Low Heat

Played a little more Yeld last night; this time with many traps.  We found out (1) some of the rules for traps didn't make sense if applied literally, like the idea that every character needed to roll against the trap, particularly when a solution was found by thinking up a way around the trap, and (2) traps are hard to work with and still keep the game moving.  Really, a trap should never actually stop the party for good, because that's just not that fun.  It should hurt them, sure, but even that has to be balanced against the fact that it's really easy to one-shot characters.  We also couldn't figure out if we could help each other over a trap, or start a chain against a trap.  After all, if you have strength of 1, any reasonable trap requiring strength to pass is going to be almost impossible to cross for you.  How does that work out?  This was particularly relevant to my poor blackmage, with strength of 1 and tough of 1; I can't jump/dodge/roll, and if I fail, that means I'm dead or left behind.  So!  Overall a fun session, but very different from our first; in the first game we were running using the usual gaming stereotypes, which to me is a lot of fun, but this time we were trying to be more subtle and literary about it, which is a bit harder.  Anyway.
Changing subjects: I've been working in my off time on abdiel (test automation center) for about six months... I'm presenting it to my group tomorrow.  It's been a lot of work, but I've been eating it for so long I think it should pay off (ie, it's not utter garbage).  Even so, when you develop something that only you use for a long time, you sort of learn to work around the known bugs without ever thinking about it.  It's about 4300 lines now, spread out in a handful of modules, none longer than a thousand lines.  What's odd is thinking about how programming applies to creative writing.  But anyway.