Alright. I’m losing sleep over this.
I don’t know how to best explain this problem.
Let’s say we have a bunch of desks, but all represented with a plural object called “desks”.
What do you do if you want “PUT APPLE ON DESK” to have the same functionality as “PUT APPLE ON DESKS”?
And then the listing says “you see an apple on one of the desks”.
Then you try “FEEL DESK” and you get “The desks are not important” instead of “one of the desks are not important” or “one of the desks is not important” or "the desks is not important$.
I have many such “objects” in my game, which should be treated as “one example from of a collection” vs “the collection as a whole” on a per-action basis. You can imagine this is a vocab matching nightmare, and the action reports keep mismatching between “is” and “are”.
Is there a way people usually handle this?
EDIT: To clarify, I am not meaning to implement a bunch of individual desks. There, ideally, would be a “this specific desk if the player needs just one” and “the whole collection of desks, if it doesn’t matter”, but ideally it would actually be the same object in the code, and would vary it’s plurality and printed name, based on the action taken.