This Place is a room. That Place is north of this place.
Joe is a man. Joe is in That Place.
Rule for printing a locale paragraph about Joe:
Say “Joe is here, busily twiddling his thumbs.” instead.
[/code]
This produces:
What I want to do is to replace the standard “You can see Joe here” with the custom message, not to have both show up. I know this must be pretty basic, but I’m not getting it. What am I missing?
Thanks. I wound up using the “writing a paragraph about” approach, which does the trick. The example I gave was somewhat oversimplified. In the actual situation, the custom description only is supposed to occur under specified conditions, which do not include the first time the player encounters “Joe,” so I wasn’t sure how the “initial appearance” approach would work.
The initial appearance property applies up until the player first picks up or carries the object. (For an NPC, that typically doesn’t happen, of course.)