In “The Scroll Thief”, I have two actions with similar grammar lines.
The “casting it at” action takes one spell and one visible thing, and is Understood as “cast [spell] on/at [something]” or “[spell] [something]”.
The “vaguely summoning” action takes one topic, and is Understood as “cast zifmia on/at [text]” or “zifmia [text]”.
The intent was that the latter action would catch any failed attempts to cast the “zifmia” spell and react more intelligently than just saying “you can’t see any such thing”. However, despite a rule saying “does the player mean vaguely summoning: it is very unlikely”, this action is always parsed first, and the “casting it at” action never gets a chance to respond.
Is there a way I can change the precedence here? I know Inform will prefer a grammar line saying “examine [something]” over “examine [text]”, but I think the additional [spell] token in the casting it at action keeps that from happening here.
My intent is to make “cast zifmia at [something unrecognized]” give a special error message about needing to see a person before you can summon them: more often than not I expect the player will be attempting to summon an implemented object which is not currently visible, or an NPC mentioned somewhere in the story text but not actually implemented. I would normally use a “mistake” line but I know those always take precedence over normal grammar lines.
However, changing the spell name to a token did fix it:
Understand "zifmia" as "[zifmia]".
Understand "[zifmia] [text]" or "cast [zifmia] on/at [text]" as vaguely summoning.