[Also first time] Overly Complicated Description

Authoring Inform 7
1

Okay, so, firstly, I’m not completely new to Inform 7, but I haven’t used it for a good few years. So I’m not completely green regarding these things. But, that said, one of the main reasons I never managed to finish a project was my tangential way of over-complicating things beyond I7’s ability.
And so, I need to know what’s wrong with this particular segment. I’ve punctuated the hell out of it, mucked about, and reduced the issues I7 had from five to one;

/
The arm is a part of the player. It has the description “[If arm is broken]This brilliant, invaluable tool of evolutionary engineering, is currently a crunchy, painful mess. [otherwise]It is a perfectly healthy, normal, sleeved arm that is not broken. Which, you know, is nice.”
The arm can be broken.
The arm is not broken.
When the player pokes the arm,
[If arm is broken] If a random chance of 1 in 30 succeeds, say "Your arm drops painfully from it’s socket. Well done. You fall the the cold steel floor, flopping like a fish, as blood slowly drains from the frayed stump. congrats.
You have died.
Score: 2
Game over.

	I'm serious.
	...
	...
	Okay, fine.
	'Your arm leaps from the floor, back to your shoulder, filling your veins with delicious, life-saving blood.'
	Don't even DO that shit again.
	Your arm is still broken though.". Otherwise say "[one of]Yup, still broken. And painful, why don't you poke it some more?[or]JEEESUS that hurts![or]Hah, doesn't even sti- OH there it is![or]Yeah, it's kinda hanging at a sort of... angle now...[purely at random]".
[If arm is not broken] Say: "You poke it. Great job."

/
(I would have put that in code, but the colour helps break the text nicely)

The problem is with the "Otherwise say “[one of]…” part, where Inform can’t find a verb.
So, I can’t see how to fix it. I can see why Inform’s having difficulty, but I have no idea how to sort it out. I’ve changed thins from ‘If-’ to ‘When-’, taken out, added, swapped around semicolons, full colons, commas and full-stops.

I hope there’s a simple solution.
Sorry if there’s too much stuff there, but I thought you guys might need the full arm-related stuff. This might not even be the right board for this…

2

The first thing is, green text is comments. The compiler ignores comments. That’s anything in square brackets outside of quoted strings.

The second thing is, on the forum, you should paste code in [code]

tags, because that preserves indentation and you’re probably screwing up the indentation. Or at least using it in a confused manner.

3

The full stop before “Otherwise” definitely needs to be a semicolon, and the 'otherwise" line needs to be indented on the same level as the “if” it’s attached to… meaning zarf is right, you’re going to need code tags.

Also, “When the player pokes the arm…” is not how rules like that are written. They are usually attached to action descriptions* like “Instead of poking the arm.” Though in your case you could write “Instead of poking the broken arm…” for that stuff and “Instead of poking the arm…” for the other stuff – you don’t have to worry about them both running at once because the more specific rule runs before the less specific one and the “Instead” rule cuts off anything else from running.

Check out some more examples in the documentation for examples for how this works.

*The technical detail is that they have to go into rulebooks. The “Every turn” rulebook isn’t linked to specific actions, and technically the “Before,” “Instead,” and “After” rules doesn’t have to be linked to specific rulebooks, but it’s very rare that you will want to have a completely generic “Before” etc. rule.

4

Okay, thanks. I wasn’t sure how important inentation was, nor how important the code tags were.
Here’s the lot in code, in case you need it, but thanks anyhow. I’ll look into making the changes.

[code]The arm is a part of the player. It has the description “[If arm is broken]This brilliant, invaluable tool of evolutionary engineering, is currently a crunchy, painful mess. [otherwise]It is a perfectly healthy, normal, sleeved arm that is not broken. Which, you know, is nice.”
The arm can be broken.
The arm is not broken.
When the player pokes the arm,
[If arm is broken] If a random chance of 1 in 30 succeeds, say "Your arm drops painfully from it’s socket. Well done. You fall the the cold steel floor, flopping like a fish, as blood slowly drains from the frayed stump. congrats.
You have died.
Score: 2
Game over.

	I'm serious.
	...
	...
	Okay, fine.
	'Your arm leaps from the floor, back to your shoulder, filling your veins with delicious, life-saving blood.'
	Don't even DO that shit again.
	Your arm is still broken though.",Otherwise say "[one of]Yup, still broken. And painful, why don't you poke it some more?[or]JEEESUS that hurts![or]Hah, doesn't even sti- OH there it is![or]Yeah, it's kinda hanging at a sort of... angle now...[purely at random]".
[If arm is not broken] Say: "You poke it. Great job."[/code]

It has since been changed to:

The arm is a part of the player. It has the description "[If arm is broken]This brilliant, invaluable tool of evolutionary engineering, is currently a crunchy, painful mess. [otherwise]It is a perfectly healthy, normal, sleeved arm that is not broken. Which, you know, is nice." The arm can be broken. The arm is not broken. If the player pokes the arm: If arm is broken: If a random chance of 1 in 30 succeeds, say "Your arm drops painfully from it's socket. Well done. You fall the the cold steel floor, flopping like a fish, as blood slowly drains from the frayed stump. congrats... Your arm is still broken though."; Otherwise say "[one of]Yup, still broken. And painful, why don't you poke it some more?[or]JEEESUS that hurts![or]Hah, doesn't even sti- OH there it is![or]Yeah, it's kinda hanging at a sort of... angle now...[purely at random]". If arm is not broken, say "You poke it. Great job."

Now the trouble seems to be in the final line.

I do appreciate your guys’ help with a part of the IF that 50% of the players will NEVER actually find.

EDIT: I should point out I tried using “Instead of poking the arm-”, but got nowhere. Also changing the final line from “If arm is not broken-” to “Otherwise-” and even prefacing with “If the player pokes the arm,-”.

5

Fixed it! I’d totally bloody forgotten to make ‘poking’ a verb.
Thanks for your help though, guys. You were invaluable.