[playtest][CRITICAL] DM turn returns empty player-facing narration on engine-heavy beats

[100yenadmin]

Found by the first honest baseline (build_sha 4267247, v1.0.3). On the faithful play backend (scripts/play_party.sh baldurs-gate <run> 8788), 2 of 3 player beats produced an EMPTY player-facing DM message in the chat panel (a [say] beat and a [check] beat).

Symptom

DM turn result.is_error:false but reply text length = 0. The engine work happened (party moved to Heapside, NPC created, Insight check resolved: roll 13 vs DC16 FAIL with consequence) and the DM ended on a 3rd-person status line. Prose existed only as terse recentEvents "Beat N —" GM-log entries, not player-facing chat. A newbie sees "I acted and the game replied with nothing." Beats 0–1 wrote full ~4400-char prose, so it's intermittent.

Root cause (suspected — needs confirmation in the resolver)

scripts/play.sh (and scripts/play_party.sh) DM resolver loop: the "narration = final reply text" contract. When the DM's final message is a status line rather than 2nd-person prose, the chat gets an empty/near-empty entry.

Acceptance

Every resolved player beat writes non-empty 2nd-person narration to /chat. Either the DM must always end on player-facing prose, or the resolver must fall back to the latest engine narration event when the reply text is empty. Verified on the NEXT build: a [say] and a [check] beat both produce non-empty chat.

[100yenadmin]

Re-verify on bb1870d (nb3): #357 is NOT fully fixed — sharpening the true root cause. With #385's indicator the newbie now WAITS through the ~55s cold-open, but the DM's first response is a duplicate of the internal Chronicle SETUP BRIEF in 3rd-person game-system notation + raw world-backstory lore — NOT a 2nd-person opening SCENE the player can read and respond to. #360's fallback wrote to /chat but recovered the WRONG content (the setup-log event), not player-facing prose. Player verbatim: 'there is nothing for a player to read and respond to; I never saw an opening scene prompt telling me where I am.' critical bug, satisfaction 3/10, pass:false. ALSO a GM-advisory leak reached the player ('npc introduced silent NPC Vanos…'). Real fix: the cold-open must END with an evocative 2nd-person opening scene (player POV — where you are, who's there, a clear open moment + choice) delivered to /chat as the DM's reply; the resolver/#360-fallback must deliver THAT prose, never the setup brief; and sanitizeNarration must strip the GM-advisory NPC-introduced pattern. Current top release-blocker. Evidence: nb3 chat.jsonl.