Spotted on an older apartment building. Damn, my chance to live my dream as a peddler to this one building, dashed! (Honestly, I wonder when that sign was originally put up, given the word choice and the text style. It’s neat!)

I missed last week, it’s true! Terrible.

Job Search

I have an interview tomorrow with a company that looks surprisingly nice. They do personal finance/bank-related things, but at least their vibe is pretty good and not stodgy, which I appreciate. It’d be a 1099 job for the first year, which is fine by me. Back when I worked in a datacenter, I was 1099 for all of it, so I’m used to it. I don’t remember exactly how to handle estimated taxes when you start making money in the middle of the year and weren’t expecting to, but I’m sure I’m not the first person to have that problem. Besides, that’s cart before the horse stuff. Right now I’m just focusing on trying to do well in the interview tomorrow.

If this job washes out, I’m going to start applying to restaurant and construction jobs alongside continuing to apply to library and IT positions. Plus some gig work, if I can ever get that arranged. (I’m currently unsticking my registration with Taskrabbit, ideally if that’d worked properly I would have been doing gigs through there before now.) It’s been almost a year since I got laid off and I’m sick of needing to lean on my support network as hard as I’ve had to. I’m extremely grateful to them! I just want to be doing something and feel like less of a passive drain. Trying to not take advantage of kind/patient people, etc.

I got coffee with a friend of mine and he was saying I might want to look into the trades, since I’m often not super happy in corporate environments. His girlfriend’s becoming a carpenter, and it turns out the local union has a great onboarding process if you go through a program at the community college in my neighborhood. I don’t know if it’s right for me, but I do really enjoy building and fixing things and for all its faults I loved a lot about the construction laborer job I had for a hot minute. It just feels weird to consider as a full-on career, but I can’t quite articulate why. Probably because it’s so orthogonal to everything I’ve academically trained to do and was taught to expect as a career. But hey, being even an apprentice union carpenter pays like twice as much as a lot of the low-level IT jobs around here. So yeah, definitely worth thinking on more.

Tabletop Games

I’ve been in something of a TTRPG drought as far as actually playing. My Sunday night game discontinued (with the group now doing a different activity), and the GM of the Star Wars RPG (West End Games’s version) game I was playing in is out of the country at the moment. Which means all I really have on the docket for playing is GMing Primary Attribute and being a player in a side project.

GMing is providing an interesting challenge right now. The current episodes of Primary Attribute feature a fight against a big monster, and I’m noodling about how to retool it to make the fight more dynamic and fun. Right now we’re running into a variation of the “bag of HP” problem, where the characters plus an ally are slugging it back and forth with the big monster, but due to a huge pile of bad and low-damage roles and the action economy, it’s slowed to a crawl of “I try to hit it” and “cool you hit it, roll damage.” Which doesn’t make for good radio and even if I weren’t worried about that, it’s not particularly engaging for the players (or me!).

I think the action economy is the big thing here. The monster’s attack is damaging, but there’s only one of it per round. Castles & Crusades runs things so that monsters always get all of their attacks, rather than needing a special multiattack feature like you might see in Pathfinder. So instead of a dragon choosing between its wings, its bite, or its tail on a given round, it just does all of them every round. This can obviously get deadly quickly. I think in this case it’s a good idea, as the monster is supposed to be fast and right now it’s not really putting out the sort of damage it should, thematically.

The other issue involves grappling, which was supposed to be one of the creature’s big scary things. It seemed like it was too easy to break out of, but looking at the rulebook right now it turns out I was running the rules for escaping the grapple incorrectly. That’s likely a semi-fix already. Giving it an additional attack would also let it grapple someone and still do normal damage, which I think would be good for keeping things moving a little faster.

An idea that occurred to me was having the creature go multiple times in a round. It’s supposed to be fast and flexible, and this would be a quick and dirty solve to the action economy being incredibly lopsided in favor of the players. The downside is, much like giving it additional attacks, it increases the potential damage it outputs every round. This could go from a “here’s multiple problems you have to deal with” ideal to a “you’ve stuck your face in a woodchipper” situation pretty quick.

It’s worth noodling on more. I’d like to do more with the combat environment, but with us strictly using theater of the mind due to the podcast medium it’s hard to make that work. I can also change up some tactics, I just need to find good ways to mechanically support it and make the new situation(s) have interesting choices available for the players. Castles & Crusades is a streamlined system, very much on purpose. While this has the disadvantage of not giving me a ready-made solution for some of these problems, it does provide a strong scaffolding for implementing any new mechanics and keeping things approachable for the players by underpinning the new mechanics with the same kind of rolls as the base system.

A lot of this turned into me rambling/thinking out loud, but hopefully it was at least a little interesting. I’d like to do a write-up of the creature’s revision after this current conflict with it is finished and I’m able to see how any changes I make affected gameplay. Stay tuned?

Wrap It Up, Kid

There’s some other miscellany. Tried to fix one of my bikes, realized I probably need a replacement part. Found a cheap online bike shop so bought that part plus the bundle of stuff I’ll need to get the vintage 80’s road bike I have up and running. I got it for $5 at a garage sale last year, and the very nice owners were desperate to find someone to take it because it is a lovely bike that just needs some TLC to actually run again. Hopefully I figured things out properly, it looks like it’ll be a blast to ride.

Writing continues apace, though not as fast as I’d like. Faster than it was, though.

I have a fun idea for doing game streaming I’m going to experiment with this week. It’s based around a gimmick, albeit a useful one, so I want to dry run it by myself before I declare with confidence that I’m all in and doing it now.

Other stuff? Other stuff. *nods*

So that’s it for this week! I hope y’all had a good last two weeks, and that your upcoming week is rad as hell.