I7: Printing a locale para

[code]“Locale Para Demo” by Me

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.

Robert Rothman

Section 17.26 of the manual:

I think the code you need is just:

Rule for printing a paragraph about Joe: say "Joe is here, busily twiddling his thumbs.".

What you want to do, I think, is use the initial appearance property instead:

Joe is a man.  "Joe is here, busily twiddling his thumbs." Joe is in That Place.

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.

Robert Rothman

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.)