Hello, I’m Sam
Formerly a senior software engineer at Google, now asking a lot of dumb questions in pursuit of B2B software startup ideas in a variety of industries. When I’m not working, you can find me unapologetically participating in stereotypical tech bro activities:
- side projects 👨🏽💻
- rock climbing 🧗🏽♂️
- road racing 🏎️
- playing TTRPGs ⚔️
I work on stuff
Some people get seasonal allergies, others get seasonal hobbies. I get both. Here are my recent rabbit holes.
Chronicle — XP Tracker
https://chronicle.balana.dev was born from my newfound interest for tabletop roleplaying games. As with many of my newfound hobbies, I get intensely deep and find myself dug in a niche. I started with D&D then slide a slippery slope into the OSR.
After GM’ing nearly 50 sessions, I found my players to be a bunch of greedy murder hobos. They rationalized this by noticing XP is only rewarded for how much gold they bring back and it’s easier to do that by slaying their foes. I’ve been unintentionally incentivizing this behavior! This is where I came across Jon Britton’s Feats of Explorations.
Jon’s zine proposed rules for awarding XP for different modes of play, depending on where the GM wants to take the game. Mind blowing! The only issue is that it requires additional math and post-session work on the GM.
Yeah, no. We can do better. And that is what Chronicle became: a glorified XP tracker for GMs that are too lazy to do math (me).