Doing Wounds

Hi there, I’m fairly new to Inform and I’m currently trying to do my first proper IF game.

The problem I’m wrestling with at present is Wounds.

I’d like the Player to start the game with several wounds, which can be examined and described. Then later they can be lost as they are ‘treated’.

I’ve come up with two basic ways of doing this, neither of which really works the way I’d like;

Method 1 is to have the wounds literally as items carried by the player, which then shows up in the inventory and can be dropped. This seems a bit silly and not in keeping with the tone of the rest of the game.

Method 2 is to have ‘wounds’ as an object in a limbo location ‘room 0’ and to place wounds in scope so they can be examined whatever the location of the player is. The problem here is that if the player types in drop or take wounds the game gives the answer “you cannot reach into room 0.” Any attempts at using ‘instead of taking wounds’ to prevent this are being overridden for some reason.

There’s probably a much easier way of doing all of this, but unfortunately it’s eluding me at present. Any suggestions welcome.

You want ‘part of’.

The gaping flesh wound is part of the player.

Then, when you want to get rid of them, you just remove them from play.

I knew there was a simpler way of doing it!

Thanks!

Although you’ve already solved your problem, just for your interest: The Instead rules are not overridden, they’re just never reached in this case. This is because “Basic accessibility” is checked before the Instead stage is reached and the “can’t reach inside rooms rule” stops the action with the answer you mentioned. You could intervene with a Before rule, though, because the Before stage is executed before :wink: the Basic accessibility…

I found it very helpful to have the flow of rules at hand when working on these matters. Find it here: inform7.com/learn/documents/Rules%20Chart.pdf