Getting the name of the verb in an action? [i7]

After a player’s action I can check what nouns they referred to with “[the noun]” and “[the second noun]”. Is there a similar way to refer to the verb used? Things like “[the current action]” include verbs and nouns both, so that doesn’t help.

Specifically I want to be able to do something like

Before someone does something: if the verb is not listed in AllowedVerbs: say "[The verb]" is not allowed; stop the action.

I’ve tried naming the action, with syntax like “Before someone does something (called the verb)”, but that doesn’t seem to be possible.

Try “the action name part of the current action”.

Before doing anything: say "[The action name part of the current action] is not allowed."; stop the action.

Thanks, that totally works!

Now, err… how could I have figured that out myself? I read a lot of documentation examples, but never came across any such thing. And then I tried browsing (somewhat randomly) through the index, but again no luck.

I always feel lost when I want to figure out some technical issue like this.

I first heard of it here on the forum (by Matt W?). And I think he (or someone else in that thread) mentioned something about its not being documented.

You can also find “the noun part”, “the second noun part”, and “the actor part” of any stored action (the “current action” is a stored action).

This is actually documented in a fairly straightforward way in section 12.20 of the documentation – as long as you know to look at that section. Which I guess I would’ve done by searching the documentation for “current action.” Searching through the documentation can be a pain (it bugs me that it slowly constructs the list of hits backwards, working through all the examples before it gets to the main text that I’m actually looking for), but I often have reasonably decent luck finding what I’m looking for – though it can take a few tries to construct the right query.

(I wonder if you’re thinking of this – “convert to request” doesn’t seem to be documented, and is one of those bits of I6 voodoo anyway. In related news, I haven’t worked on this for a while because I’m not sure how to extract “kissing iris” from “asking folks to try kissing Iris.”)

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There’s an apparent inconsistency of language, in this case, that made it especially hard to search for.

An action name is something like “the taking action.” This implies that the verb (taking) is considered an action.

But if I take a rock, then the [the current action] is “taking the rock”. So here action refers to the complete phrase, including verb and noun. It was this that made me think that what I was looking for must use some word other than action.

Eh, anyway, thanks for the help!

Ha, yeah, didn’t mean to suggest that you had done anything wrong. I think that the uselessness of the I7 documentation is much exaggerated in some quarters, but it definitely isn’t always easy to find what you want unless you already know what you’re looking for. (In which I7 is not absolutely unique; I can tell you sometime about my efforts to find out how to rotate an Excel spreadsheet 90%, or an even more fun part of the documentation.)

Anyway, “the current action” is of the kind “stored action,” which includes the actor and the nouns like “player taking the bun,” whereas an “action name” is just the generic action that rulebooks operate on, like “the taking action.”

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