They say in technology that if you’re not studying something new then you’re already behind. I’ll admit there were times in my career where I did feel like I was behind the technological curve. But never enough that I was willing to do anything about it. Now things are different, I worked while going to college and it feels like that once again.

This isn’t a nauseating “my employer is so amazing” brag but I say one thing about Amazon, you are always studying for something. It’s not like you have a choice, it’s built into the job. If you stand still, you are going to get run over. Not only by your peers, most of whom would dismantle the television set in front of you and rebuild it with lasers if there was nothing else to do, but also by your customers.

Getting close to two years with the company, a week hasn’t gone by where I haven’t had some reference material open studying for this or for that. It’s great for expanding your knowledge of technology but I’ll admit there are some study nights that take more willpower than others.

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Making my own player character for a Dungeons & Dragons game drives me a bit mad. I usually spend my time on the other side of the screen attempting to keep player created chaos from imploding the universe I have created. Accepting that no one is interested in listening to my novel, it still takes the first ten minutes of the first session for me to understand my plans have been thrown into disarray.

The player characters start rampaging across the landscape faster than my pre-written notes and improv skills can keep up. The strategy I have evolved for dealing with this is that of a world that continues moving around them as they pass through it. They decide to do something in one place, something else happens elsewhere. You might be the player hero but the world keeps turning, and everyone who isn't you has been busy.

As a player I find I suffer from Dungeon Master brain during character creation. It is not enough to just come up with a concept I find myself over engineering my characters during creation because I can see their potential downfall were I running the game. “What about this race, with this subclass, and these feats? How will the powers scale at mid to late game? What if I multiclass? Are there unique combinations of abilities that can trigger off one another to give me an advantage?”

However, I am not running the game and whatever pitfalls I foresee may not be the pitfalls I will encounter. Even the term pitfalls is incorrect, they are “gameplay opportunities.” Though that might not be the phrase I will use when I look down at my character sheet and realise that the spell I chose not to take earlier is the one that could have saved us from the total party kill that just happened.

It might be for the best if I create a replacement character now. See you in a week.

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