Just a bit of musing

[Chris Gray]

:I don't actually agree with this.  This is where you end up with things
:like "push" as a social, except for one room on the entire mud where it
:pushes a button.  In another room with a similar button but written by
:a different person, you have to use "press."  I dislike the effect you
:get from the old adventurer games of "guess the verb" - I want to know
:what commands I have availible to interact with my character right from
:the start.  Thus I know if I see a button in the room, I can alway use
:a certain command straight off to try to push it.  If that doesn't work
:it means it's not a pushable button and I can start bending my mind to think
:of other things to do with it, rather then "well...lemme try 'press'...hmmm,
:maybe it doesn't answer to 'button', how about 'green'?"
:This is in the same category as restricting the "steal" command to only
:those in the thieves' guild.  Huh?  My character can't try to steal something
:from someone?	Why not?  Is he just so incredibly sheltered that he's never
:heard of or even thought of trying to take something from someone without
:their knowning?  Now, he'll probably fail, but this is just fine, and differen
:from restricting the command altogether.

Actually I tend to agree with this quite strongly. Even though I've got
lots of exceptions in my system. I've played "guess the verb" way too
many times! However, that said, I think you do want to allow some
exceptions, else you end up with the different kind of "guess the verb",
where the player knows that verb "balance" is used to find out their
balance at a bank, but now they have to figure out what the verb is to
try to get the see-saw to stay entirely off the ground. If you put
everything into one complex verb, you end up with *no* modularity in
your system, and changing anything has ramifications everywhere. Its also
a lot more painful to change a complex verb on the fly than it is to add
another simple verb.

So, I vote for a balanced situation - have a good set of verbs in the
main grammar, but allow special case verbs and grammars as needed.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA