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:
Issue 3 of Knock!, an OSR zine
This one felt like it had a lot of random tables compared to long-form articles, but there were still some good ones in there. I particularly liked Joseph Manola’s article on domain-level play and Arnold K’s on the purpose of dynamism and how to do it.
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:
- I was favouring smaller missions which were easier for me to prepare or improvise, but which are easier precisely because they don’t have much action in them.
- My rumour table had a lot of entries which were more of a way for me to convey setting information and which didn’t really lead to a job or adventure: they could if the players really pursued them, but not directly.
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.