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45 lines
2.3 KiB
Plaintext
45 lines
2.3 KiB
Plaintext
Example: ** Murder on the Orient Express
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Location: What are relations for?
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RecipeLocation: Character Knowledge and Reasoning
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Index: Relations and their uses
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Description: A number of sleuths (the player among them) find themselves aboard the Orient Express, where a murder has taken place, and one of them is apparently the culprit. Naturally they do not agree on whom, but there is physical evidence which may change their minds...
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For: Z-Machine
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The following example creates two new relations, and two new verbs, in order to set up a tangled web of intrigue.
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{*}"Murder on the Orient Express"
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The Dining Car is a room. Lord Peter is a man in the Dining Car. Sherlock Holmes is a man in the Dining Car. Miss Marple is a woman in the Dining Car. Adam Dalgliesh is a man in the Dining Car.
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Suspecting relates various people to one person.
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The verb to suspect means the suspecting relation.
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Dalgliesh suspects Holmes. Holmes suspects Lord Peter. Lord Peter suspects Holmes. Miss Marple suspects the player.
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Exculpating relates one thing to various people.
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The verb to exculpate means the exculpating relation.
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The silver bullet exculpates the player. The pipe ash exculpates Holmes. The poison pen letter exculpates Lord Peter. The poison pen letter exculpates Miss Marple. [Poor Dalgliesh. I guess he did it.]
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The pipe ash, the letter and the silver bullet are carried.
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Given this, we can then set up elaborate rules:
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{**}Instead of showing something to a person who suspects the player:
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say "'You would say that,' remarks [the second noun] darkly.".
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Instead of showing something which exculpates the player to someone:
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say "'How striking!' says [the second noun]. 'Almost I begin to distrust myself.'".
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Test me with "show the letter to miss marple / show the silver bullet to holmes".
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And so on: "if Dalgliesh suspects someone who is exculpated by something carried by the player...", for instance, makes a fitting final example for this chapter. The description
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someone who is exculpated by something carried by the player
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expresses a complicated idea in very few words, and in such a way that a passer-by looking at the source text would immediately see what was meant.
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The moral is that relations allow sophisticated patterns of behaviour to be created in a way that reads back naturally as English.
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