#187

Apr 17, 2022

Work

This was a short week, and so will be next week. I could stick with a 4 on / 4 off / 4 on / 2 off schedule, that would be nice. Shame we don’t have enough conveniently-placed bank holidays.

This week I finished some scoping work and wrote up an implementation plan for a fairly significant refactor and migration we’re planning, which will eliminate a source of load on our primary database. Of course, I didn’t identify and propose this myself, there’s been a rough plan for this since before I joined, but now we have details too.

It’ll be nice to get to actually doing the implementation and poking around at some fairly core bits of functionality.

Books

This week I read:

Gaming

My Traveller game has been running for six months now! That’s a long time! So I ran a mid-campaign check-in, and found that some aspects of the game were not as good as they could have been.

The problem boiled down to “it’s fun but there could be more action”, which… isn’t that surprising with the benefit of hindsight. I identified two problems with how I was running things:

So I’ve re-done my rumour table so that every rumour is now either setting the scene for a specific future mission I have in mind (so that, for example, when they are hired by the rich and famous Lord So-and-so to find his missing whatchamacallit, they’ve heard some things about him before), or which directly point to some NPC or location where excitement may be had. I’ve also retconned the end of our last session, where they picked up a job to do… exactly the sort of thing that is easy to prepare and not that exciting to play. So now they have a much more action packed mission coming up with assassins and mercenaries and a noble son who needs to get to his execution on time to prevent a war.

And going forward I’ll just have to keep an eye on the sort of content I’m preparing and be vigilant that I’m not prioritising something just because it’s easy.