The betrayal bar, measured rather than guessed
An alliance dies when the model's P(better off without them) clears a bar: 0.42 in the pair rooms, 0.45 in the crew room. Both numbers came from asking the same question across a ladder of situations and putting the bar in the gap.
- BETRAY_THRESHOLD
- 0.42
- The Syndicate
- 0.45
- WRECKED_TRUST
- 0.25
- A bar that could never fire
- 0.72, on the first draft wording
The pair-room ladder
0.42 sits in the gap between 0.29 and 0.50. It fires on an alliance that is genuinely over and never on one that is merely uncomfortable.
| Situation | P(better off without them) |
|---|---|
| healthy alliance, early / late | 0.14 / 0.16 |
| ally is already safe, trust intact | 0.19 |
| cooling off | 0.29 |
| strained, late | 0.52 |
| wrecked, and the ally is already safe | 0.50 |
The draft that never fired
The first version asked whether the character would break the alliance this beat, and set the bar at 0.72. Breaking an alliance on any given beat really is rare, so that question tops out around 0.18. The bar was unreachable and no alliance ever died. The bug was in the question.
A crew is a different question
The Syndicate asks about a table instead of a person, and the first wording walked into the same wall from the other side. "Would you walk out now, with a cut off the people you leave" answered 0.20–0.25 in every situation, healthy or wrecked. What separates is asking whether this is the wrong table to be sitting at when the cage counts, with the arithmetic in the state:
| Situation | P(wrong table) |
|---|---|
| crew of 3, early, trust 0.6, biggest in the room | 0.30 |
| crew of 6, mid, thin share but still winning | 0.32 |
| crew of 3, beat before the last count, ahead | 0.33 |
| crew of 5, late, a rival crew has grown past yours | 0.52 |
| crew of 2, late, trust 0.12, wrecked | 0.58 |
The rule you take away
A different question is a different scale, so the bar belongs to the room through betrayBar(spec) and not to the concept. Strip the arithmetic block out of the state and that same question flattens to 0.39–0.43 whether the crew is winning or losing, which makes the separation a property of what the character can see rather than of the phrasing alone.
Read next
Measuring a threshold instead of guessing it
To set a threshold on a model's answer, ask the same question across a ladder of hand-built situations, look at where the answers separate, and put the bar in the gap. A number picked by intuition usually sits where the model never goes.
Blocs and crews: two shapes of alliance
In the pair rooms an alliance is two people who share heat and cover each other. In The Syndicate it is a crew of any size that splits a pot evenly, which turns every recruitment into a maths problem.
Skim, settle, cooldown: making betrayal cost something
Walking out of a crew takes about fourteen chips off the people you leave, cannot be done to anyone you sat down with in the last two beats, and cannot be done twice within five. Together those put betrayal on a specific beat.
Trust, heat and standing
Three quantities carry the politics. Trust is private and pairwise, heat is how much attention is on you, standing is what the room thinks of you, and only trust can buy an alliance.