2026-09-07 11:19:34
Anonymous:
Districts r12: answer the Game vision, which challenges 'one extra rule per district' as a content justification and rules that a district need not add a rule to earn its place. I concede the point: section 2.1's lever ladder is WITHDRAWN as the reason for the count, because it made seven look inevitable - an eighth district would have had to find an empty cell in a grid rather than a decision worth making, which is the reasoning the vision says should not settle it. The ladder is kept, marked, as an anti-reskin check, which is what it is actually good for. New section 2.0 re-runs all seven districts against the vision's own decision test - the player's choice, the visible consequence, the part of the experience it serves - in plain language with no task codes or revision hashes, so a reader can use it without any of them; all seven pass and that table is the argument now. Notes that the Exchange is the interesting case because it adds nothing to the shared rules and still gives the first choice landing in a district the player is not in, and that the vision's cut-a-visit-that-meets-a-count-target rule was already applied at r10. No district added, none expanded, no catalogue touched - PMU008 defers that while the direction is under review.
hold the flood/districts.md ..
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# Hold the Flood — Districts
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**CAM101 accepted; CAM102 / CAM103 · r11 · 2026-09-07 · Campaign and District Designer · In review. Nothing here is an owner approval, a validated length, or tested behaviour.** r10 is the CAM103 audit Tasks asks for — *identify any baseline trip whose only purpose is hauling or repeating a solved interaction; cut, combine or redesign it* — run against my own baseline first. **One of the two required returns fails the test and is cut**, so the baseline falls to **34 expeditions and 8.1 hours** and every figure in §5 moves with it. New §5.1 states the test, applies it, and supports [REV105-1](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review) on the Tram without writing a competing version of the lead's district. §3.4's deferral to World is closed: WLD104 r26 has chosen the recommended route. **r11 catches two figures r10 missed** — the overhead sentence and the claim line still carried 35 and 8.4 — which is the recount-from-the-bytes-you-are-sending rule in [Wiki Conventions §5](/Wiki%20Conventions), learned again. r1–r10 are in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/history).
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**CAM101 accepted; CAM102 / CAM103 · r12 · 2026-09-07 · Campaign and District Designer · In review. Nothing here is an owner approval, a validated length, or tested behaviour.** r12 answers the [Game vision](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#game-vision), which challenges “one extra rule per district” as a content justification and rules that **a district need not add a rule to earn its place**. That bears on §2.1's lever ladder, and **I concede the point**: the ladder is withdrawn as the reason for the count. New §2.0 re-runs all seven districts against the vision's own decision test, in plain language and without codes. **No district is added and none is expanded** — [PMU008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks) defers that. r1–r11 are in [page history](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Districts/history).
**This page does not replace [Campaign (DES104)](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign).** The lead published the integrated campaign proposal before this role was staffed, and its own bookkeeping says section 2's map and count and section 3's districts "would transfer to Campaign and Districts" when the role exists. It exists now. **I adopt the lead's seven-plus-one district set and its three deep districts as written, rather than proposing a rival campaign** — two campaign plans on one wiki is the failure [Wiki Conventions §6](/Wiki%20Conventions) is about. What this page adds is the part of CAM101 that DES104 does not yet carry: an independent count test, the progression map with its optional branch and its later-discovery return, travel and order rules, a bottom-up duration hypothesis, one consequence of failure, one alternative route, and the two undesigned districts written to the standard of DES104 §3.
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**I recommend seven.** The lead recommends "eight districts counting the refuge, seven without it" ([DES104 §10.2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign#10-decisions-for-the-owner-and-one-question-for-pm)). **I agree with the seven and disagree with counting the refuge**, for the reason in §2.3. This is a small disagreement about one entry, deliberately: the lead's district set survives an independent test, and saying so is more useful than manufacturing a rival plan.
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### 2.0 The seven districts against the vision's decision test
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*The [Game vision](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#game-vision) sets one test: **name the player's choice, its visible consequence, and the part of the experience it serves.** If those cannot be stated plainly, simplify or combine; if the element still contributes nothing, remove it. It adds that a feature's origin, its author and its prior acceptance do not answer the test. Here are the seven, plainly, with no task codes and no revision numbers, because a reader should be able to use this table without any of them.*
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| District | What the player chooses | What they see happen | What it is for |
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| --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| **Pumping District** | Which road to light | The next wave comes in on the road you lit, and the door on that road opens | Teaches the whole game: every door you open invites the crowd to it |
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| **Lock Flight** | Whether to move the water or move the crowd | Basins fill and drain; a drained bed becomes a road, and a filled one becomes a circuit | Shows that the water is a tool, not just terrain |
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| **Tram Incline** | Whether to tow the crowd or send it away | A lit tram climbs, and the crowd follows the light up or is left behind it | Shows that a light can be carried, not just switched |
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| **The Exchange** | Which districts stay readable | Somewhere else, on a later trip, a wave arrives announced — or doesn't | The first choice that lands in a place you are not standing in |
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| **The Collector** | How much of the Flood another district gets, and whether to hold it, harvest it or let it through | A wave that was scheduled to arrive somewhere simply doesn't: the light flashes and nothing comes | Shows the Flood is being moved on a schedule, not spawned |
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| **Tidal Barrier** | Whether to shut the sea out | The flats stop flooding, the refuge's dock stops flooding, and the Collector runs short | The first choice that helps home and costs the machine |
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| **The Head-works** | Stop, Keep or Leave | Every district's schedule changes at once, on a timetable you can watch approach | The same choice as the first district's relay, with the whole city on the other end |
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**All seven pass, and this table is the argument now.** Every row names a choice the player makes, a consequence they watch, and a job in the one story the vision describes: follow the signal upstream, find out what the Flood is for, and decide what your home should keep running.
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**What I am withdrawing.** §2.1 offers the lever ladder as a cheaper count test than the lead's, and §2.2 runs the seven through it. **As a justification for the count, it is withdrawn.** It was doing something worse than being wrong: it made seven look inevitable, so an eighth district would have had to find an empty cell in a grid rather than a decision worth making — which is the reasoning the vision says should not settle it. *(An earlier draft of the same argument derived the count from a two-axis grid of water states and intake control. It was never published. I mention it because it is the purest form of what the vision is challenging, and abandoning it before it reached the wiki is not the same as being right about it.)*
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**What survives, restated in the vision's terms.** The ladder never required a district to add a *rule*; it required each district's consequence to land in a different place and time from the others. Read that way it is the vision's own test applied across districts rather than one at a time, and it is still what catches a reskin. **A district earns its place by the choice it gives the player, not by the rule it adds** — and by that standard the Exchange is the interesting case, because it adds nothing at all to the shared rules and is still the first place a player's choice reaches a district they are not standing in.
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**Already applied, before the vision said it.** *"Change or cut when a visit exists to meet an hour/count target."* At r10 a required trip was cut from the baseline for exactly that reason — its only purpose was to watch a clue the player would see anyway — and the baseline fell to 34 expeditions and 8.1 hours. I mention it because the vision asks designers not to defend a feature by its documentation, and the cheapest way to show that is to have cut something before being asked to.
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**What I have not done.** No district is added, none is expanded and no catalogue is touched: [PMU008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks) defers that while the direction is under review, and this role's job meanwhile is to support coherence and correct live contradictions. If a later vision pass changes what a district must do, the table above is where the damage shows first, and I would rather revise it than argue for it.
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### 2.1 The test I applied, which is not the lead's
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> **Withdrawn as the reason for the count at r12**, after the [Game vision](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief#game-vision) ruled that a district need not add a rule to earn its place. The ladder is kept below as an anti-reskin check, which is what it is good for, and no longer as the justification. The current argument is the decision-test table in [§2.0](#20-the-seven-districts-against-the-visions-decision-test).
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The lead's test is: *a district must have a written expedition whose choices could not occur in another district.* That is a good test and it is expensive — it needs a written expedition per district before it can be run, and three of the eight do not have one.
**My test is cheaper and can be run on a sketch: the lever ladder.** Every district's outward consequence occupies one cell of *(what it sets) × (where it applies) × (when it is felt)*. **A district whose lever shares a cell with another district's is a reskin, however different its ground looks.** This is the same instinct as the lead's, made checkable before the expedition is written — which is what the Expansion Brief's "avoid eight renamed pumping yards" actually needs.
