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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: General examine question
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Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 21:36:56 GMT
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Lucian P. Smith <lpsmith@rice.edu> wrote:
>What I *do* think would work in your situation is to have the item have a
>'sub-item' that contained the new description you wanted.  i.e.:
>
>>X THING
>
>It's a pretty red and blue.  It has wavy lines patterned over its surface.
>
>>X WAVY LINES
>
>Looking more closely, you notice that the wavy lines outline a small
>square on the underside of the Thing.

A number of people complained that they didn't know where the POSTRA
spell as the Enchanter in Heroes came from; the walkthrough used it
without the examines necessary to find it. It was pretty easy, though;
once you acquired the Kriit, examining the Kriit mentioned runes, and
examining the runes told you about the POSTRA spell.

I'm hoping that this was because people started just playing from the
walkthrough and thus didn't do the easy clues that weren't on the
walkthrough, but I think it's possible that there's a danger here
that some people won't examine the sub-object because they'll have
gotten a thorough enough description from the top level comment that
they won't think there's anything they're missing.

One problem I have is that lots of games--mine included--will do the
classic "make the sub-object a synonym or the main object". That's
good in the sense of being better than having the word unknown,
but it's bad because once you get one or two of those duplicate
examine messages, you stop examining sub-objects. Or I do, anyway.
But I'm a notoriously bad player.

SeanB
