Allow for flavour text about sidekick HOT 6 CLOSED

It's not just the effort, it's that treating the non-parsable parts of the expression as comments will make the bot's behaviour flacky and unpredictable. I see a lot of typos in the bot. People would mistype the roll modifiers and get an error. If we treat anything we can't parse as comments, then they'll get a wrong roll instead. I think that getting a wrong roll, where we misinterpreted a part of the expression as a comment, will be much more confusing than an explicit error.

So I really don't think that treating just about anything as a comment is a right way to go for the bot's default behaviour.

On the other hand, it's possible to implement a tunable configuration that on a particular channel would switch the bot into a simpler D&D only mode or something, were the syntax is fixed and anything else can be treated as comments. I think I will consider this with enough support from the backers.

Thanks for your input. I'm glad we shed some light on the subject.

from sidekick.

I did this initially but then reconsidered. There's a lot of dice systems out there besides D&D and the syntax might be quite unpredictable for all I know. Here's an example from just a day before: #37 (comment). I'd like a clear separation between the comment and the expression proper in order not to be dancing around guessing whether something is an expression or a comment.

What you might try to do instead is memorize your initiative roll with "/r $initiative = 1d20+7".
Rolling "/r $initiative" is both descriptive and faster.

from sidekick.

What I'd rather do is the "/r $initiative all" syntax. It will get the stored initiative rolls of all the active players on the channel, roll them and print a sorted list. How does that sound?

And I've just thought of the "/r $initiative all desc" and "/r $initiative all shuffle" options to control the sorting.

from sidekick.

Hmn, Roll20 has the syntax to just display any text, or even display inline dice rolls. I was just so used to that system that it took me much too long to figure out why I was getting errors all the time. (I love the error messages, though.)

The most important thing, at any rate, is to make clear what the roll was for. If I type "rolling spot check", and then two other people talk while I finish writing up "/roll 1d20 + 7" and press enter, then the GM has to process which roll was for what again. It's a little bit messy; adding what a roll was for in the bot response makes it a lot cleaner.

We can do without, obviously, but its minor inconveniences adding up all the time.

In my own simple python bot, I checked for the character | and printed out anything that came after as plain text. It's not as sexy, but it works.

from sidekick.

In my own simple python bot, I checked for the character | and printed out anything that came after as plain text. It's not as sexy, but it works.

How is that different from the "#" comment character used by Sidekick?
Have you missed it in the docs? It's in the second example.

from sidekick.

It... isn't D: sorry for the confusion, that was just to make sure I explained the 'print text'-thing correctly. I could've used # as an example too. It was more to convey that $initiative isn't quite what I'm looking for.

If it's too much effort for too little gain, don't worry about it!

from sidekick.