#139

May 16, 2021

Work

I was on support from Wednesday, which I forgot about until Tuesday, so I didn’t get as much team-related work done as I’d planned. But I at least managed to finish off some things.

So far on support I’ve spent all my time trying to debug an issue in a legacy thing we have which is written in a language nobody really knows (Scala), is very old and crufty (it’s been around since 2012), has development outsourced to another company (who only make a couple of changes a year), and we generally don’t have much knowledge of what it does or how it works. All the people who did know these things left years ago.

So it’s been a bit of a challenge, but I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Books

This week I read:

Gaming

I’ve been reading The Monsters Know What They’re Doing this week, which has some really great analyses of monster combat tactics.

Whilst all the worked examples are for D&D and, so, not really portable to other systems—the blog takes the position that any creatures which have evolved in a world run by D&D mechanics have an instinctive understanding of those mechanics, and so pick their tactics accordingly—I think the Why These Tactics? page is pretty portable: the exact numbers and attributes will need tweaking, but the ideas are sound.

I’m going to have a go at analysing some of the Call of Cthulhu monsters I’m likely to throw at my players in the next few sessions, and see if I can come up with some more interesting combats than the usual “a horrifying beast appears before you, and tries to rip you in half”.