I was sitting at a hundred and ninety-something recipes in the trade program for a week or two until this week, when I hunkered down and added some things which I'd had to make up ad-hoc weights for last time. Now I am past 200 items inside the table's workings, which is the milestone I set myself for making this post.
So: here is the current trade table, for the market town nearest to the party. (I've also attached screenshots of the version at the bottom of this post.)
I'm finishing up adding a wooden ladder to my price table. Sounds simple, right? Have a look at my thought process below, to see what I think about when I add something to the table.
I'm modeling each rung as a carved cylinder of diameter 1.5 inch and length 1 foot.
This is just a plain old straight ladder, so the side pieces are two long planks. I've got them here as 17 feet long each, with width and depth both 2 inches. Distance between rungs is 1.5 feet, so that's ten rungs plus a foot of extra at the top and bottom.
As of last session I have finally gotten the hang of drawing a map on the computer during play. I've resolved to continue doing this as it's much cleaner and quicker than using pencil and paper, and makes it easy to move things around or copy them when needed.
I did some good D&D work today. I added the coat of plates to my economy program, which achieved a few intertwined goals all at once:
write economy recipes for every armor type
restyle the traditional range of armor scores (9-3) with terminology I find more satisfying (see below) the armors while retaining the conceptual and linguistic shorthand categories of "leather/mail/plate"
These are the divisions of armor types which I've arrived at:
quilted gambeson (which must be worn under other armors, too)
leather armor
coat of plates
haubergeon
hauberk
half-plate (breastplate plus assorted arm armor)
full-plate (as half-plate plus fauld and leg armor).
Having taken Alexis's DMing master-classes last fall, and having been back in the DM saddle for nigh on half a year now (after three years of absence), I've been working hard to shore up my weaknesses. Both the classes and my new influx of practical experience have shown that one of my weaknesses is hesitation. Just plain difficulty with making a decision quickly.
In order to combat this, and in order to get some more experience with performance (which is part of what a DM does), I've signed up for and begun taking comedy improv classes at a local theater. The course runs for two months and next week will mark the halfway point.