Both scaling levers counted seats. partyEnemyHPScale gave +15% boss HP for any
roster >= 2, and partyActionExpectation lifted the enemy from 1 to 2.4 attacks a
round. A seat COUNT charges the same for an under-levelled friend, a hired NPC,
and a true peer — so a below-median body cost a full seat's worth of boss and did
not give a full seat's worth back.
Measured, once the companion's free full-heal was taken away and he became honest:
hiring him was WORSE than going alone (66.1% against solo's 69.0%). That is this
bug, and it has been live for every under-levelled friend anyone has ever invited.
Seats now carry a SeatWeight, and both levers scale on the summed weight of the
LIVING seats rather than on a head count. The weight is level-based, priced against
the leader, times a discount for a hireling (no subclass, no magic items, gear that
is never Masterwork — the layers a player accrues and a hireling never will).
Level, and deliberately not a power score: an HP-x-damage proxy would rank a cleric
below a fighter and quietly make every mixed HUMAN party easier, which is a
difficulty regression smuggled in under a bug fix.
The safety argument is one property: **a peer weighs exactly 1.0**. So the curves
interpolate between the integer knots the P8 sweep tuned — (1, 1.0), (2, 2.4),
2n-1 from 3 up — and every integer input returns exactly what it always returned.
Solo is byte-identical, a party of same-level humans is byte-identical, both
goldens hold unmoved, and only an UNEQUAL roster lands between the knots. That is
the entire point of the change.
It also finishes §2(b): a seat that is down now buys the enemy nothing. §2(b) fixed
the head-count half; a corpse still carried its full weight until this.
Measured, 640 runs/arm, same grid:
solo 69.0% (unchanged — corpus intact)
+ Pete 76.8% (+7.8pp)
+ a human cleric peer 77.6% (+8.6pp)
band solo +Pete lift
trailing (<40%) 10.0% 31.0% +21.0pp
middle 58.9% 76.8% +17.9pp
leading (>=70%) 93.5% 99.2% +5.7pp
Help, never a carry: he rescues the players who were drowning and barely moves the
ones who were already fine — and he stays below a real human of the leader's level,
which is the invariant a hireling must never break.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01J5SQZWoLmL3M3mw2XmHHdy
