(Disclaimer: This post is about a game. It is all fiction.)

I originally wrote this post a few days after Symbols 3, but I never got around to fully finishing it. So, don't mind the wrong date references ;-)

Last weekend was the third Symbols event, which I attended with as nightkin character Rallin. Before I delve into everything what happened exactly last night, which I expect to be quite lengthy, I will first touch the highlights and main story thread. Further on, I will give a longer somewhat chronologicalish description of this event.

Getting around to stuff

Symbols 3 can be summarized for me as "I didn't get around to it". I have been talking (at length with Ailiva and Taima), tracking (some big creature and a murderer), woodworking (gardening tools for Hallistrad), mourning (for our Sicheii and his apprentice), partying (for the lives they lived), comforting (my little sister Pakuna), getting my ass kicked (multiple times) and dipping (being out of character when you're supposed to be in character).

Dips on Saturday

Especially the last one is rather uncommon. There are always a few moments during the weekend where you just sit around being out of character for lack of things to do or lack of play offers, but Saturday night, just about everybody sat around dipping. I missed the first part of this due to sitting around Varaashi's sick bed. I spent there with a few other people being IC (but barely) and playing the domino game Ailiva brought.

After that, I tried pulling the Nocona (the group I play with) back IC, but that didn't really work out. The Nocona group is one that tends to generate a lot of play by itself, so does not tend to dip a lot. Still, it happened anyway. Later on, we were gonna do our funeral rites for Rallin's grandfather and his apprentice, so this would get people back in character. Just around the same time, a few friendly mist creatures came by, drawing the attention of just about everybody ("Why are all these people in our camp? We just wanna give the last honor to our dead! Oh wait, those mist creatures are here..."). I'm not sure if this lasted, since I haven't left our camp thereafter.

Anyway, I have been thinking about what has caused this massive dip. Main cause seems to be the weather Saturday afternoon. There was a little rain, but mainly very hard winds. A few of the tents that served as healers guild, library, etc. got broken, so nearly all tents were brought down as a preemptive measure. On one hand this thwarted a number of plots prepared by the SLs, that depended on having those actual IC locations. On the other hand (together with the cold), this caused people to sit together in large groups at the campfire or the inn, since there wasn't really anywhere else to go. In general, I think, large groups of players have a large tendency to fall out of character quickly and are pretty hard to get back into character once they do. In the end, I think all this worked out pretty nicely, since people got back into character eventually and did seem to enjoy their time dipping as well.

Stuff to do

About the "not getting around to it" part, I had a lot of stuff to do. I did some of those things, but a lot of them got postponed because I didn't get around to them or couldn't put myself to do them. One thing in particular I regret, is not having a decent conversation with Seth, the changeling death cultist that walked into Runewall. I exchanged a few words with him walking into the tavern, but didn't get around to asking him a thing or two. I think he died in the battle on Saturday, though he is rumored to have died before and returned from that (typical for a death cultist, I would say).

Another thing I regret is not asking Ailiva to teach me some healing. I wasn't really sure what or how I wanted that really at first and there wasn't any good opportunity later on. I'll have to ask her at the forum now, or perhaps on the next event. We'll see. Rallin did manage to learn a few unofficial lessons about nerves and diseases, from Ailiva reading from the new books she received and her teaching Hallistrad. If anything, this just made Rallin more interested.

Another thing Rallin should get around to, is how to properly wield his dagger, maybe something bigger than that. Thinking back about all the Symbols events, I think Rallin only managed to inflict a handful of wounds on his enemies, while receiving a multitude of that back from them. Perhaps he should ask Vaj to help him with this.

Anyone, let's get over to what actually happened.

See more ...

This morning's CLP exam went pretty well. Despite the high voodoo-level of promela, the language used, the exam was easier than I expected. Now let's hope I did well enough.

As I was hanging around at Bas' place to chill and discuss the exam, we noticed something at Inter-Actief breaking (both nerding away on our respective laptops). Within 10 minutes we were on the site to see why our (Windows) domain controller had stopped responding. We discovered that it had decided that the windows update it had just installed required a reboot and just went ahead with rebooting. Rebooting that machine is a bad idea anyhow, since it takes more than 15 minutes, during which half of Inter-Actief becomes useless, ICT-wise. Better yet, it had managed to hang itself somewhere between shutdown and boot, so a reset was required. Go Windows!

Anyway, I'm off to Harderwijk now, sailing course tonight, and opening of my fathers new sailing school this weekend. Since I'm planning on becoming a sailing instructor there, that means plenty of sailing this weekend :-D

This post is about a bunch of stuff that happened today (or has some relation to that stuff :-). I am currently waiting for the bus to take me back home, so perfect opportunity to write some things down. If only the sun would come back now... I will not write about last weekend's Symbols event, I am working on another, huge, post about that.

CDP exam

So, this morning was my CDP exam. I had not prepared too well, following only about half the classes (they weren't too good anyway...) and not making all of the homework exercises (meaning that even if I would make the exam flawless, I would only get about 8 out of 10 marks).

Still, I was planning on passing this course, so I teamed up with Bas, who also had to do the same exam (but didn't really follow the course at all this year). This turned out to be a good idea, since it prevented both of us from getting distracted too much. We made our base of operations at the Inter-Actief room, so we would have a printer to print some reference material (the exam was open book). This reminds me, I have to drop by there sometime this week to pay for the pages I printed....

Anyway, I found the exam this morning to be easier than expected, I actually had an answer to all of the questions. So, it seems I might have actually passed after all.

Stupid PIN codes

Anyway, after this exam I was planning to drop by the postal office to pick up my new bank card. Exactly two weeks ago, I was trying to pay for Laurens' birthday gift in a store and I realized I didn't remember my pin code anymore. Everybody forgets stuff sometimes (especially me), but knowing your own pin code is so natural, that it feels as if your mind is seriously broken if you don't remember it. Complete weirdness. Anyway, since I had a few vague ideas about my pin code before suddenly remembering the telephone number of Inter-Actief and mistaking it for my pin code, I got my card blocked.

Next day, I made a trip to the bank, who promised to give me a new pin code, since I still didn't remember it. Four days after forgetting it, I suddenly remembered my code again, but it was no use anymore. Anyway, I got my new pin code, but also some other letter from the bank for which I needed to identify myself to get it. Probably a new bankcard, though the guy said I would only get a new pin code. Ah well. Since I was away last weekend, I had to pick it up at the postal office.

Postal WLAN

So taking the bus to the postal office (expecting to have to drop by the bank too to activate the card), I realized there that it would not open for another half hour. But, there was sun and I had my laptop, so I would write some about Symbols for my blog.

I ended up yanking my laptop's on-board WLAN card into scan mode, to see if I could get an Internet connection and hang around on IRC. I found multiple unencrypted WLAN networks, of which one seemed particularly interesting. It's network ID was "default", which offered a good chance to a non-secured open Internet connection set up by someone not taking the effort of reading any manual or getting some clue.

It turned out that associating with the access point wasn't that hard. Just tell the SSID to wpa_supplicant and be on your way. On the other hand, getting a DHCP lease proved impossible. I suspected the network to be statically configured, so I fired up my favorite packet sniffer Ethereal and made it listen. I was hoping to get a few TCP packets that would allow me to guess the network range and gateway address. No such luck. I did receive a few DHCP DISCOVER packets, which turned out to be not all mine.

At first suspecting that someone else was also trying to get a DHCP lease, or probably just the PC that was supposed to be connected by this access point, I decided that the DHCP server was probably off or broken. That's when I noticed that the DHCP discover packets were not aimed at the access point, but actually originated from this access point. I didn't know why, but this AP was trying to get an IP address.

As kind as always I decided to boot my own DHCP server (it's always nice to run a real OS on your laptop) and give the poor AP an IP address. This actually turned out to work, so I was hoping to get some Internet connectivity soon. Pointing my web browser at the IP address I just gave to the AP gave me a nice login screen, for which my second try (admin/admin) worked. So, I could now easily reconfigure just about anything on this AP (which I didn't, because that would have been rude). It turned out this was just a access point and no router, that had it's LAN interface set to DHCP client. Probably the DHCP server on the LAN was unavailable (or the AP wasn't configured at all, perhaps) and for some reason it didn't just direct it's DHCP requests to the LAN interface, but also to the WLAN interface.

Anyway, since the LAN side of the AP was only configured by my DHCP server, I had no idea on how to actually reach the Internet from here. Also, the postal office opened, so I had played enough and got back to the useful stuff. I finally picked up my bank card (which was activated immediately, so no need to drop by the bank).

I was planning on dropping by Simon too at Saxion, to talk about last weekend's Symbols and the System we are going to develop. But since he was at home sick, I did some shopping and went home. Now (it's after dinner as I finish this post) it's time to do some learning for Thursday's CLP exam, again together with Bas. We already decided we would allow ourselves to do some coding on Claud-IA, the to-be-built user management system for Inter-Actief. But, first some CLP...

Ever since I have been involved with LARP organization, I have been thinking about some way to properly administer subscriptions, events, characters, etc. This administration is mostly done in excel or text files, with the user visible part (who has subscribed and has their payment been received already?) in a forum post that was continuously edited and updated. Character administration is a similar story, with paper administration of character sheets not being uncommon.

As you can imagine, this is not quite optimal. Apart from being generally a lot of work, this approach is error prone. Also, all administration has to be done by the organization themselves and requests from players ("I want to upgrade this skill or that" or "Here is my updated background") have to be manually entered into whatever system is used.

Existing systems

Cauldron, the club I have been working for before was the first club (I know of) that used an on-line system to manage player characters (dubbed "chargen", for Character Generator). Players of various events could register their character, with all their skills, attributes and background. On the other side the organization can approve characters and changes to characters, assign experience points to them, etc.

While being a big improvement over previous manual administration and greatly reducing the workload, there were still a couple of drawbacks. Most significantly, the system did not track who was registered for what event. To prevent people from creating characters for random events, subscribed players would get an event password. In addition to the login/password needed for the chargen, this makes a whole pile of extra login info.

I once planned on reducing these problems by (proposing to) integrating an event subscription system into chargen, so it knows who is subscribed to what events. This has the added advantage of simplifying the event subscription administration and being able to generate a list of subscriptions and possibly payments dynamically. Shortly after formulating this intent, I stopped working for Cauldron, so this never saw any work from me.

Another "drawback" of the chargen was the focus on rules and skills, the actual character and its background were just an extra. This makes sense for big events with lots of characters, but seems wrong to me now...

I've also heard that the folks at Enneade were busy on a system for doing administration of subscriptions and perhaps also characters. I haven't seen or heard this myself yet, but I will investigate this a little further. Perhaps something can be gained from cooperating with them.

A new system?

As you will probably have concluded from my last few remarks, I have been thinking about also creating a system for performing miscellaneous LARP administration tasks. Right now I'm involved with Evolution Events, a relatively new LARP organization mainly founded by a number of former Cauldron crew members. We have recently had our first event. For this organization there is need for such a system.

One can wonder why I would want to create a new system instead of using one of the existing ones. Main reason here is that I want to create something which is generally usable. I personally like software that is general and reusable by nature and encourage open source software. Besides that, EE will be running different types of events with different rule systems. The rules (and therefore characters) for Lextalionis will be completely different from those of our upcoming Exodus event.

Though the Cauldron chargen does support multiple rule sets (from different Cauldron events), these are all similar and follow the same basic rules. Besides that, I do not expect Cauldron to just give their work away to other clubs, probably not even for future cooperation.

For the Enneade system, I haven't seen it yet, but since Enneade currently runs only one event with one rule set, I expect that modifying their system to support multiple rule sets is probably more work than starting from the ground up.

Having said that, I will probably look at both systems carefully to see which features and things worked, and which did not.

Building it

I have recently had a few conversations with Simon, organizer of the Symbols event. He was planning to work on a similar system. Since our ideas about this (both regarding the actual system as well as about making it shareable with other clubs) mostly matched, we decided to team up. Since then, I've also received help offers from Rene and Sna, within EE. I can probably use their help somewhere along the road, for the moment, I'll have to figure out what exactly we are supposed to build.

Though this post originally started out as a general description of what this system was supposed to be doing, this small introduction turned out to rather large already. I'll stop here, saving my plans for the actual system for my next post. Still, I'm going to end this post with the same thing I was going to end the original post with: This new system needs a name! If anybody has a nice suggestion, let me know!