#239

Apr 16, 2023

Books

This week I read:

Roleplaying Games

Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier

Alas, the three new players couldn’t make it, and two of the regular players also had to skip on short notice. Thankfully, one current player and one ex-player were able to attend, so we still got to play (with them each running two PCs). It was fun, but as a means to induct new members into the group, it was an abject failure. Oh well, maybe next time will be better.

Heaping more misfortune onto the pile, one of the regular players who had to miss this session said that he’d have to miss every session until at least the end of next month, and may not be able to play even after that. So I’m assuming the worst case for now, that he’s out of the group.

Which means there are only two regular players left in the group. That is not enough for most games. It’s a bit of a crisis situation, the group desperately needs some new committed players or it may just fizzle out in a matter of weeks.

But how do you find new players for an RPG group?

Miscellaneous

I made some changes to bookdb this week, for the first time in a while. Since I’m getting more print-on-demand books these days1, and those tend to have EANs rather than ISBNs, I added EAN validation. I also changed it so book codes have to be one of three formats:

Whereas before it was totally freeform, but if the code was a 10- or 13-digit number it’d be validated as an ISBN.

Then, I was so disgusted by the state of the code that I refactored it a bunch (only breaking it twice in the process), and even added a few tests for the ISBN and EAN validation, using Hypothesis, which is one of those tools I’ve always wanted to use but never had reason to. In fact, this is possibly the first time I’ve ever written Python tests.


  1. Though, these are RPG books from DriveThruRPG. If the group falls apart I guess that’ll slow down my RPG spending…↩︎