Wednesday, the 4th day of the Red Moon, 937

What a day! I kept really busy. I did some good (I think) refactoring of some libraries for sending transactional mail. I made a nice little improvement to our (on-CPAN) mail generator to make our Markdown-based messages look better in both plaintext and HTML. I deleted 36 obsolete fields from an annoyingly large table. I felt pretty productive.

Old-school D&D rewards experience for treasure on a 1 GP = 1 XP basis. I stopped finding this horrible ages ago, and I think it makes plenty of sense, and don’t care whether any given DM wants to use or not use that rule.

Am I a role-playing blogger? Yes, obviously in the strictest interpretation of the words, but do I get anybody following my blog’s feed mostly to see my write about RPGs? I don’t think so. I think anybody doing so is probably chased off by the technical posts… but there’s little to no chance I’m going to try maintaining two blogs. Blech.

Absolutely ages ago, I decided I wanted to start running a second D&D game. I’ve been running a 4E game since January 2009, but we only play about once a month, and while I enjoy the game and the players, I find the infrequency of our play to be pretty unsatisfying.

A week or two ago, I read Grognardia’s quick write-up of Rotworld. I was interested! Rotworld is an old-school early-80’s-like RPG of the zombie apocalypse. I picked up a copy and put it on my tablet. Pretty soon I decided it would be worth getting a printed copy. (I like having RPG PDFs printed and spiral bound for easy reading.)

At YAPC::Asia, I gave my talk Email Hates the Living!, and at the end there was just one question: “When will you make Email::Sender use Any::Moose?”

A couple months ago, I produced a set of fourteen tables for generating random encounters in the Great Plain of my “Ethos” 4E D&D campaign. I’ve used them for the past few games, and I think they were a huge success from my perspective. I’m taking the approach that the tables tell me what the party encounters, and I figure out why before the encounter begins.

Only what… seven years after its first release, I’ve finally added tolerable support for “funny character” to Rubric. It wasn’t all that hard – it had the usual problems. I knew what I should’ve done to begin with, but then I had to figure out all the stupid things I had done before that, and had to undo them.

I spent the last week in Tokyo for YAPC::Asia. It was great!