Cantr II Discussion Forum

I was really bored today so I started going back through my old emails and stringing together the turn reports for my favorite character. (Actually I always meant to do that for all my characters, but seeing the amount of time this one is taking I don't know...)

Anyone ever done this? I highly recommend it. It's a lot of work, but it's so cool going back and seeing how they've evolved, especially since I keep coming across all these things I'd forgotten about...some of which are pretty hilarious in hindsight.

1421-7: You say: "I guess I should go and give moral support or
whatever, but there's no way I'm getting dragged into some big argument.
*smiles* I'll just pretend like I'm asleep if I have to."

Never was a statement proved more wrong.... I guess it's only funny to someone who knows the details, but seriosuly, reading this made soda come out of my nose.

And of course I'm impressed by the sheer amount of time I had to waste back then! Of course I had less chars so they could afford to be chattier.

Also, anybody know if there's a limit to the amount of text MSWord can hold? I'm up to almost 300 pages and I've only just now reached 1430...

I've only done it for one episode, one of my chars courtship and marriage, but others must have done so, viz The Rangers Tale.

I'm sure Word can take far more than 300 pages.

I started doing this with my favorite character and I stopped, intimidated, when I reached 850 single-spaced pages (with increased margins). That was only half of his life to that point.

Soda coming out of your nose?
Cantrians have been doing it wrong all this time???

I've occasionally patched together event logs per character, but never went far with it.
Longest I made was 5 or 6 pages, and that was with a goal.
Needed to find back an event, to see if one of my chars was getting ripped off in a trade, but the trade spanned almost 15 days... aren't sleepers fun?
Due to that length, and me only taking a look well after it had happened, I ended up with those 5 or 6 pages.
I would've just whacked the char that my char was trading with until he died, but in a large town with several law-enforcing chars around, that'd end in a far worse way than having to wait.

Don't know how much pages Word can take, I'm an OpenOffice junkie myself, but I vaguely recall that once encountering a limit in Word, though that was still in the days that win98 was sparkly new.

I was doing this for my char Dusty Rose during the war so that I could write an in-character account of what happened.

Going back to when the army left from Karnon Seaside I finally gave up after transposing 8 days (still in Kwor) and 63 pages of single space 10pt font, I knew it would be a long time before I could read all that again and write something up so I gave up on it there. Maybe if I find a lot of free time later this semester I can write it up for the ‘zine, or perhaps as late as next summer.

He had some strong opinions about people and events that he never spoke much about but would have come out in his writings if I could have gotten around to it, so I wouldn’t want to transpose his opinions (especially about other characters) to characters in game OOC. Although if I could have gotten it written IC that would have been awesome.

ahhh memory lane... It's kinda awkward typing about my characters, I can remember their lives & snap back into thinking like them as well as if I was still playing them.

tiddy ogg wrote:I've only done it for one episode, one of my chars courtship and marriage, but others must have done so, viz The Rangers Tale.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhh! Don't mention that thing or nite will post! And then I'll have to knock his ego back down to a smidgeon below normal.

Is it possible to get it that low?

I tried doing this.......taking all events for each character from my turn reports and making character reports, way back when I first started. But it did take forever, and then my computer crashed and I lost all of it! I never even thought of doing it again.

I want to do this with all my other chars but it really is pretty overwhelming.

But besides all the stuff I mentioned, one of the things that made me want to put the effort into it was that it's so annoying when there's some little detail my char is supposed to 'remember' and then I looking through 30 seperate emails just trying to figure out what happened when. Like, if I know I met someone on a certain boat trip, well I can't even remember what year it was half the time and I have to pick a bunch of random emails until I can narrow it down to a dozen or so, then I have search through those until I find the specific one I want.

That's exactly what I do, and likely many others as well. I liked it so much better when we got a weeks worth of events on one turn report. It made it so much easier to search for things like that.

That's why I have my turn reports sent to a yahoo address, I can filter them and use advanced search interface which is handier than outlook.

LOL! Fat chance I'd ever do that. Especially with what, 100+ emails of dead characters to go through?

Anyone miss Thetaris? No, for a good reason, which is why he says on page 10 or something of hotmail. Forever. (please find an In-Game reason to erase all history of him. And Sevarious or what ever his name was.. Severius I think.. Thank god I forgot. He was the asshole in Kwor.)

I recently started a folder for turn reports but that's not gonna help splitting them up. I don't think I'll ever manage to do that anyway. It's easy to use the new Yahoo mail search function to find the events I want. That thing has been vastly improved - before you couldn't even enter quote marks to search for exact phrase, since it interpreted it as so that the quote marks much be in the text too. Try searching for a person with a common name and it would catch every other person with the same first name as well. But not anymore. + It shows preview of the context the word is found at, so you can ignore it if it's a wrong one. (Exept if there are other occurances in the same topic, but that's rather rare.)

I think it might be possible to do an automated program in Visual Basic or something - you provide it with a list of character names in alphabetical order (or maybe it could arrange them in alphabetical order automatically) and then the program reads the file from top to bottom and upon running into Events for (NAME), will cut off the topic above this line. Every character would be separated into their own txt file, named after the character name and the date from the header.

tiddy ogg wrote:I've only done it for one episode, one of my chars courtship and marriage, but others must have done so, viz The Rangers Tale.

I'm sure Word can take far more than 300 pages.

As a matter of fact, except for a few exceptions, I did not save any day reports whatsoever! Everything was written from memory (yes, I have a good one), saved notes, and maybe sometimes a touch of literary flair.

nitefyre wrote:...and maybe sometimes a touch of literary flair.

If by touch you mean suckerpunch?

Pter still has all of his copies of the Ranger's Tale that keep him entertained on those long car rides across the continent.

Marian wrote:Also, anybody know if there's a limit to the amount of text MSWord can hold? I'm up to almost 300 pages and I've only just now reached 1430...

Not sure about a limit, but Word 2000 tends to stop showing page numbers after page 2999, in the bottom left hand corner on the status bar, but the document I had loaded at the time was far larger than this, so I think your magnum opus should be okay.

And I started doing something similar for my characters, but rapidly run out of time. I may go back and have another stab at it at some point.