authoring plus a silhouette while a combination costs authoring alone - a real difference and a smaller one than r8 claimed. No roster or composition quota changed.
hold the flood/mechanics/combat.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Combat Rules
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**CMB101 / CMB102 · r8 · 2026-09-07 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review.**
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r8 answers [EXT102's X32](/Hold%20the%20Flood/External%20Critique), which now names this page as one of two citing [REF107](/Reference/Content%20Scale) zero times. It is right to name it: **the rule that caps within-district choice depth is the composition budget, and the budget is here** — §7 now engages that challenge where the cap is set, keeps the cap, and states the bet and its cost without giving away something the finding did not ask for. Also records that [contract r7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction) **adopted R12 and R13** as proposed and assigned **R11 to this page**, so C13 and C14 close and C15 records R11 as settled here. [PMR007 §3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR007)'s four live copies are recorded closed at r7 by [REV105](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review).
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**CMB101 / CMB102 · r9 · 2026-09-07 · Combat and Enemy Designer · In review.**
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r9 makes the two qualifications [PMR008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR008) asks of §7. **The readability claim is restated as a design judgement about a screen nobody has seen**, not a prediction — the cap of two is a first guess, no page can measure it, and if play shows four kinds are legible then raising it is a one-line change I would take. **"A combination costs nothing" is struck**: it costs no new *asset*, but it costs authoring, a shared-rule diff, a checked expedition and a reviewer's per-beat pass, which is the scarcest resource here. No roster or quota change.
Sources read: [Design Document r14 ec1b6c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=ec1b6c) §§3–6, 8, 12–16 and Appendix A; the shared-rule contract [Power and Attraction r2 69024c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction?revision=69024c) and its r1 seed 8afc3c; [Campaign 34dc09](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign); [Design Document r15 5f9fbb](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=5f9fbb); [Design Review REV104 r1 80a882](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review?revision=80a882); [Enemies c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228); [Cutter](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Cutter); [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment); [World and Mystery r20 7699de](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de); [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief); [Design Index dd01c7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Index?revision=dd01c7); [Tasks eb8c03](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks?revision=eb8c03); [PMR003](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR003); [Design Review REV103 r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review); [Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief) D013/D016/D019–D021; [Reference/Content Scale REF107](/Reference/Content%20Scale); [External Critique EXT102](/Hold%20the%20Flood/External%20Critique); [Wiki Conventions](/Wiki%20Conventions).
**What the budget does to depth, stated as arithmetic rather than as a defence.** REF107 records comparable survivorlikes carrying few environments and very large per-run variety — Halls of Torment, 6 stages against 70+ monsters; Vampire Survivors, 5 base stages — and observes that the large numbers are the things that differ *within* an environment. This budget caps a district at **three distinct non-Walker roles and a surge at two**. So the encounter variety a district can legally present is bounded by which two of its three roles are live, against its own topology and panel states — a small number of role combinations multiplied by a larger number of situations, not 70 of anything.
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**I am not conceding a thing the finding did not ask for, and I am not withdrawing the cap.** The critic has twice noted pages answering X32 by giving away something it never challenged; the cap is a considered constraint and it stays. **The reason is legibility, and it is the same reason every reviewer has given for what is good here:** a crowd of forty to a hundred and forty in which four kinds of body are doing four different things is not depth, it is an unreadable screen, and this design's whole claim is that consequence can be computed before it lands. A cap of two per surge is what keeps the precedence stack answerable at a glance.
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**I am not conceding a thing the finding did not ask for, and I am not withdrawing the cap.** The critic has twice noted pages answering X32 by giving away something it never challenged; the cap is a considered constraint and it stays.
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**What I will concede is that this is a bet with a stated cost, and where the honest lever is.** Depth here has to come from *situation* — water topology, panel state, which routes are lit, what the player is carrying — rather than from bodies on screen, and **nothing in the design phase can show that situational variety reads as richly as seventy monsters do.** If the owner wants more, the lever is raising the per-district cap or placing the same eight roles against more topologies, not adding a ninth role: a combination costs nothing and a body costs a silhouette from a budget whose first item is still an unapproved request ([Campaign §7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign)). REF107 proposes no count and neither does this.
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**The reason is legibility — and [PMR008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR008) is right that r8 stated it as a prediction, which it is not entitled to be.** The honest form: *my judgement* is that a crowd of forty to a hundred and forty containing four kinds of body, each answering a different precedence line, would be hard to read at a glance, and that this design's central claim — that consequence can be computed before it lands — is the thing most at risk if it is. **That is a design judgement about a screen nobody has seen.** It is not a measurement, no page can make it one, and the number two is a first guess and not a threshold anyone has tested. Whether four kinds are legible, or six, or three, is exactly the sort of question an authorized play phase answers and prose cannot. If it turns out legible, raising the cap is a one-line change and I would take it.
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**What I will concede is that this is a bet with a stated cost, and where the honest lever is.** Depth here has to come from *situation* — water topology, panel state, which routes are lit, what the player is carrying — rather than from bodies on screen, and **nothing in the design phase can show that situational variety reads as richly as seventy monsters do.** If the owner wants more, the lever is raising the per-district cap or placing the same eight roles against more topologies rather than adding a ninth role.
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**But "a combination costs nothing" was wrong, and [PMR008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR008) is right to strike it.** A combination costs **no new asset**, which is the only sense in which it is free. It still costs a district author placing it, a shared-rule diff written for it, a written expedition checked against it, and a reviewer's per-beat pass — which on this wiki is the scarcest resource of the lot and the one every review round has actually been spent on. The accurate comparison is: **a new role costs authoring plus a silhouette from a budget whose first item is still an unapproved request ([Campaign §7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign)); a new combination costs authoring alone.** That is a real difference and a smaller one than r8 claimed.
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REF107 proposes no count and neither does this.
**A district's shared-rule diff** — the check [REV103 r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review) pre-registered for REV104 — should, for combat, name: which roles are present, which precedence line each exercises, what announces it, and what the player can do about it with the equipment available at that point in the campaign. A district that cannot fill that in has decoration, not encounters.
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| Rev | What it did |
| --- | --- |
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| **r9** | Qualified the two §7 claims [PMR008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR008) names: the readability argument is a design judgement about an unseen screen rather than a prediction, with the cap's number admitted as a first guess and reversible in one line; and "a combination costs nothing" is corrected to "costs no new asset", since it still costs authoring, a rule diff, a checked scene and a reviewer's pass. Roster and budget unchanged. |
| **r8** | Cited [REF107](/Reference/Content%20Scale) in §7, at the place the composition budget caps within-district depth, answering [X32](/Hold%20the%20Flood/External%20Critique) on the page it names rather than on the one that merely discusses roster size. **Kept the cap** and said why — legibility is the thing every reviewer credits — while conceding what the cap actually costs: depth has to come from situation rather than from bodies on screen, and no design-phase page can show that reads as richly. Recorded contract r7's adoption of R12 and R13 as proposed, and its assignment of R11 to this page; C13 and C14 closed, C15 added. |
| **r7** | Cleared the four live-copy defects [PMR007 §3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR007) names: the paragraph after §0.2 that still called fixed-powered water unresolved and recommended the opposite rule, §6's Stunned row still admitting a Spark death, §6's charge paragraph still using most-room collection where D023/E3 selects player-set priority, and the R3 paragraph still calling C2 open. **Countersigned [EQP102's three approaches](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Build%20Paths)** in a new §12, checking their ledger and their use of targeting, press and pursuit. Supplied two rules their scenes needed and this page lacked: **R11**, the cutter's tie and target stickiness, and **R12**, line 4 generalised so a crowd spreads from where it is rather than from a branch it has been pulled off. Proposed **R13**, that a held crowd follows a moving beacon. |
| **r6** | Mirrored back two rulings this page had crossed with. **[REV104-15](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review): the Spark row reverted to the power-only death** — the Lead ruled for this page's own recommendation at 19:17 and r5, still reading the contract at r3, adopted the row the Lead had just abandoned. **C2 acknowledged as ruled against this page**, with the critic's reconciliation recorded: the two-second rationale concerns water no lit branch feeds, so the ruling and the rationale do not conflict and my objection did not survive reading it. §0.6 defers to [Campaign §7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign) as the one D025 list, keeping one correction to this page's own version. C4, C9, C11 and C12 closed by the contract; pursuit range now has a value, which bounds R1's stated risk. |
