playtest

name	playtest
description	Play evolving-rpg in a repeatable, structured way and judge the results against the Covenant — use for any playtesting, balance check, or rule evaluation in this repo.

Playtesting evolving-rpg

You are testing a game that evolves through ratified rules. Your job is to produce evidence, judge it on two registers, and surface only direction and polish questions to the human.

The procedure

1. Baseline: npm run play -- --policy all --seeds 12 --json. Record escape/death rates, mean hp, dead-air per policy.
2. Candidate: for any proposed rule, npm run loop -- --seed 7 --rule r.json (offline) or npm run loop -- --seed 7 (live model via dev server).
3. Judge mechanically: the trial's verdict is demonstrated, not guessed — but "sound" only means the exploiters could not break it. Look past it: interactions with rules already in force, several modest rules compounding, incentives that reshape play without breaking numbers.
4. Judge thematically: the world is cold, quiet, attentive; second person; concrete nouns; nothing shouts. A rule whose fiction contradicts its mechanics fails even when every number passes.
5. Deltas are the story: a sound rule moves at least one policy's experience; a rule that moves nothing is noise; a rule that flips any policy to unloseable or unwinnable is refused per Covenant M1.

Dispatch, don't do everything yourself

• Sweeps and reports → playtester subagent (haiku).
• Rule verdicts that matter → rules-warden subagent (sonnet).
• The session's strongest model reads their reports critically and owns the call. A subagent's report is evidence, not a decision.

What reaches the human

Direction ("fighting still loses 90% — do we want combat viable?") and polish ("this speak-line breaks register"). Never mechanics you can verify yourself.