reikhelm/deepfall/PLAYTEST.md

DEEPFALL — Live 6-Player Playtest (2026-06-19)

A complement to the Monte-Carlo balance sweeps (FINDINGS.md): six persona AI players — each a different kind of human, each piloting a different one of the six Lineages and six Callings — sat at a virtual table and played a full game, making real in-character decisions refereed by a faithful rules engine, then reflected on the fun.

This is the thing the bots can't measure: how it feels.

The table

Player	Archetype	Company	Final
Vex	the spoiler (competitive, denial)	Dvergar Hierophant	🥇 84
Rook	the gambler (chaos, push-luck)	Sylphid Wardancer	🥈 82
Mina	the min-maxer (cold optimizer)	Wisp Prospector	🥉 75
Pip	the first-timer	Gnoll Reaver	59
Tav	the roleplayer (story over winning)	Revenant Lorekeeper	50
Greta	the cautious banker	GolemBorn Warden	30

11 rounds, clean ending on Floor 1. Top three within 9 glory (84-82-75), 2 lead changes, 5 contested collapses, 2 Worthy Ends.

The verdict

avgFun 7.3/10 · 6 of 6 would play again. The game is fun — its problems are balance and clarity, not fun. The drama landed exactly where it was designed to:

• Rook's round-8 Last Stand — Maw one tick away, zero loot, stands up and declares anyway, rides the Hall collapse to 22 glory while a rival is swallowed for nothing: "The Maw blinked first." Their favorite moment of the night. The three-exit triangle produces real table theatre.
• Pip (the newbie) literally screamed when a Den he'd half-forgotten he was holding paid out 10 glory at collapse. "I did not understand what happened. Everyone looked at me. Worth it." The collapse-scoring surprise is delightful even when you don't fully get the rules.
• Tav (the roleplayer) stood in a burning Library as the floor fell and walked out with 24 glory of "ancient marginalia." The theme carries.

What it caught (and how it maps to the bot data)

1. The careful line is under-rewarded — and it feels unfair, not just weak. Greta never lost a crew and finished last: "The scoring punishes the careful and rewards the reckless. That is not a game, that is a bad lesson." Mina played the provably-optimal cash-out line, found it joyless ("that's not daring, that's invoicing"), and still lost to riskier players. Even the winner, Vex, flagged it: "Rook got eaten twice and still finished two points behind me — that gap is not satisfying." → This is exactly the sim's CashOut-strategy weakness (2.8%) and the open Cash-vs-Worthy substitution finding — now confirmed from three independent human angles, with the emotional weight the win-rate number can't convey.

2. Humans hit the feel-bad 6× where the bots hit it 0×. The Monte-Carlo bots cash out defensively and almost never get Taken without a Last Stand (0.00/game). But the gambler, the roleplayer, and the newbie walked into the silent death six times this game. Rook and Tav independently demanded the same thing: "Every death deserves a punchline." This is the headline meta-finding: the live-agent playtest caught a problem the perfect-play simulator structurally hid.

3. The deep-collapses-first geometry confuses newcomers. Pip, round 5: "Nobody told me the floors count DOWN. I thought it went up. Why does it go down. WHO DESIGNED THIS." Got caught thinking he had five turns when he had one. → The fun-critic predicted exactly this ("richest = doomed first" fights loss-aversion intuition); the playtest makes it a hard component requirement.

4. Contests feel flat. Mina and Vex both noted that piling markers into a room is a free hedge and ties split evenly: "two markers beats four markers because the split is flat — that is irrational" (Mina); "flooding a room should be a genuine gamble" (Vex).

Changes made (and re-validated in the sim)

Change	Why	Knob
Desperate Strike — a no-Last-Stand Take salvages ⅓ of unbanked loot	Rook & Tav: a silent death shouldn't be a humiliating zero	taken_salvage_frac = 0.33
Extraction bonus — flat +3 glory per crew retired alive	Greta: reward surviving the delve, not just dying deep	cashout_extraction_bonus = 3.0

Re-sweep (1000 seeds): the strategy band tightened — WorthyEnd 46.7 → 42.5%, the safe/engine lines lifting (PressOn 25.8 → 31.9, CashOut 2.8 → 3.7); 6-player victory margin fell to 9.5% (even tighter top-of-table). Pacing, combo spread, and the 0.00-feel-bad-for-bots all held.

Recommended next (not yet built)

• Marker-weighted contest shares (Mina) — split a contested room's Glory in proportion to marker strength, and hand every contestant a Dread token (Vex) so piling in is a real gamble. The cleanest fix for finding #4, and it further differentiates Warden.
• The "Maw eats NEXT" indicator (Pip) — a big, unmissable physical marker on the next floor to collapse. A component fix for the onboarding cliff; folded into the rulebook.
• The deeper Cash-vs-Worthy fix (finding #1) — the flat extraction bonus helps but doesn't fully solve it. The real lever (per FINDINGS.md) is making denial score for you, or paying Worthy End on cumulative depth dived. The next prototype.

The bottom line for 6 humans

It scales — a clean 11-round game with a tight 3-way finish and real lead changes — and it delivers the fantasy: the gambler got their blaze of glory, the newbie got their scream, the roleplayer got their story, the spoiler got their win by playing the table. With the survival incentive, the Desperate Strike, and a big "Maw-eats-next" marker, this is a table-ready 6-player game. The one thing still worth a design pass before a print run is making the careful player feel as clever as the reckless one feels alive.