'Instead of doing something other than...' problem

Authoring Inform 7
1

I’m working on a game where the player can become exhausted and unable to move under certain conditions, and I’m trying to get the game to recognize that status and limit actions. I read the instructions for the ‘instead of doing something other than X’ in the Actions section of the rulebook and I think I followed them correctly, but I keep getting error messages. Here’s the code I used:

Pep is a kind of value. A person has a pep. The peps are peppy and exhausted. A person is usually peppy.

Instead of doing something other than waiting, listening, looking, or examining something when the pep of the player is exhausted:
say “You’re too exhausted to move.”

Here’s the message I got:

You wrote ‘Instead of doing something other than waiting, listening, looking, or examining something when the pep of the player is exhausted’ , which seems to introduce a rule taking effect only if the action is ‘doing something other than waiting, listening, looking, or examining something when the pep of the player is exhausted’. The part after ‘when’ (or ‘while’) was fine, but the earlier words did not make sense as a description of an action. This looks like a list of actions to avoid: ‘doing something other than waiting’ was okay; ‘listening’ was okay; ‘looking’ was okay; ‘examining something’ was okay; so I am unable to place this rule into any rulebook.

As near as I can tell, it’s trying to run everything together into one long action; I’ve tried multiple ways to write it and nothing seems to work. Can anyone give me a way to do this that the program will accept?

2 
Instead of doing something other than waiting, listening, looking, or examining when...

The compiler doesn’t like the mixture of generic actions (listening) and noun-qualified actions (examining something).

3

Here’s code that is from Wade Clarke’s Six, originally. I used it for my own means.

an object can be fiddly or unfiddly. an object is usually unfiddly.

instead of doing something with a fiddly object:
if action is procedural:
continue the action;
say “You don’t need to fiddle with that.”;

to decide whether the action is procedural: [aip]
if examining, yes;
if attacking, yes;
if smelling, yes;
if saying yes, yes;
if saying no, yes;
if dropping, yes;
if looking, yes;
decide no;

(This code is also useful for if you don’t want something to cost a player a turn in a time-dependent puzzle.)

4

That seems to work, thanks for the help!