Keyring description...

All of my games feature a keyring, as a portable supporter with 4 keys (your usual familiar ones–car, house, mailbox and unidentifiable key which you use to pry stuff with)–when the player uses a key, he implicitly ‘takes it off of’(though this ‘silent’) of the ring, uses it, and ‘puts it back on’ (silently). That’s not the problem. Just a trivial question and I am probably being anal about this–Is there any other way, than the below, to get a description (upon examining) of the keyring, without getting a repeat of the list of keys which are on the keyring–

A keyring is carried by the player. It is a portable supporter. The description is "It's a shiny blue carabeener-type keyring. It has your car key, your apartment key, and your mailbox key, plus a key that you call your [']utility['] key, which you cannot identify, but you use it to pry stuff with." Understand "key ring" or "keys" as the keyring. Instead of examining the keyring: say "[the description of the keyring]".

The last line prints only the description of the keyring, and not a list of the keys on it (and there is no chance of losing any of them), which ‘examining’ would do with any supporter–the keys are already included in the description.

I thought there might be a better way of doing this–so I tried altering my description to include ‘[a list of mykeys which are on the keyring]’, because I thought that that way, each of the keys would be ‘mentioned’, and inhibit the listing, without my having to have an Instead rule. It didn’t work.

Any ideas, or do I already have the best solution to this?

Thanks

The list of things on the keyring is produced by the “examine supporters rule,” so you can do this:

The examine supporters rule does nothing when examining the keyring.

To try to find out the names of rules that do things like this, sometimes it helps to type “rules” before you try an action like “x keyring.”

(BTW I think it’s spelled “carabiner.”)

Thanks Matt, that’s a handy tip, I tend to overlook the built-in rules.

I thought I had seen ‘carabeener’ somewhere, but I see that you are right about that, too.