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29 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
29 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
** Report rules for actions by other people
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(Reporting rules for other characters' behavior; The Man of Steel Excuses Himself)
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Elaborating the report rules to be more interesting than "Clark goes west."
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Report rules can be a good point at which to add local color: while Inform provides default descriptions of character behavior, these are rather generic and can stand to be customized.
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For instance, if we wanted to liven up our previous Clark Kent example:
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{*}Report Clark Kent going a direction (called the way):
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say "[one of]With a particularly weak excuse[or]Muttering[at random] about [random excuse subject], Clark heads [way]." instead.
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To say random excuse subject:
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choose a random row in the Table of Lame Excuses; say "[reply entry]".
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Table of Lame Excuses
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reply
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"needing a paper-clip"
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"wanting an English-Tuvalu dictionary"
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"walking a neighbor's dog"
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"hearing air-raid sirens"
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"having drunk too much coffee"
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"thinking he smells smoke"
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"wondering where Lois got to"
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"needing to speak to Jimmy"
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"noticing the Good Year blimp"
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It's good to be careful, as the library report rules have been designed and tested to describe every contingency (going through doors, going in vehicles, etc.): so when replacing a report rule, we should try to consider all the possible variations of the action that we might want to describe.
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However, in this case, our scenario is so simple that there are no doors, vehicles, or pushable objects, so we're safe in giving Clark a very simple reporting scheme. |