Nah, this doesn't feel like work. It's fun, and every time I discover a better way of doing something I feel like I'm learning. This time I joined the item and character table to the initial query, decimating the number of queries needed (while complicating the query results. Is there any way to only grab some things while doing a join? This from this table, these from that table?) and cutting back a lot of potential lines of code. This will also make it easier to apply the results to multiple users, which seems to me to be a good thing for a game that is multiplayer.