D&D: Spiders!

After my D&D group fought the harpsichord in the ballroom they headed upstairs in the mansion. But not before they found a secret door behind a drape in the Ballroom that transported them to the Library. Yes, it was all the way on the other wing of the mansion. Yes, I put that in because it's a Clue trope to have secret doors that lead straight across the map. 😂

Then, while trying to leave the library, the group spent a long time cracking up laughing about a trap on the way out. I mean, it was supposed to protect the lord's library from intruders coming in, but this group's trap-finding ability that excelled on finding the secret door failed them when it came to the trap in the narrow corridor. The floor dropped away, plunging two of the characters to the basement level below. Upon that they started coming up with increasingly Rube Goldberg-like ways to try to rescue those down below. Several times I pointed out, "You've been in the basement before. You know where you are. There are stairs less than 50' away from you." 🤣

Only then— well, after that plus investigating the Dining Room because, why not— did they head upstairs. And upstairs they found... spiders!



The main corridors upstairs was full of spider webs. Two of the party members got stuck in the strands. As they struggled to free themselves, the monstrous spider who spun the webs approached and webbed-up the space around the remaining PCs.

It was a tough battle because of the stickiness of the webs. The group kept struggling to get free. Fortunately for them, the spider didn't manage to bite them. I rolled lots of crap attack rolls. 🤷

What I should have done, now that I reflect on it, was have the second Large Monstrous Spider come around at them from behind while they were mostly stuck. That would've made the combat even more challenging. Instead, I had the second spider kind of hiding at the far end of the corridor. By the time the group entered its range they had their plan for "How to fight a Large Monstrous Spider that shoots sticky webs" locked in.

And then they reached the boss. Lord Eito Asano.

To be continued....

Execs Can't/Won't Connect the Dots on Remote Work

This evening I had dinner with one of my clients. We got the VP of the organization that owns our software, along with the director and manager underneath him who manage our software on a daily basis, to join us. It was an amiable meeting where we talked about a number of things. One of the topics of conversation was where everyone lives and the degree to which we work from home (WFH) or are mandated to return to office (RTO).

My company is remote-first, I've noted before. We actually gave up our last remaining office lease last year. Execs looked at the cost versus the number of person-days of occupancy we had, and decided the value wasn't worth the cost. Our customer exec quipped that his company looked at the same equation and made the opposite decision. Instead of reasoning, "Too few people come to the office, let's terminate the lease," they chose, "Too few people come to the office, let's force them to come back."

But here's the funny thing about the whole equation. The exec in question doesn't RTO. He lives 500 miles away. He works from home. Every person beneath him in his organization is pressured to spend more days in the office. It's tracked. It's a topic in performance reviews. But the VP works from home.

Oh, he's aware of the hypocrisy. Some employees are bold enough to confront him with it. Others go through anonymous feedback sites, where "You work remotely while forcing us to commute to the office, that's ridiculous" is the #1 most common item of feedback. He recognizes all this... and he treats it with the same detachment as he might note, "Huh, there's rain in the weather forecast today." He's hypocritically enforcing a policy he doesn't abide by himself... and he doesn't care.