Great balls of fire!

Went to the RPG guild again. Choice of 2 games. One seemed hugely over-full, so I went with the other one. It was a wander round dungeon slaying monsters type game. Something I'm not too keen on because it seems like a video game. On the plus side, we did have a couple of slightly crazy players, including a drunk dwarf and a pyromaniac elf. So I did have fun. And I don't want to criticise the GM too much because he was willing to actually run a game. The real problem was simply a lack of games running.

So I really need to step up. Except, I know why people run games like this - It's because it's easy. Conflict drives plot, and combat is the most obvious and easy to run form of conflict. It also finds the players rather than have the players need to work out the plot. Games I played with the people in Brighton were a lot less fighty, and so was masterofapath's Vampire game as far as I remember (as an aside, we should really have another round of that).

I guess I should do another SotC. Except FATE doesn't lend itself to one-shots. Plus if I do go that way, I need to work out a few issues.

Better fast character generation.
Spending a whole session making characters probably is fun, but I kind of want to play a game. Ideally I want to avoid pre-gens.
I also need to be a lot stricter about aspects. People chose beneficial ones. Perhaps I just need to be stingier with FATE points here.

Create my own plot.
The pregen I dug out didn't actually make sense when I came to run it. I actually have a number of basic ideas. I just need to piece them together.
I need more intrigue and roleplay possibilities.

Most importantly, I want to avoid fights unless the players initiate it. We can have other sorts of contests.

Adventures in Pi-land

In our previous installment (which I don't think I actually mentioned) I managed to get Pi-fighter - my Raspberry Pi - working. Also got X working. This is nice because it means I can access the system from the comfort of my laptop PC.

Today I started tinkering with bluetooth.  It should involve 3 commands:
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends bluetooth
sudo service bluetooth status
hcitool scan

The first command worked fine. The second one had an odd error message. A bit of googling told me I can ignore this. The third one simply refused to work. After much googling I found out that there was an hciconfig command it told me the interface was DOWN. So I needed to turn it UP

hciconfig hci0 cc up

Should have worked. Turns out I need to run as root.

So I scanned and i saw my mobile phone and my wiimote. Yay! Even managed to work out how to set up a connection (although there didn't seem an obvious way to maintain a connection). Still, doesn't matter. There are python modules to do that. Tried a cut and paste.

socket connect error (control Channel)

So I tried to use a genuine remote instead. Yeah... That worked. That's a little disappointing. I want to use a cheaper controller. I guess I can probably get this to work with a bit of C tinkering. It's network stuff though. Network stuff scares me.

The next problem - how do I actually read it. There are plenty of tutorials, but doesn't seem to be any actual documentation! Still, I think I have a basic idea about it now. I can at least read the values I want to read. And probably make it rumble :)

For my next trick I need to control some motors. Pondring concepts for ball balance bot.