I’ve closed out a lot of things lately! Today, I finally got enough people from our condo to head down to the bank so that we could open a bank account. The bank account we were using up until now had one name on it, and it was the name of an owner that had sold their unit several years ago.
We wrapped up a D&D adventure yesterday. To save time several sessions ago, I picked a dungeon module I found online to fill in a hex on the area map. However, I soon found that it wasn’t a great fit for the players, and I found it awkward to alter.
It was a dungeon built around magical Escher/Pac-Man style architecture which looked really cool on paper. The thing is, “the map” isn’t the primary focus of most players, so a lot of what’s interesting about it doesn’t really land with them. Many of the rooms were left empty, but if you fill too many of them in, then I feel you make it ever harder for the players to develop a feel for the map because they stop thinking about it for a long time every time they come to a new room. The quirky architecture also makes it hard to modify physically because the internal consistency is so delicate.
There’s also a path-based puzzle that could be fun if you were moving around pieces on a board with no fog of way, but that’s not how D&D works, at least how we play it. The puzzle involves unlocking the climactic location by going to 23 locations in a certain order. That’s just way too much.
I added in a bunch of explicit drops about how the dungeon works. I also added some “Deus Ex Get Outta Here” forcing events, but those were actually unneeded. The PCs got up to the climactic location and made their choices about the fate of the local residents, then worked out some fun “getting down from a high place” logistics with semi-tragic/hilarious results.
I think people were having fun with it, but nonetheless, I’m glad we can move on to another location.
And finally, I got my web audio channel vocoder which I was working on for the better part of two weeks at the Recurse Center (but physically at home) working. It does not sound great (and neither did the original channel vocoder), but it does sound like a musical signal modulated by a voice. Sometimes, through no fault of your own, you try to make something only to find out that it’s not possible to make that in a reasonable amount of time. Theoretically, if you’ve put in the work, you should feel good whether it works out or not. Practically, you don’t usually feel good if it doesn’t. So, I’m relieved that it did.