I’m working a new game idea in which a player may or may not respond to a series of timed room descriptions…such as on a cart, moving down a hallway, in which the user is presented with a series of brief descriptions that she may or may not act upon.
Message 1: you are passing a picture of Dorian Gray
possible response: go a direction
if no response in 3 seconds, a second description is displayed
Message 2: You are now fast approaching a Van Gogh painting
3 seconds to respond.
etc…
is this even something that’s possible? I can’t even think of a way to phrase it to find something like this in the manual.
Every turn rules do what they sound like: you can print something after each player action. (Or, if you do a little bit of counting, every second or third player turn, or what have you.)
Printing something after some number of seconds is harder. By that time the player is in the middle of typing their next command. Or maybe they’re still reading the previous description. Depends how fast they read.
Interrupting input is possible but it’s very hard to make it feel right for every player.