The section of the manual for naming rulebooks seems to say that if the rulebook is based on something other than actions, its name must end with “for”. Is this true? Earlier I wanted to call a person-based rulebook “behavior of”, but I had to call it “behavior for”. How does that work with activities?
I was just reading the section on the “Deciding the Scope of something” activity (tried several chapters before I finally remembered that it was an activity, so maybe it’s in the activities chapter), and I have a number of questions:
I gather from this and the example that “Deciding the scope of” is a person-based activity (it’s a little ambiguous - the section is called "deciding the scope of something). But aside from the example, there’s no real information on how to use it, in terms of when to use someone besides the player, whether to replace the “rule for deciding the scope of” or to do anything “before deciding the scope of” someone. Is that somewhere else in the manual?
Scope is one of those very fiddly bits of Inform, and the manual’s description of it leaves swaths of it unexplained. Scope’s tied to what the player or NPC can interact with, so any rules that you write will have to do with scope for the player or for a live person who’s interacting with the simulated world.
The only scope rules I’ve ever had to do are “after deciding the scope of…” to add extra things in scope or pull some things out of scope. Unless you want to completely hand-roll your own scoping method, I would stick with after rules to make minor adjustments to the list of things in scope.
Have you looked through the five examples that are part of that manual page? They may help you get a better handle on adjusting scope.
Er, the middle rulebook of an activity begins with the word for, but other than that, there’s no restrictions. For and of are both optional prepositions after a rulebook name (either in an activity or out of one). For example (ha), these all compile and work fine[code]
Behavior is a person based rulebook.
Behavior for yourself: say “hi”.
Behavior yourself: say “hi”.
Behavior of yourself: say “hi”.
Contemplating something is an activity on numbers.
For contemplating 5: say “yes”.
For contemplating for 5: say “yes”.
For contemplating of 5: say “yes”.
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