v10, Season 0, and two bodies it got wrong

Engine v10 is live. Every card rolled on it stamps Season 0 instead of Legacy.

What v10 actually changed

The big one is that your spins know about each other now. The story knows how many times you have done this and who the wheel last made you — and from v10 it knows what time it is where you are, what time it is where he is, and how long you wore the last man. It ends looking forward to your next spin instead of ending on nothing.

The bond wheel got narrowed hard. A stranger is now about 90% of rolls. Your son, your father, your best friend — those still turn up, and they are worth more than they were. The moment you can roll your son twice, or roll your father while you are wearing your son, the relationship stops meaning anything. Rare is the only way that idea survives a chain.

The grade ladder was re-swept before launch, measured over 200,000 bodies:

• D — 49.5%
• C — 31.3%
• B — 12.1%
• A — 4.8%
• S — 2.0%
• SS — 0.29%

The old ladder was handing out SS about 40% more often than it was supposed to. Nobody counts how many D cards exist. Everybody notices how often an SS shows up.

And v10 is frozen. Every engine version keeps its own copy of the code that made it, so a card is described and graded by the engine that rolled it, permanently. When v11 changes something, nothing you own moves.

Season 0

Season 0 is open-ended. It runs until the featured slot goes up for sale and the bracket starts, and that is where Season 1 begins.

Spin today and the card you get is stamped Season 0. What that stamp really says is that you were early. It all works — the wheel, the writing, the images, the film, the card — but you are going to hit things: a body the generator got obviously wrong, a page that moves next week, an edge I have not sanded yet. That is the deal for being here now, and the two bodies below are exactly what I mean by it.

I'm not going to pretend this isn't a scarcity mechanic. It is. There will only ever be as many Season 0 cards as get rolled before the season ends, and the stamp is set the moment a card is made — nothing restamps later. It also happens to be true, which is the part I care about: these are the first bodies this thing has ever made, and they will never be made again under this engine.

The generator still gets plenty wrong

Two from this week. Both real cards, both live on the site.

Bryce Halloran is a priest. His card says he is not religious.

Danny Cabral is a soldier, and the wheel caught him getting dressed for work — in a messy bedroom, shirt buttoned wrong by one, a tie hanging loose around his collar. He should be in a barracks getting into his uniform.

They fail in two different ways, and the difference is the interesting part.

The priest is a wheel that never asked another wheel a question. Religion is rolled against his age and his background and nothing else. It has no idea what he does for a living, so a 25-year-old leans toward "no" — and to that wheel, a priest is just a 25-year-old. Small fix.

Danny is the opposite problem: the wheel already knew. It knows a soldier's morning starts outside a barracks. It knows what he wears, down to the dog tags. It uses both of those elsewhere. But "getting dressed for work" is one of the moments the generator treats as self-contained — the scene described is the whole picture, and everything else is deliberately shut out so an indoor shot does not come back with a city skyline pasted behind it. That rule is right almost everywhere. Here it threw away the two facts that mattered and handed a soldier an office worker's bedroom.

Both are being worked on. Neither can touch a card that already exists — v10 is frozen, so fixes land in v11 and forward. When Season 1 opens you will notice a lot of this cleaned up.

Things I'm rolling around

• A social dashboard where you can talk to other spinners who have found themselves in new bodies
• An auction house where you can sell, or a trading house where you can trade bodies you own
• Tournaments for the most liked body of the season, pitched between two bodies

None of that is promised. It is what I keep coming back to.

If you have any suggestions, please comment them below.