Command Language Guide

This guide is intended as a rather complete guide and reference to all of the commands the Bee will respond to. It shouldn’t be necessary for every storyteller in a game to know this document inside and out to play. (For that purpose there are the Quick Reference guides.)

Todo

Write the quick reference guides and link them here.

Overview

The Bee listens for commands surrounded in square brackets. The commands that it expects are meant to appear like English sentences and should generally follow the structure an English speaker would expect. Every command ends with a period.

There are a few conventions used in this document, intended to keep the language examples clear to follow. The square brackets around examples will be bold to help examples stand out. Variables that can be replaced will be italicized. Most examples will use rather verbose sentence formations and a first-person format, but the Bee will parse several more examples than specifically mentioned in this document. Example:

[I move Character Name to count spaces direction.]

The parser also supports the obvious third-person variations of verbs and many words in a sentence can be elided, including the subject for a more imperative tone.

Note

It may be important to keep in mind that although commands look like English, the parser is stupid.

Pronouns

One particular simplification to keep in mind when working with the Bee: there is only one pronoun. While you can use all your favorite friends to represent it (such as I, he, she, and it), the parser doesn’t pay attention to which particular one you used and using different English pronouns in the same sentence doesn’t affect the meaning to the Bee.

For players with one and only one character The Pronoun refers to “the current player’s character”. Players with multiple characters will deal with The Pronoun as “the current character”. The current character is implicitly set in most sentences. The current character can be set explicitly with the “as clause”, which can be prepended to most commands:

This example won’t parse, as it needs a command, but should get the point across... [As Character Name, ...]

It is important to note that the comma ending the clause is required. For role-playing purposes the synonyms “For” and “As for” can also be used to begin the clause. The “as clause” sets the current character for the duration of the current email message or Wave blit. (The Bee will not remember beyond that.)

Character Naming Restrictions

Bee tries to be as flexible as possible in parsing character names, which as the examples above alone show are used in many different ways, but there are still some restrictions required to keep things sensible. Hopefully the general overall flexibility provided makes up for the few cases where you may bump into a syntax error.

  • Names are case insensitive (as is the rest of the parser)
  • Names may consist of any number of words
  • Names may not contain any commas or periods
  • Names may contain any other punctuation or unicode characters
  • Names may not contain any reserved words

Todo

Should probably create a nicely formatted list/table of all reserved word combinations... For now, people are welcome to consult the grammar itself.

Also, names are opaque strings to the Bee, so the character name needs to be written in full each time it appears.

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