Work
I spent most of this week playing around Postgres’s table partitioning, with the pg_party gem. It was easier to get working than I thought, the actual code change to switch over one of our big data processing pipeline to using a range-partitioned table, creating partitions as it needs them, wasn’t very complex.
Of course, the devil is in the details: doing this without any downtime, in a way we can roll back, and with the best partition size to optimise performance. But I think I have solutions for all those too.
Unfortunately, postgres 14 has a data corruption bug with concurrent index creation, so we have to wait for that to be fixed (and our production database upgraded) before we can actually start to build some of this partitioning stuff for real.
Books
No books this week, I was too busy inhaling lore and rules for my new RPG campaign.
Roleplaying Games
Forbidden Lands
On Sunday I finished running Winter’s Daughter in Forbidden Lands. The PCs explored the tomb of Sir Chyde, having just reached it at the end of last session, and re-united him with his fairy lover, Princess Snowfall-at-Dusk. As their reward, they made off with a lot of loot, and a good wish: to always have food, water, and shelter when needed.
On the whole, I’m not a huge fan of the Forbidden Lands system. It worked well enough when we were in the dungeon or in combat, but I found the hexcrawling rules a bit flawed and the encumbrance system far too punishing. Given that the hexcrawling rules are the main reason to use Forbidden Lands over another system, I don’t think I’ll be returning to it.
Furthermore, I’ve had an epiphany that D&D-style XP is likely the best way to encourage the sort of fantasy I want in my games, so to that end I’ve started a full Dolmenwood campaign in:
Old School Essentials
Yes, OSE, which Dolmenwood and Winter’s Daughter are actually written for. I’ve started a campaign in my Saturday group themed around the PCs being cartographers from the Royal Geographical Institute of some larger empire which Dolmenwood belongs to, sent to produce the first comprehensive and fully accurate map of the region.
I think this is a great premise. There’s so much weird, fun, and interesting stuff in every corner of Dolmenwood, and this premise gives the players a strong roleplaying reason to comprehensively search it, and so encounter all of these things. I’ve also adopted a house rule giving XP for exploration:
- Exploring a hex gives 100xp (each) for the first hex, 200xp for the second, 300xp for the third (etc), resetting when you return to a town.
- Overcoming a hidden thing (intentionally left vague) gives 50xp, on top of any other XP gained doing that.
This rule gives a mechanical incentive to have thorough mapping expeditions, which introduces a fun tension: if they don’t go to a town, they can’t resupply, which creates risk. I’m looking forward to seeing what emergent play comes of this.
This is my first time running OSE, so there’s a learning curve, but the system is generally pretty simple and has a “do what feels right” philosophy. For example, in the first session one player wanted to cautiously approach what they thought to be a distraction (a crying child in the middle of the road), and asked “how do I do that?”, I said “just say that you’re doing it, and you’re doing it.” In the moment, I gave them a +2 to their surprise roll, and so they ended up noticing the ambush that had been set. In a more mechanically rigid system, that sort of on-the-fly ruling would be discouraged.