This is kind of a part 2 to my other question, about ‘Instead of doing anything other than…’. I have a very restrictive rule regarding interacting with a particular character, but you can ask this character about things. I have three actions for ‘asking’–one is the basic ‘asking about a topic’, and the other two–‘interring about something’ and ‘questioning about something’–take second nouns and are enabled by Epistemology. Thus my allowable action list with this character is/was –
Instead of doing anything other than attacking, listening, thinking about, whiffing, thinking speculatively about, asking, interring, questioning, reading or examining with the evil ghost:
The strange thing about this, in testing, was, while the ‘interring’(from interrogating, this one took as yet ‘unknown’ second nouns), and ‘questioning’(for known second nouns) were both allowed, the basic ‘asking about a topic’ was not–although it’s on the list–and it responded with the rebuff called for in the rule (“Your action is ineffectual…”).
I solved this problem by bypassing the rule with a Before rule–careful to include any Check rules for this action, and a ‘stop the action.’ clause where the rule ends–
Before asking the evil ghost about a topic:
if the manhole is not open:
say "Blah blah blah...";
stop the action;
otherwise:
…..
stop the action.
It now works perfectly, but was there any other, better way to do this??
There may be some ambiguity with “asking” here, because if you look in the Index tab and then the Actions tab, there are two built-in “asking” actions-- “asking it for” and “asking it about.” I would try to be more specific when you list the action, for instance, “asking about a topic.”
Although when I try something like that in an “Instead of doing anything other than” rule, I get this message:
So I guess that won’t work.
Another approach would be to put the different actions you want to rebuff in a category, like “useless behavior,” and then say “Instead of useless behavior:”. Section §7.15 in the documentation (“Kinds of action”) talks about this.
Thanks BG. I had tried putting ‘asking about a topic’ into a category like that–it didn’t work, but I didn’t think of putting ALL of those actions together. I’ll try that next time I run into this problem.