TRPG General Chat

2:21 AM

7

Q: What is the interaction between green-flame blade and mirror image?

We are planning an attack on our nemesis. Intelligence efforts indicate that the enemy can use mirror image. I have green-flame blade. As we thought through our tactics the question came up: Would GFB, on a hit, remove more than one of the mirror images? We think not, but we think that it will b...

bobble

3:31 AM

'tis a bad image, but I've printed and corrected the pattern

(since the converter got very confused around the edges)

now comes the Counting of Boxes, in which I determine which colors I need to buy more of

BESW

4:48 AM

David Schirduan wrote a twitter thread about designing the resolution mechanics in Ripe.

Big Trouble Mammoth Collection [BUNDLE] by B Drone Games. A Sci-fi/Adventure setting for the Hero Kids Rule set.

Brothers In Arms by weepingrobot. A Game Where You're Made For War

Pirate Rummy: a Family Card Game by Vincent Baker.

Witch You Were Here by breathingstories. A spell for time travel to more beautiful times.

Yes Indie'd Pod episode May 09, 2021: "Yes In RPGSEA’d – Jammi" Marx interviews Jammi about Apocalypse Keys, Once More Into The Void, The Gauntlet, and colonial narratives in RPGSEA game design spaces.

The Indie RPG Newsletter by Thomas Manuel. curating interesting tidbits from the tabletop rpg interverse

If you're lost you can look and you will find me // Time after time by breathingstories. A game for two lovers trying to find each other across a chaotic expanse of non-linear time.

"Accessibility in Gaming Resources" by Jennifer Kretchmer. A massive compilation of resources, documents, tools, and more addressing accessibility in tabletop gaming, streaming, and life.

@bobble Ooh nice

bobble

> red - 139
orange - 207
yellow - 333
green - 900
blue - 333
indigo - 207
violet - 139
white - 1164
black - 1478

these are my counts, I'll figure out how much I already have of each color later

BESW

Bruno Prosaiko shared on twitter a bit of the character sheets he's making for Monkey's Paw Games' upcoming Unconquered.

YouTube playlist: "Blades in the Dark Roll20 Demos" (BitD Compendium goes live on Roll20 tomorrow)

BESW

5:51 AM

Home - a Zine for TTRPGs by Goatman's Goblet. a set of randomizers for places of safety and domestic respite

A. B.

7:30 AM

Is it just me or is there a sudden epidemic of people saying an when they mean a?

(a propos of the time-travelling witch.)

It's really annoying, but I can't make out whether it's really any different from usual or whether it's just a case of seeing red cars everywhere once you start looking for them!

Good work with the pattern, @bobble . Looks a bit stretched, I assume that is just because the squares aren't square?

yes, it is the same number each way, should have just counted before asking.

Carcer

there's a bunch of words for which a/an appropriateness depends on dialect

A. B.

Really? What kind of words?

Carcer

a historian/an historian are both correct depending on whether your accent elides the H or not

I think it's mostly words beginning with H now that I try to think about it

A. B.

Oh, the kind where it's a matter of opinion whether it is a vowel or not, yes, of course. I know about that (vaguely). But I'm talking about things like "an spell component".

kviiri

7:46 AM

My gut reaction would've been to remind that not everyone is a native English speaker, but then I remembered that at least by my smallish sample size, the ESL folk are actually more attentive to clean prose grammar-wise.

Carcer

when I've made such mistakes in my own writing it's usually because I wrote something else first and then edited it incompletely, I think

A. B.

That makes sense, hadn't thought of that.

What's puzzling me is more that it seems to be suddenly appearing much more often than usual, and it's spooking me slightly :-D Anyone else noticed this, or is it just a case of red cars?

kviiri

I would suggest red cars, though if it's, say, this stack specifically, even a single prominent red car can have a quite big statistical impact :)

There's also the recursive Baader-Meinhoff effect, where after hearing about the Baader-Meinhoff effect somewhere, you start noticing the effect more and more.

A. B.

8:01 AM

Haha
Is that what the Baader-Meinhoff effect is, then? I hear that expression now and again and always forget to look it up.

kviiri

French also has that thing where words are changed depending on vowel-consonant differences. Eg. one doesn't say le ail (garlic), but l'ail. That also comes from pronunciation, not specific glyphs

A. B.

Elision, I think that's called. And, of course, don't even start about Welsh "mutations".

kviiri

@A.B. Baader-Meinhof effect (actually single "f" in Meinhof", I mis-spelled it earlier) is the perceptive bias named after the West German terrorist organization Red Army Faction that was also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group. The bias or illusion comes from a particular journalist who encountered the group's name once, and shortly thereafter seemed to see seemingly random mentions of them with much greater frequency than before

I have this illusion recurrently: often specific series of numbers catch my attention once and then they recur in unusual places.

"seemed to see seemingly", wow. This has to be the best wording for today on my part.

A. B.

Oddly, (I did look it up after I posted), Wikipedia seems to spell the terrorist group with two f's and the perceptive bias with one f. I don't know whether this is general or it's just a goof on Wikipedia.

Seemed to see seemingly. I approve.

kviiri

At least English and German wikipedias both have Meinhof with one f only (discussing the terrorist group)

Trish

8:09 AM

@kviiri one F is correct

kviiri

So I'd wager it's either a mis-spelling on the part of the Wikipedia you're referring to, or an unusual orthographic convention for the language you're reading in (some languages have special rules for writing foreign names, either generally or in a case-by-case basis)

Trish

@kviiri most likely an error - the Bundesarchive wouldn't misspell: bundesarchiv.de/DE/Content/Virtuelle-Ausstellungen/…

A. B.

I'm reading in English. Checked again, I think maybe it was just a few odd pages after all, I'd searched in a rather confusing way.

Trish

in fact, on the RAF page I can not find a single "Meinhoff"

kviiri

@Trish It's most probably an error, but I think it should still be stressed that in the general case there isn't a single correct spelling for names across languages.

A. B.

8:15 AM

English frequently has the special convention for spelling foreign names that "we will spell them however happens to come into our heads and you can't stop us". :-D

kviiri

French famously have that "Vladimir Poutine" for the Russian president, and some languages do that or similar for all names

A. B.

I never heard that one! :-D

kviiri

Although in Putin's case, the reason for a novel spelling is simply to prevent his name from sounding vulgar.

And I guess the French spelling also hints better at the Russian pronunciation, which is a plus I'd reckon?

The Latvian orthography assigns spellings to foreign names by phonetic approximation of the original language, with some adaptations to better fit Latvian phonology and morphology. For example, Alan Turing is Alans Tjūrings

I think that was suggested for Finnish orthography as well in the 19th century when linguistic reform and development was at full speed

AncientSwordRage

@A.B. some Spanish dialects would pronounce a initial S as having a vowel in front, so they may be pronouncing it in their head as "an (e)Spell component" ?

Like uh-spell

kviiri

The paper proposing that would not only have replaced endonymous spellings of foreign place names with ones altered for Finnish pronunciation and morphology (eg. it's convenient to end names in vowels here most of the time) but also replaced Finnish names that had already developed for existing place names (eg. Lontoo, Pariisi, Berliini, Moskova) with phonetic approximations of their endonymic pronunciations

BESW

8:29 AM

@AncientSwordRage There's a joke I've heard Persians tell each other that relies on a similar observation.

@kviiri You've probably seen some of my Firehose links about how Guam is currently revising its village names from their 19th-century Spanish-imposed spellings, to reflect the current CHamoru orthography.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW I'm partly basing this off of a comedians routine, where their mother calls the comedians brother uh-michael

Ben

waiver

waivee

waived

AncientSwordRage

@BESW that sounds good?

BESW

@AncientSwordRage I've also seen Japanese speakers struggle with foreign words which end in particular consonants, or which combine particular consonants without intervening vowels, because Japanese tends not to do either of those things.

So yeah, there's a lot of "my tongue is used to this pattern" stuff, and gosh but you should see an English-only American try to pronounce the Guam villages of (in the Spanish orthography) Yona and Mangilao.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW my mother-in-law pronounces my name like the Bengali word for cake. I had no complaints going by Cake, but she wanted me to pick another name she can call me

BESW

8:37 AM

@AncientSwordRage In theory more than in practice, in many cases. There's contentions about the Guam government's approach to orthography--who gets put in charge, who's considered expert, and whether it's a problem to have one island use a noticeably different orthography from all the others.

trogdor

yeah it's actually a little more complicated than "we get to pick now"

AncientSwordRage

@BESW I remember you saying orthography wasn't fixed/always decided by those who use it?

trogdor

because of,.. who actually gets to pick and why

BESW

Yeah. Its active suppression by the US government is still within living memory.

trogdor

yep

the sheer audacity, telling people they can no longer use their own language

BESW

8:46 AM

And of course the very idea of giving the language a written component was originally a tool of colonization and assimilation. To reclaim public and authoritative control of the language is a recent and important development, and there are several different opinions about how it should be done.

trogdor

yeah that's what I was originally getting at, there isn't 100% consensus on what should even be done with whatever control Guam now has over,.. the language itself now

not to mention, again, only certain people even have that control

it's not something being say, voted on

it's kinda just like, a decision people currently in office have the power to make which is kinda,.... I don't even know what to say about it really

AncientSwordRage

Relevant: youtu.be/xa8BYZrSTxY

Trish

9:01 AM

@kviiri in case of proper names there IS. For example, the proper way to spell Sun Tsu is 孫子

@kviiri Владимир Путин ?

though it gets wonky with daimyo... Matsudaira Takechiyo, Matsudaira Motonobu, Matsudaira Motoyasu and Tokugawa Ieyasu are all the same person

A. B.

Is that like in Russian where there are things like you can be called by your surname or by "son of so and so"?

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@kviiri Well that spelling results in the closest pronunciation to the original.

kviiri

@Trish No, that depends on what language you're writing in.

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica Yes, though French doesn't do this in general does it?

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@kviiri I'm not sure. I think I encountered a few other names that look funny to an Englishman but actually sound about right for a Slav when pronounced in accordance to the rules.

But my encounters with French in a political/historical context are even less common than my encounters with it in general.

kviiri

Of course there's also the issue of romanizing names in general

I should also point out that even the idea of a person having a single "true form" of their name is, at least in the Western world, a relatively new one.

A. B.

9:18 AM

Now I think about it, it's hard to know what's really more "accurate" when one language is quoting a name from another language that uses letters quite differently, e.g. what English spells sh and oo Welsh spells si and w.

kviiri

Used to be the norm that names would vary by surroundings and situation. A king could go by "Karl" in their court but sign official documents as "Carolus" or something similarly fancy, and be referred to as "Charles" across the border

I'd think what did this practice in in favor of "single fixed form" was the advent of writing as the foremost means of transmitting information.

A. B.

Do you copy the way the originating language spells it, preserving their letters but giving a false idea of the sounds if the reader doesn't already know? Or do you spell it the way that in your language would represent the sounds accurately? (Not that that entirely makes sense in English, which has wildly inconsistent spelling anyway due to a lifetime of taking the "spell it the way they do" option with loanwords from all over the world.)

That's true, I'd forgotten about those Latin forms.

Trish

@kviiri Carolus Rex aka Karl XII aka Charles XII, king of Sweden?

A. B.

"John" appearing on legal documents as "Johannes", abbreviated to "Jno" because that's not how you spell either of them.

Trish

@A.B. Gaius. That's properly Abbreviated: C.

kviiri

9:24 AM

@Trish Something like that! (I'd assume there have been many Kings fitting the description)

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@kviiri Used to be? English, French and Italian speakers seem to lean towards using the English, French and Italian variants of my full name when they are using it, which is are significantly distinct from the Slavic variant.

Trish

@kviiri Few actually. Karl XII and Charlemagne aka Karl der Große come to mind.

kviiri

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica Well, the "norm" is more or less gone, but I'd say the practice still lives on in more informal contexts :)

I have a friend from Russia, and since he learned to speak Swedish I've been intermittently referring to him with the Swedish form of his name

Trish

we are all βάρβαροι anyway: Sounds like baba to the greek :P

AncientSwordRage

@Trish Linfamy has a good video on this 😅

Trish

9:30 AM

@AncientSwordRage I know!

As far as barbarians: we are all barbarians by one name or another. youtube.com/watch?v=zugW-48-N2g

AncientSwordRage

@Trish I wondered if that was where your example came from...

Trish

@AncientSwordRage not exactly that video, but he is a prime example, because his first family name was obscure.

after all Oda Kichihōshi and Oda Saburō still keep the Oda of Oda Nobunaga. Owari no Ōutsuke was jsut a title given to him (they called him fool!) as well as devil king or demon shogun.

Though, he did call himself (according to a portoguese jesuit) "Demon King of the Sixth Heaven" (dairokuten-maō)

@AncientSwordRage but if you really want to go through names... Kinoshita Tōkichirō is Hashiba Hideyoshi is Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

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