2026-09-06 17:56:34
Anonymous:
CLR101 r6 (append only): confirm Q31 fixed in DD r2 (gravity culvert in body and resolved list); Q32 still open, clause 3 unchanged; new Q33 - survivorlike appears once in the whole owner document, in the glossary, while D005 is a confirmed owner requirement and section 6 concedes the arc does not reach the genre's payoff, phrased as 'the genre as its audience knows it' which assumes knowledge the owner may not have; new Q34 - the two-hour refund window steers owner decision 4 but is never explained in plain words or sourced, and the new Reference section's rules seem to cover exactly this. Note on document growth 51KB to 63KB
hold the flood/clarity questions.md ..
@@ 199,3 199,28 @@
| **Q32** | Clause 3 introduces a distinction the design did not have before: the district has a **power line** and a **signal line**, the panel switches both, the dispatch pulse travels the signal line only, and current you inject yourself "travels power, never signal — so it can draw a surge that is already inside, but it can never choose where the next surge enters." As a piece of engineering this is the neatest fix in the packet: it gives PM's "the coil cannot select the intake" a physical reason instead of an exception, and Appendix B is honest that the two lines are new and exist for that purpose. My question is not whether the rule is good. It is **how a player ever finds out it exists.** I have read sections 7, 9 and 12 and the clue list, and the two lines appear nowhere in them — no cable you can follow, no marking at the panel, no difference you can see between a beacon lit by the panel and a beacon lit by your own coil. The whole design rests on rules being learnable by watching, and on clues being fair. Put yourself in the player's chair: you light the yard beacon with your coil, you reasonably conclude you have done what the panel does, you plan the next ninety seconds around the surge coming to the yard — and it enters at the causeway. Without a visible cause, the honest lesson a player takes from that is not "there must be two circuits", it is **"the rule I worked out is unreliable"**, which is the single worst thing that can happen to a game about deducing a rule. What does the player *see* that tells them apart — two cables running side by side, a second colour, a marking at the panel, a beacon that flashes differently when it is the relay's pulse rather than your charge? One observable cue is all this needs, and it belongs next to the rule rather than in an appendix. | Design Document §4 clause 3 and Appendix A vs §7, §9, §12 | Open |
*Round 5 by the same outside reader, appended after re-reading the live page immediately before saving. No design content, no decisions, no owner requirements, nothing built, no assets, no research claimed. I changed no statuses and no question text this round; Q29 and Q30 were already marked answered by the roles that answered them, and I have only confirmed them here.*
**Q31 is answered and I have checked it.** The culvert is a gravity drain in §2 *and* in §16's resolved list, so the two pages agree and the "resolved" entry now records the right thing. World and Mystery r10's integration check caught the same clause-2 problem independently, which is the system working. **Q32 is still open** — clause 3 is unchanged and the two lines are still invisible to the player. **Q25 and Q28 remain PM's** and are unchanged.
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Draft r2 is better again: the world designer's map adopted as drawn, the outside critique answered on the document's own terms rather than deflected, and three new owner decisions. Two things a first-time reader still cannot get from the page, both in the newest material.
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### Q33 — the document never uses the owner's own word for what this is, and quietly says it might not be one
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| **Q33** | **"Survivorlike" appears exactly once in the whole design document — in Appendix A's glossary. It is in no section of the body.** Meanwhile it is the first confirmed requirement the owner gave: Brief **D005**, "Genre: survivorlike", authority *Owner*, status *Confirmed*, and the Hub's mandate opens with "a survivorlike focused on exploration, experimentation, and mystery". At the same time §6 says "This design's arc does not reach that point by default", and owner decision 6 says that without the optional arc module "the honest label is **a routing game with automatic weapons rather than the genre as its audience knows it**". I want to be clear that I think the honesty is admirable — it would have been easy to leave that out. My problem is that it is written in a register the owner may not decode. "The genre as its audience knows it" and "shipping under the genre's tag" assume the reader knows what players expect from a survivorlike, what a storefront tag does, and why a mismatch hurts. Strip that knowledge away and the sentence sounds like a small taste question. It is not. It is the document saying, in the politest possible way, **that the thing being proposed may not be the genre the owner asked for**, and the decision about whether that is acceptable is the owner's alone. §16 files it under "Presented for decision" as "The genre's payoff module", which names the fix rather than the risk. My request is one plain sentence, in the body and in §16, using the owner's own word: something to the effect of *"You asked for a survivorlike. As proposed, without the arc module, this is a routing and deduction game with automatic weapons; it may not feel like the genre you named. Here is what adding the module changes, and here is what it costs."* Then decision 6 reads as the significant question it is. | Design Document §6, §16, §17 decision 6 vs Brief D005 and the Hub mandate | Open |
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### Q34 — "the refund window" is doing real work and is never explained or sourced
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| **Q34** | §11 states "a refund window of two hours would cover about the first eight expeditions, which is most of the designed game", §16 repeats it, and owner decision 4 rests on it. **Nowhere does the document say what a refund window is, whose it is, or where the two-hour figure comes from.** A reader without games-industry background — which is the reader §1 was so carefully written for — has no way to know that this refers to the storefront's policy of letting a buyer return a game they have played for under two hours, and therefore no way to see why "most of the designed game fits inside it" is an alarming sentence rather than a neutral one. As written it reads like a scheduling detail; it is actually a commercial risk that could bear on the length decision more than any design argument in the section. Two small things would fix it: one clause saying what the window is in plain words, and a source, since this is a factual claim about an outside platform rather than a design proposal. The wiki now has a [Reference](/Reference) section whose stated rules are that every claim is linked and that fact is separated from inference — this looks like exactly the kind of claim those rules exist for, and it is currently the only bare external fact steering an owner decision. | Design Document §11, §16, §17 decision 4 | Open |
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**One thing I am watching but not filing as a question.** The document was 51 KB at r1 and is 63 KB at r2, and every revision so far has added a section. Nothing is wrong yet — r2 is still readable end to end, and everything added earned its place. But the property that made r1 succeed was that a stranger could hold the whole thing in their head. If a later revision has to choose between completeness and that, I would ask that it choose that, and push the completeness into the appendices where Appendix B is already doing the job well.
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*Round 6 by the same outside reader, appended after re-reading the live page immediately before saving. No design content, no decisions, no owner requirements, nothing built, no assets, no research claimed. I changed no statuses and no question text; Q31 was already marked answered by the world designer and I have only confirmed it here.*
