Talk:The mechanics of progress/@comment-25928487-20151007083127/@comment-1743025-20160413024503

And I just got 104 at 200+14, but it turns out that's actually irrelevant. My first assumption was that the formula given above was, and always had been, exactly wrong... but I realized after looking at the comments on Would you care to give a guest lecture? (there are quite a lot of 'em, having nearly this same discussion) that it's actually just ambiguous and easy to misread.

In my reading (and I suspect that of a couple others here) the line "You've gained 1–(modified Watchful level) x Cryptic Clue" doesn't look like the range "from 1 to (Watchful) Cryptic Clues", so much as it does the equation "1 minus (Watchful) Cryptic Clues" or "1 minus (Watchful) times [missing value] Cryptic Clues" - either of which would tend to result in losing, rather than gaining, Clues.

Does anyone have any thoughts on a clearer syntax? I'm not sure what's done elsewhere on the wiki (or if there's any clever way to do it with the template), but I don't recall being quite so puzzled over any other similar ranges in the past.