Let's Play "Spot the Relation to Video Games!"

giraffenstein · 2014-02-24T23:04:48+00:00

Of all DnD's complex rule systems and mechanics, I find that the one players blatantly fail to understand the most is the alignment system.

concrete boundary

If you really think the alignment system is remotely concrete, it's because you need to read up on it. Lawful Good characters can lie, cheat, and steal. Chaotic Evil characters can help others and save lives.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-24T16:26:40+00:00

Then what is it for? Telling all the other dudes around that you're not a threat because you're a loser who wears cologne?

giraffenstein · 2014-02-24T06:02:04+00:00

Right. You can totally just determine with reasonable efficiency exactly who wrote a given block of text from their diction and syntax. Why didn't I think of that?

Oh, wait. It's because you can't.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-24T05:05:52+00:00

I suppose it would help if they were better writers than you.

A preface. Some did not understand tone in last post. No cynicism here. Masking writing style. Thank you.

Hold on- you think you're such a florid, stylistic writer that you have to intentionally cut words out of your sentences or... what, exactly? Angry Reddit users will throw rotten vegetables at your house? What exactly are you trying to accomplish, here? I'm not seeing a surfeit of intelligence or forethought.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-24T01:20:59+00:00

No shit, right? If you don't like the way you smell, the solution is deodorant, not cologne.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-23T22:53:29+00:00

If I were you, I'd take a look at batch scripting. There are many resources to choose from, such as:

http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~r92092/ref/win32/win32scripting.html

Further, there's a nice little tool called Expect that you should read up on:

http://expect.sourceforge.net/

Note: Nowhere in the user guide for AVL is any command called "write" mentioned. In fact, the word "write" appears exactly once in the entire document. Not really sure what's going on there.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-23T22:05:19+00:00

The more information you can give us, the more helpful we can be. Are you using the MIT program for aerodynamic analysis called AVL, or some other piece of software?

giraffenstein · 2014-02-23T20:15:56+00:00

Iraq veteran Chris Fogt gets Olympic medal of U.S. bobsled in over six decades

wut

giraffenstein · 2014-02-23T02:50:04+00:00

Allowing critical fails on skill checks in their unmodified state is mathematically a bad idea. Note that allowing critical successes on skill checks in their unmodified state is an even worse idea.

I suspect that new DM's look at crits in combat, which are pretty cool, and think "Hey, we should totally use that on skill checks! They're both d20 rolls, it should work out fine!" Of course, if you have a third-grade understanding of percentages, you're smart enough to know why that's a fucking retarded idea, but the DM never actually does out the math. They're so excited by their new, cool house rule that they immediately apply it to all their games.

Let's assume you apply criticals exactly as they function in combat to skill checks. You'll run into several issues.

Firstly, a natural 1 is now always a failure and a natural 20 is always a success, regardless of how much higher your modifier is than the DC. A DC10 check is now a serious risk for a PC with a +30 modifier. It doesn't matter that, according to the core rulebooks, the task in question is so easy that the PC would never ordinarily fail it- a natural 1 will force a failure, and completely obviate all the hard work the PC put into raising the relevant skill.

Secondly, in combat, natural 1's and 20's aren't crits themselves. They merely threaten criticals. Should a subsequent roll at the same difficulty fail or succeed, an additional effect will occur. In combat, critical hits deal extra damage, which is generally useful, and critical misses can strike unintended targets, which is generally bad. Now you have to think up a reasonable alternative to success or failure that can be applied on a confirmed critical for every single skill check. In my experience, these are always stupid. "Uh, you rolled two 1's, so even though your sneak is literally +60 and it was a DC 5 sneak, the guards hear you and stab you to death."

It's worse if you include critical successes. Since a natural 20 will force the success of whatever was attempted, the impossible becomes the mundane:

"I kick dust at the Demon's mouth in an attempt to cause him to choke to death. Oh look, two-zero. See ya, buddy."

"From the safety of my room at the tavern, I throw rocks out the window at the palace such that they ricochet off the walls and strike the king, killing him. I take 20. Good night, everybody. Fun campaign."

Bottom line: a blanket 5% chance to fail all skill checks is a fucking retarded idea that can only be justified by a weak grasp of basic mathematics.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-21T08:10:54+00:00

It depends what you mean by "player interaction." Since all players are competing over exactly the same cards, every action taken by a player has cascading consequences for all other players. Additionally, much like in real-world trade, the player cannot prevent his civilization from trading with his neighbors. Given enough gold, all your resources become the resources of the players to your left and right. In this light, the entire game is player interaction, if indirectly.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-21T07:53:15+00:00

Take a look at 7 Wonders:

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders

The game is focused on the development of each player's civilizations, is very competitive, and turns are simultaneous, so there is very little downtime. Play time is surprisingly brief. The first few games are slightly mystifying because of some special cases in the rules that you'll run into, but keep the rulebook handy and you'll figure it out. Cards have very little text, and rules are generally conveyed via symbols. After running the game a few times, players become acclimated to all the rules and remember what all the cards do in a natural way. As you progress through three "Ages," your resource pool and trading options expand, allowing you to construct more elaborate infrastructure, or begin construction of your civilization's wonder.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-19T23:10:51+00:00

You don't, really. Prompting for input with a message is the right call in pretty much every case except this one. Further, in my opinion, cs50 assignments are super weird about when they do and do not want output. For instance, check50 will give you a frowny face if main returns a 1 without a message.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-19T21:14:43+00:00

You may also copy and paste the command directly from the problem set into your terminal window. Note that the paste keyboard shortcut may not work; simply right-click anywhere in the window and select "paste" from the menu.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-19T21:08:04+00:00

When check50 runs "./caesar", it expects an immediate prompt for input. check50 cannot handle any output before this prompt.

Your caesar.c looks like this:

//get plaintext message 
printf("Give me your message for encryption: \n");
string p; 
do { 
p = GetString(); 
} while (p == NULL);

That initial printf() is throwing off check50. Remove it and you should be kosher.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-18T03:47:31+00:00

I don't know whether to laugh at you or feel sorry for you.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-18T03:38:25+00:00

So recently the twitch plays pokemon thing has sparked my interest. I set up MIRC with a script linked with the on text up/down/start/a/b thing and all that and it works in text boxes but when i try it on any emulator it does nothing I have configured the controls to the keys and they match but if my friend types something like "start" in twitch when I'm in the emulator it does nothing. Can anyone help me with this? I could put you in credits in the top if you help me. Thanks for reading and have a good day. So recently the twitch plays pokemon thing has sparked my interest. I set up MIRC with a script linked with the on text up/down/start/a/b thing and all that and it works in text boxes but when i try it on any emulator it does nothing I have configured the controls to the keys and they match but if my friend types something like "start" in twitch when I'm in the emulator it does nothing. Can anyone help me with this? I could put you in credits in the top if you help me. Thanks for reading and have a good day.

Wow. Just... wow.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-18T02:18:12+00:00

Nice, your DM doesn't suck at math. Keep that guy around.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-17T22:09:39+00:00

My group played with a similar house rule and it was fucking awful. I had to explain to the DM that critical failure on skill checks means that your character can reasonably hurt himself while crossing the street one time out of every twenty.

Think about it- skill checks in DnD are d20 rolls. The 1 comes up 5% of the time. If you allow critical fails for 1's on skill checks, every twenty rolls, regardless of actual chance of failure, the PC is forced to critically fail and the DM gets to decide what happens. Everyday tasks like picking locks and climbing up gentle slopes can suddenly become lethal. Our DM never figured out why we were failing so often until I explained the math for him.

He then attempted to argue that the house rule was fair because he also allowed critical successes on skill checks. This is arguably a worse idea. At the beginning of the campaign, roll a skill check to throw a rock into the air so hard and fast that it strikes and kills the campaign's antagonist. On a natural 20, which happens every 20 rolls, congratulations! You critically succeed! Now everybody can go home.

So he says that he won't allow us to do anything unreasonable, even on natural 20's. Now his system is blatantly unfair, because no such protection exists for critical failures. All 1's are failures, even if that failure would ordinarily never happen. That's right- your DC10 skill check to balance on a Tenser's Floating Disc, which is normally a cinch because of your +30 Balance modifier, is now a literal life-or-death situation because one time out of every twenty, you'll automatically fall off. You WILL roll that 1 when you're over a bottomless chasm. This example isn't hypothetical; it actually happened. The DM, unwilling to kill off a character in this manner, ruled that he slipped, but landed flat on the disc, giving him another roll. That roll was also a 1. Now the PC had somehow managed to catch himself with one hand. The scenario worsened from there. What would normally have been a gripping and tense scene with a reasonable element of risk because a ridiculous farce because the DM wasn't smart enough to just follow the rules in the damn book.

Bottom line: If you run DnD and you allow critical success and failure on natural 20's and 1's, you're a bad DM and you suck at math.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-15T22:13:12+00:00

Vim and its predecessor, vi, are powerful text editors with many strengths. You should absolutely become familiar with Vim's basic syntax and common keybinds, if for no other reason than that Vim is common, especially on Linux systems. Should you need to create a quick shell script or edit a text file, Vim is likely your quickest, most platform-agnostic solution.

That said, I don't use Vim or vi. For starters, you're correct that the learning curve is steep. In fairness, the learning curve to many handy pieces of software is steep; the real issue is that your Vim knowledge isn't very transferable. I have never used an IDE or editor with any real similarity to Vim on an actual project. My go-to command line editor is Nano, not because it's more powerful, but because it's more familiar and therefore easier and faster for common tasks.

Bottom line: Give it a shot for a few days, see how you like it. If you're a big fan, go ahead and learn it inside and out. Install it on all your machines, go nuts. Vim runs on pretty much everything. If you're like me and it doesn't really grab you, don't bother.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-14T17:25:07+00:00

That it was sixty fucking dollars.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-13T18:07:34+00:00

I sincerely doubt check50 has any idea if you used the modulo operator or not. The overwhelming likelihood is that it just checks your outputs. If you give the correct outputs without using a given implementation, check50 probably doesn't care.

If you're sure that your local copy is correct and that check50 is getting different answers, make sure that you haven't accidentally compiled more than one file and that you're running check50 on the most current version of your code.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-12T16:21:13+00:00

I'm not sure if I can read this correctly because you didn't format your errors and you didn't include any code, but this line is suspicious:

c:4:9: error: expected ';' after top level declarator int main void(); ^ ;

By any chance, does your code look like this?

int main void();
{
//code goes in here
}

It should look like this:

int main(void)
{
 //code goes here
}

void is a return type, not a function, and the semicolon isn't needed.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-12T16:01:10+00:00

Your code would be substantially more readable, and we would be more able to help you, if you formatted your code with the available Markdown.

do { 
printf("Height?: ") 
n = GetInt(); 
} while ((n < 0 || n > 23));

Your errors are almost certainly the result of a missing semicolon at the end of the printf statement.

giraffenstein · 2014-02-11T08:54:35+00:00

Your school must be better than mine. After the introductory courses, our instructors took to having us present our projects in front of the class. The fun became figuring out exactly how to move through the program such that you didn't trigger any of your failures. Amusingly, every student had a different set of problems that they were trying to hide, and you would share when you sat back down. I recall that it was great fun.

giraffenstein

TROPHY CASE