Parchment (Playfic) acting weird

I’m writing a story on the website Playfic, which uses Parchment for Inform 7. For some reason, adding a certain item seemed to cause the game to not run. There was no error message or anything. The game just wouldn’t load. I could edit and make it load by deleting the item in the code (only altering the other code associated with it to apply to another object), and it ran fine before, which is how I figured out it was this specific item that was the problem.

The item was just a compass.

The code was as followed:

[code]The player carries a compass.

To say dont-drop-the-compass: say “[one of]Nah, you’ve got a terrible sense of direction.[or]You wouldn’t be able to navigate without it.[or]You’d get lost without it, so no.[or]Too important.[or]You need that to navigate.[or]There’s no way you’re getting rid of your trusty compass![or]Dropped.[pause for effect][paragraph break]Nah, just kidding.[purely at random]”.

Instead of dropping the compass: say “[one of]It’s very precious to you, so you’d prefer to keep it on your person at all times. Plus, you’re a pretty terrible navigator without it.[or][dont-drop-the-compass][stopping]”.

Instead of going somewhere when the player does not carry the compass: say “You’re not going anywhere without your compass.”[/code]

I’m fairly confident this was a problem with Inform and/or Playfic, not my code. Has anyone else here had problems with that?

Well, Inform 7 doesn’t like [pause for effect]:

It compiles fine if I remove [pause for effect]

Also, tried my test game with your code on playfic and got this error (it also doesn’t seem to like [pause for effect]):

Problem. In the line 'say "[one of]Nah, you've got a terrible [...] h, just kidding.[purely at random]"'  , 
I was expecting that 'pause for effect' would be something to 'say', but it didn't look like any form 
of 'say' that I know. So I tried to read 'pause for effect' as a value of some kind (because it's legal to say values), 
but couldn't make sense of it that way either. 

“[pause for effect]” isn’t a standard Inform phrase. Are you using it from some extension? PlayFic uses an old version of Inform and not all extensions are available.

Yes. I’m using Emily Short’s screen effects extension, and at one point I made it so ‘pause for effect’ redirected back to ‘wait for any key’ because I often wrote it by accident. If you include the extension and swap ‘pause for effect’ with ‘wait for any key’ – or just add to say pause for effect: wait for any key it will work fine. That issue was seemingly unrelated – it was just the compass part the kept making it not load. I’ve been using Basic Screen Effects for months without trouble.