TRPG General Chat

3:03 PM

Of course, I'm sure most professions have plenty of "why bother" moments, and don't even get the sort of feedback we're discussing here. I doubt I've ever responded to a Home Depot e-mailed survey in a way that would move the reader to tears and a feeling of professional fulfillment....

(Speaking of which, I'm going to go write a letter to our obstetrician now.)

Polyducks

That's nice of you :)

[googles obstetrician]

"Pregnancy doctor"

"Midwife"

David Wilkins

@Polyducks I don't want this to sound mean in any way, but is English your primary language?

Polyducks

@DavidWilkins It is, but Americans tend to have different ways of saying things than us in the UK.

@DavidWilkins 'Sabatical', for example, is an Americanism, and I've never heard someone say 'Obstetrician'.

and @Eimyr purposefully choses difficult words because he likes to feel important (love you @emiyr ;) )

David Wilkins

Ok, that's fair. I guess I just assumed those were common English, and not just American words.

I think the whole Pringles thing threw me off, because I had no idea you guys across the pond liked them

Polyducks

3:19 PM

Also I haven't really spoken to more than a handful of other human beings for about 7 months, so that might also be a contribution.

Pringles are big here.

David Wilkins

I blame everything on videos like this:

BRITISH GIRLS TRY AMERICAN CANDY + SNACKS!

►

Polyducks

It's funny, since America has dominated the media I find English accents more and more attractive

That's not a slight - Americans really push English as being attractive

David Wilkins

I agree, English accents are attractive. I am astounded how often I discover actors that play roles with very specific American accents are actually British

nitsua60

@Polyducks Even in America, most people I've heard just say "oh-bee." (As in OB/GYN.)

Polyducks

Oh, I recognise OB/GYN

Tim B

3:25 PM

@DavidWilkins Just be aware that very few american actors can actually do a British accent, normally when they try it sounds abominable...but no-one except us brits even notices :(

David Wilkins

@TimB I can understand that.

Tim B

it's like america has some concept of a "British" accent (completely ignoring the fact that no British accent remains constant even from one town to another and in several cases we have multiple regional accents inside one city) and it's turned into a self reinforcing meme that that is what the accent should sound like

Polyducks

@TimB Amen brother. Dat Britney tho

oh my god. When I was in Los Angeles their idea of a British accent was a syphilitic cockney. It sounded awful.

David Wilkins

I get the feeling that the average American actor is a bit less disciplined than the average Brit actor.

Polyducks

'ELLO MATE, AV ANUVVA SHRIMP ON THE BARBIE THEN MATE!

(actually pronounced in capitals)

I don't know about that. There are some amazing American actors. Like Christian Bale

oh wait.

nitsua60

3:31 PM

@Polyducks "'allo. 'ow are 'ou? Shall we go to 'artford and get out of this 'ell'ole?"

Polyducks

Hugh Laurie is a great American actor too

Oh wait...

nitsua60

Anthony Hopkins.

Oh wait...

David Wilkins

Another accent Americans don't get right: Aussie. This video is hilarious:

The most Aussie blokes ever stop a robbery [Gold Coast]

►

eimyr

@Polyducks So what is the word for "obstetrician"?

Polyducks

@eimyr I suppose it's 'obstetrician' but we more commonly use 'doctor / nurse / midwife / ob/gyn' in common conversation

and infer the meaning from the context

eimyr

3:39 PM

@Polyducks and yes, that's exactly why I'm using complicated words. Not at all because I learned English from a book and don't know the most common colloquialisms ubiquituos among more loquacious Brits.

@Polyducks but... but... ob in ob/gyn stands for obstetrician...

Polyducks

@eimyr lol

eimyr

I have the same problem with Three Letter Acronyms. I just don't know them.

So TLC gets mixed up with BLT and LLC.

Polyducks

People don't need to know what something stands for to understand it.

nitsua60

@Polyducks That sentence is hard for me to wrap my head around...

wax eagle

@eimyr most obstetricians are also gynecologists

hence the ob/gyn ref

nitsua60

3:44 PM

I'm unpacking it as "some people don't need to know what arbitrary set of sounds that, themselves, stand for a thing, this arbitrary set of sounds stands for in order to associate this set of arbitrary set of sounds with the thing itself."

David Wilkins

@eimyr I've worked in two seperate US Government organisations, don't get me started on acronyms.

Polyducks

@nitsua60 I should say - people don't need to know the etymology to understand the meaning of an acronym. For example, you might not know that 'pleb' is short for 'plebian', but you can still use the word 'pleb'. You might not know that 'laser' is an acronym, but you can still use it.

eimyr

If you use the word pleb I don't want to talk to you.

You don't have to know it, I don't need to hear it. Win-win.

Acronyms are for peasants.

nitsua60

@Polyducks right: it was the cognitive dissnonance between knowing that you meant that ^^ while another part of my brain was screaming "but knowing what the thing stands for is understanding it!"

David Wilkins

@Polyducks radar is an acronym as well

nitsua60

3:47 PM

my hyper-rational rules-loving side and my side that believes in language as a social compact erupted into argument

Polyducks

@DavidWilkins it is?

@nitsua60 so in other words - I blew your mind? :p

nitsua60

@Polyducks absolutely

David Wilkins

@Polyducks RAdio Detection And Ranging

nitsua60

@Polyducks RADAR=Radio Detection And Ranging. "radar" isn't an acronym.

Polyducks

Is it not an acronym because it uses the first two letters of the first word?

nitsua60

3:54 PM

It's the new noun that skips the middle-man of "radio detection and ranging"

(Because the language is alive, and "radar" is now a word that means "things that magically detect things at a distance.")

David Wilkins

I fail to see the distinction, to me radar was coined as an acronym, thus it is an acronym

nitsua60

@DavidWilkins has it right when he capitalized the first two letters of RAdio. I wasn't saying it's not an acronym because it doesn't perfectly take first letters, just distinguishing between RADAR=acronym, radar=noun divorced from acronym.

David Wilkins

@nitsua60 how exactly is radar divorced from RADAR?

nitsua60

@DavidWilkins the distinction is that when people make the sequence of sounds "skoo-bah" and write it as "scuba", and it unambiguously represents using gear to breathe while swimming underwater, but many/most users neither signal that there's an underlying phrase being abbreviated nor know that there's an underlying phrase being abbreviated, then "scuba" is a new word distinct from "SCUBA."

David Wilkins

I was unaware of these strange rules about when an acronym is or isn't an acronym

English is weird.

nitsua60

4:00 PM

I wouldn't call them rules, just observations.

Polyducks

I think you're right though. I'll ask my girlfriend tonight. She studied languages and language development and we can get a fixed answer!

I'm going to be in for an hour and a half lecture, but I'm doing it for you, guys.

David Wilkins

I feel that if the mechanisms that created an acronym still apply, the acronym is still acronymous.

Polyducks

I think what @nitsua60 is saying is what I was saying. If you don't know it's an acronym, is it still an acronym?

nitsua60

@DavidWilkins I'm no linguist, but my wife's professional specialty is language development and acquisition and I'm a nerd and pedant; we've had many discussions on the subject and she's brought me off of my RAW-centric understanding of language.

David Wilkins

Oddly enough, LIDAR is not an acronym

nitsua60

4:04 PM

@DavidWilkins (reading that was fun when I misread the last word as "acrimonious")

David Wilkins

lol

nitsua60

@DavidWilkins really? I'd always just assumed Laser Interferometric Detection And Ranging.

David Wilkins

the term lidar was actually created as a portmanteau of "light" and "radar"

nitsua60

The article has twenty-three citations, one of which is an obscure manuscript from the 1490's and the other twenty-two are arguments on LanguageLog.

David Wilkins

haha

nitsua60

4:07 PM

Uh-oh, @SevenSidedDie found the first land mine for data collection.... (See his comment.)

Polyducks

@nitsua60 woah, you too?

nitsua60

@DavidWilkins so does it get the half-acronym template? Or "Hackronym"?

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Not actually collecting data, just skipping directly to making sure the question is tagged sensibly.

David Wilkins

@nitsua60 hackronym is fair :P

anyone any good with regular expressions?

JohnB

I am good at trial and error with regular expressions :)

David Wilkins

4:11 PM

hehe

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie (I'm just teasing. It just felt like the first instance in the field where we'll see if things have calmed down or if there's still reignition potential. And I got nervous.)

Tim B

@DavidWilkins Yes. Many people. ;) What's the problem?

David Wilkins

I have a CSV file with many blank fields I want to remove (sequential commas, ie ',{2,}'

Only I don't want to remove blanks before a certain column

Tim B

ok

David Wilkins

Also, I don't want to admit that this is easier to do with Excel than sed

Tim B

4:15 PM

do you have any escaped commas in your data?

David Wilkins

yes

Tim B

then you can't do it with excel or regex

David Wilkins

or rather, enclosed.

Polyducks

Why can't you use regex?

Tim B

you need a proper parser

David Wilkins

4:16 PM

I can do it with excel by using the "Go to special..." command

Polyducks

surely you can escape around escaped commas

Tim B

until you have escaped escape characters

you've got a heirarchical syntax not a regular one

regex only parses regular expressions...

Polyducks

[blank look]

Tim B

",",",\",",""

how many cells is that?

Polyducks

aren't you using the regex to specify what to match?

Tim B

4:18 PM

actually it's not completely impossible at this point, you're not at the point of parsing html

Polyducks

like, you can write a regex to match almost anything.

Tim B

no, you can't

David Wilkins

HTML cannot be parsed with regex

Polyducks

The joke of that circle jerk is that you can sift through html as a string to get what you want, but you can't use regex to 'parse' anything.

parsing is turning one thing into another thing, usually for rendering.

It's a misleading meme

Tim B

not at all

Polyducks

4:20 PM

-_- reasons, Timmothy!

Tim B

lets say you're looking for the data inside the <foo> div...so you regex <foo>.*</foo> - seems fine right?

Polyducks

not if you use a greedy *

Tim B

even without the greedy

Polyducks

go on, why doesn't it work?

Tim B

so what happens if the text contains a html comment containing </foo> or a completely unrelated field on the page is called <foo>...or a completly unrelated user's post contains <foo>Hi</foo>

David Wilkins

4:21 PM

4427

A: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool th...

love that answer

Polyducks

That's dealing with a set of unknown data. You don't use it in production, but you can use it to sift through data to remove trailing commas.

Tim B

you can parse for a specific string and match on it...but you've lost all the hierarchical information that lets you say that this is actually a HTML tag not a random bit of string, and that this is the html tag you are actually interested in

But people do try to use it in production

and it works fine until someone posts something you didn't expect somewhere you didn't expect it

Polyducks

It's very situational. You can't say it doesn't work in every situation. What if the only content you have on the page is <foo>bar</foo> and you want to get 'bar'?

If someone is posting something you don't expect you won't be using regex

That's for javascript/php/other to make specific DOM calls

Tim B

if all the page contains is <foo>bar</foo> then why are you using regex anyway?

Polyducks

but sorting out a csv to remove unwieldy commas is just the thing regex is fine for

Tim B

4:24 PM

which is why I asked whether the data contained escaped commas

Polyducks

I have a feeling you are just being difficult for the sake of being difficult. There's a reason I'm in rpg and not the javascript room.

David Wilkins

And I incorrectly said yes. It does have un-escaped encapsulated commas

Tim B

at which point you can't do it with regex in any sensible way at all...since you have no way to count how many quote marks you've passed etc in regex

Polyducks

[goes back to work]

David Wilkins

Also encapsulated quotes. This data is hideous

eimyr

4:27 PM

Guys, how about moving to Not A Bar?

Polyducks

(y)

Tim B

i.e. doing a regex query to spot the difference between: "", 1, 2 and ",",1, 2 is a nightmare

@eimyr Don't worry, we're done

David Wilkins

aye

eimyr

Cool.

So what is the best RPG to portray hacking?

Tim B

I've never seen a good one tbh. Shadowrun is the only one that even tried that I've played and that was....not great

mind you this was like 1st edition shadowrun 20 years ago

I imagine they've improved it

Polyducks

4:31 PM

I've seen hacking in Shadowrun, but I didn't find it all that compelling

They had hacking in the shadowrun game that was released for PC recently, but that wasn't particularly good either

There are a lot of virtual hacking software games like pony island, but I don't think any of it really gives it justice

Like SMBC once stated, real hacking is calling up the target and telling them you're the password inspector

Unless you're talking about the sort of hacking that I do - which is to make something work, albeit not the correct way.

eimyr

No, I'm talking about circumventing-security-systems-by-exploiting-imperfections hacking

Polyducks

Oooh now you mention it

There was a computer game that came out... something about bears

eimyr

Goat simulator?

Polyducks

anyway, you had to hack your way through it. Things like making your hitbox infinitely small

no no

There was an enemy that you had to fight, but its health was so high it was impossible to attack using a sword which did minus damage

so if you made your sword 'heal' it, it'd go over the size of the integer and turn into a minus number, effectively killing it

I really wish I could remember what it was called. It was an MMO RPG

eimyr

(I only recently learned that "albeit" is supposed to read all-bee-it and not all-byte)

Polyducks

4:35 PM

haha :)

David Wilkins

hehe

eimyr

(just german things)

(I was actually reading that as a german word "albeit" which translates to "however")

Polyducks

That's pretty much what it means in English too

It's a conjunction of 'all be it'

like 'be that as it may'

It means 'That is how it is, but...'

eimyr

Anyway, reading it All-Byte in an english sentence introduces an unwanted germanic element...

Polyducks

or... 'however'

oh right :)

David Wilkins

4:41 PM

"all-Byte" sounds like albite, which is a plagioclase feldspar, the first member of the Albite-Anorthite solid solution series, apparently. Also an anagram of albeit

Polyducks

Everyone is showing how smart they are, and I'm just sittin here, making someone else's web page :C

David Wilkins

Well, that was more like "How smart wikipedia is"

Polyducks

haha

David Wilkins

I just realized that I earned a silver badge today here in chat

Tim B

getting starred?

David Wilkins

4:52 PM

yeah

Tim B

Congratulations :)

David Wilkins

Thanks!

Ahriman

@Polyducks Hack 'n Slash?

Forrestfire

5:55 PM

hello

David Wilkins

hi!

The Oracle

7:04 PM

0

Q: Where goes the [traveller]?

A long time ago in a country far away (from me) a system was born. It was named traveller. Since then several others have taken up the work and created different yet similar systems based upon it. Some of those found a tag of their own (mongoose-traveller, mongoose-traveller-2, traveller-5) and ...

BESW

9:17 PM

If you're a third party publisher of Fate stuff, please head over to http://FateRPG.com and tell us! http://www.faterpg.com/2016/fate-publishers-sound-off/

Tweeted by fredhicks on February 15, 2016 at 7:34 PM

nitsua60

9:30 PM

@Adeptus @doppelgreener do you think there's a worthwhile mainsite question along the lines of "coming into an existing group to GM, what are best practices?"

(running off to belated Valentine's dinner, so will be afk for a while)

wax eagle

@nitsua60 I thought we had that?

BESW

@waxeagle If so, I can't find it.

wax eagle

yeah, I think I read that as the reverse

nitsua60

I'm not seeing one in here, which is a search on gm-techniques + "new"

I'll admit to not doing all the due diligence: I haven't browsed all of gm-techniques yet.

BESW

I think mainsite would be happiest --and you'd be more useful answers-- if you specified as much as possible about your situation, rather than trying to make it generic.

SevenSidedDie

9:35 PM

I think we might have a “taking over another GM's campaign: how best” question, but I suspect that's a bit different.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie that may be close to my situation: I've got a phone call tonight to learn more details!

BESW

There's a big difference between, say, taking over for a GM who's been kicked out vs having the old GM as a player; or GMing for a small group of friends vs GMing for a store campaign.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 In general yeah, details are good. I know there's a tendency to go "I don't know what the problems might be, advise me", but answers get way better when the question is about what conceptual problems are giving one pause / tripping one up at this very moment.

nitsua60

(right now I'm at the point of: "I've been approached by 3rd party and am having phone conversation tonight with party face; suggestions for my list of questions to pose are most welcome!")

afk awhile--thanks, and ping me if you think of anything

SevenSidedDie

28

Q: How can I screen new players to make sure they are a good fit for my game?

I'm looking to start a new Savage Worlds campaign and I need a full set of players for it. I've played in games before and ran a couple of one-shots, but I've never GMed a full campaign. There's already a meetup group for RPGs in my area, so I don't think I'll have a hard time finding players. H...

gm-techniques new-players players

maybe?

trogdor

9:40 PM

probably part of it at least

BESW

@nitsua60 Size, consistency, and demographics of group; systems they like; what happened to the last GM; length and frequency of sessions; why'd they choose you...

SevenSidedDie

Like a good move in go, you'd want a call like that to serve many different purposes. I don't think we can do a general question covering all possible things to tackle in that circumstance, but we can have more specific questions about specific tasks to complete in such an interview.

Otherwise it's the RPG equivalent of "I'm going on a first date. What are the best practices?" ;)

trogdor

lol

plus, none of us know the person you are "dating" XD

the equivalent of that anyway

SevenSidedDie

There are a remarkable number of points of similarity between romantic relationships and gaming groups. I guess that's not surprising, since both are personal relationships that involve practical concerns.

2

BESW

[amused] I don't have a lot of experience with vetting new gaming groups, but I do have training in putting together small study/training groups that will meet regularly for months at a time, and I try to ALWAYS have the first "getting to know you" session over food.

nitsua60

10:00 PM

@SevenSidedDie my wife stood me up on our first date...

trogdor

I am always surprised to hear something like that

nitsua60

@BESW Good point--I have experience standing up every September in front of a bunch of strangers and trying to start convincing them to come along on a year-long ride with me. The weird twist here is that I'm being asked "hey, do you want to come do this?" rather than trying to work the magic in the other direction.

Eh, well, we'll see how it goes. Nothing big on the line.

Miniman

10:21 PM

@nitsua60 Except the future of the human race! Little did you know that your decision will have far-reaching consequences that will eventually determine the fate of the entire world!

Or, yanno, maybe not.

BESW

Speaking of which, Legends of Tomorrow is totally a Fate Accelerated game.

nitsua60

"Far-Reaching Consequences" would be a good name for an album.

BESW

10:57 PM

@doppelgreener Some time in the next week-ish, I'd like you to help me design the new Brother James. Since he was originally your one-shot PC and all.

Adeptus

11:11 PM

@TimB There's a few who can - James Marsters, for one.

BESW

His Chicago accent, on the other hand...

Tim B

@Adeptus Yeah, he got coaching from Anthony Stewart Head though :D Also he did one of the London accents not that generic fake "british" accent thing

BESW

(And sometimes it feels like many British actors can more easily adopt regional American accents than they can slip from one British area accent to another.)

...also RP has a lot to answer for.

RIP RP

►

Adeptus

11:37 PM

RP?

BESW

Received Pronunciation, an accent from upper-class/southeast Britain shared and inculcated at boarding schools as a sign of good education and later adopted as a "universal" or "unmarked" accent by politicians and the BBC.

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