Three defects, all the same mistake, all found by sweep and not by tests: the
companion has no database row for a thing to persist onto, so the thing "arrives
fresh next time" — which for a resource means infinite.
1. His spell slots refilled every fight. The ledger went on his combat SEAT, and
a seat is per-session. A human rations one pool across a 30-room run and gets
it back at camp; rationing it IS the caster's game. Now on
expedition_party.companion_slots_used, refreshed at camp. (Worth ~0pp alone —
a run holds only ~2 real fights, so the pool never binds. I predicted this was
the whole answer. It was not.)
2. His BODY refilled every fight. buildFightSeats seated him at Stats.MaxHP and
the close-out skipped him — "he arrives fresh next time", said the comment.
That is an infinite body: he soaked a share of every fight's incoming and then
reset, while the humans beside him bled all the way to camp. THIS was the
carry. Now expedition_party.companion_hp; healed at camp; a dropped companion
returns on 1 HP rather than as a corpse, because there is no companion-death
rule and inventing one inside a bug fix would be a second feature.
3. No autopiloted caster had ever healed ITSELF. simPickAllyHeal skipped
`i == seat` and bailed on !IsParty(), so a solo cleric carried cure_wounds for
a whole run and never once cast it. Now simPickHeal: heal whoever is worst off,
which is sometimes you.
Measured, 640 runs/arm, like-for-like (the leaders whose role-fill gives Pete a
Cleric, against a human Cleric follower of the leader's own level):
solo 69.0%
+ a human cleric 77.6% (+8.6pp)
+ Pete 66.1% (-2.9pp)
The reference arm is the point. Against SOLO even a mace-only Pete looked like a
carry — but parties are designed to be safer, so solo is the wrong yardstick.
Against a human peer the real bug appeared: a gearless, level-penalized hireling
was out-clearing a fully-geared human cleric of the leader's own level by 15pp,
because he was the only combatant in the game who healed to full between fights.
With the free lunches gone he is honest, and honestly a net negative — which is
exactly the plan's §2 diagnosis, unmasked: a below-median seat cannot pay for its
own enemy scaling (+15% boss HP and 2.4 enemy actions a round instead of 1).
§2(a) is next, and the sweep now argues FOR it; before this commit it would have
made things worse.
Self-heal moved solo 66.1% -> 66.2%, so the balance corpus is undisturbed and no
re-baseline is owed. It is also NOT the answer to §6 — casters reach for a healing
consumable first and the sim stocks them, so a human rarely falls through to the
spell. Pete carries no consumables, so it is his only heal.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
Every spell lookup in the engine is keyed on a Matrix user id and answered
by a dnd_* table. The companion has rows in none of them, deliberately — a
sheet on disk is what would turn him into a real character everywhere. So
the auto-picker's first statement, LoadDnDCharacter(uid), came back nil and
returned "attack", every turn, for the whole fight.
A hired Cleric swung a mace while the party died. Role-fill hands a lone
martial a Cleric, so that was the common case of the feature.
Adds a seat-scoped spellbook: seatKnownSpells / seatSpellSlots /
seatKnowsSpell / consumeSeatSlot / refundSeatSlot. A human seat delegates to
the DB functions verbatim — same queries, same order — so solo combat and the
balance corpus are untouched (both goldens byte-identical). A companion seat
is answered from his synthetic sheet and a slot ledger on his seat's
persisted statuses. The seat is the correct home and not merely the available
one: every expedition hires the same @pete, so a store keyed on his user id
would have two parties sharing one pool of slots.
He gets the same default kit a real character of his class and level gets.
The below-median stays where it was — the level penalty, the never-Masterwork
gear, the absent subclass and magic items. A bespoke weaker spell list would
be a second nerf hidden in a different file.
castActionForSeat was also a live hazard: it loaded the caster through
ensureCharForDnDCmd, whose auto-migration branch, handed a user with no sheet,
builds one at level 1 and *saves* it. Pointed at the companion that silently
makes him a player. He now takes a branch that never reaches it, and a test
counts rows in dnd_character / dnd_known_spells / dnd_spell_slots /
player_meta to keep it that way.
Measured, 640 runs/arm (10 classes x L10,L12 x 4 zones):
solo 66.1%
+ Pete, mace-only (HEAD) 83.4% (+17.3pp)
+ Pete, casting 95.9% (+29.8pp)
The fix does what it should. It also lands on top of an unpaid §2(a): the
mace-only arm shows Pete was ALREADY a carry, taking the trailing band from
6.8% to 63.6% without casting a thing. The tell is the cleric leader, who
role-fills a *Fighter* Pete — a seat this commit cannot touch — and still goes
26.6% -> 98.4%. That is enemy scaling undercharging for a seat, not spells.
§2(a) is next, and is not optional.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
