#146

Jul 4, 2021

Work

This week… what did I do? I think next week I’ll go back to making a list of things I want to get done, as I felt like I achieved more when I was doing that, and it was easier to write this section of the weeknote.

I didn’t stop for any particular reason, I just… stopped.

Anyway, this week I continued working on email things. We’ve now got a “log in to manage your notifications with your GOV.UK account” thing running in staging, which needs a bit of tweaking to meet current designs. But hopefully we can launch that soon.

I also had a few meetings with the Digital Identity programme, who are developing the cross-gov auth thing, to talk about how we’ll migrate users out of our prototype auth thing and how account management will work.

Books

This week I’ve been reading Olympos by Dan Simmons, but I’ve not finished it yet.

Gaming

Godbound

This week I finished off the Godbound one-shot I started two weeks ago.

Godbound is a system I’ve wanted to try out for a long time but, having now done so, I don’t think I’ll be going back to it. I found it really hard to come up with challenges when the PCs have powers like:

Those reduced to zero hit dice or hit points within 200 feet of you automatically stabilize or die as you wish. If you desire it, willing living creatures at zero HD or hit points around you may continue to act for as many rounds as you have levels before they unavoidably fall dead.

Or,

You have mastered all spheres of mortal academic knowledge. You always know the answer to any question involving such learning, if any mortal sage knows it and automatically succeed on attribute checks to accomplish intellectual tasks if they’re within mortal capabilities.

A game where the PCs are demigods sounds fun. But how do I challenge those demigods without pitting them against magical foes who can just negate their powers? And if I do that, what’s the point of even using this system in the first place?

Traveller

I’ve continued thinking about an upcoming Traveller campaign, and got the players on board with my campaign pitch. There are a few options which we’ll have to discuss in session 0, whenever that happens, but basically it boils down to:

  • A human-focussed campaign (at most one alien PC)
  • Set in the Trojan Reach sector, which is a bit of a political powder-keg
  • A mostly episodic style, but where the PCs have long-term goals
  • And they’re likely a gang of space pirates

I think that’s a recipe for fun.

RPG Blog

This week I published an article about why you should run a mid-campaign check-in, inspired by the one I did for my Call of Cthulhu campaign a few months back.

Miscellaneous

I’ve had another batch of hardware-related bad luck this week.

I got some new CDs, and discovered that my USB CD drive was dead: I could put a disc in and it would give it one or two feeble spins, but it wouldn’t consistently spin and the computer wouldn’t recognise it.

And then today, my mouse started playing up! It seems to be a problem with the mouse itself, as in both Linux and Windows it’ll sometimes become unresponsive. In Windows, I can fix it by locking and unlocking the screen, in Linux by unplugging it and plugging it back in again.

So I’ve now got a replacement CD drive, but the mouse issue began after ordering that, so I won’t get a new mouse until next week.