More disambiguation trickiness

Authoring Inform 7
1

Say I’m playing a character named Bob who is dressed as E.T., and is wearing an E.T. mask.

I might later be playing a character called Sue, who can look at Bob and refer to him, parser-wise, as Bob or as E.T.

To allow this to happen I have to ‘Understand “E.T.” as Bob.’ Of course, Bob’s mask is called “E.T. mask”

After all that’s in place, if I’m Bob and I type “drop E.T.” in an attempt to drop my mask, I get the disambiguation question:

“Which do you mean, yourself or your E.T. mask?”

Is there a way I can stop character pseudonyms from being offered at disambiguation time? I’ve got a headache here as I’ve got a heap of people in costume and the player might be any one of them. And obviously I don’t only want to stop it happening for ‘drop’.

2

I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that you want:

Does the player mean doing something with the player: it is unlikely.

3

I previously tried either that or something like it without success, but to make sure, I tried it the way you wrote here and… sadly, it doesn’t do the trick.

4

Another trick would be limiting the understand phrase:

Understand "E.T." as Bob when the player is not Bob.
5

Oh cool, I didn’t know you could add qualification to ‘understand’ phrases. Thanks.

And here I was already starting to hack Aaron Reed’s ‘Numbered Disambiguation Choices’ to eliminate ‘yourself’ as an option. I had made some progress, too!

6

Ok, I’m trying it now.

The thing is, the following works without any disambiguation:

The Kitchen is a room.

The monster mask is a thing.

The player carries the mask.

Understand "monster" as yourself.

So you must be doing something more complicated.

7

It may be the difference is in this part - you wrote ‘Understand “monster” as yourself.’

In my game, I can’t use that construction without qualification because who you are changes. You might not be the monster.

But if it’s not that alone, you’re right, I do have a bunch of other code going on due to the fact the player could be different people.