In one particular case in my IF, the player is given a meaningless disambiguation question. I would like to know how to prevent it.
Specifically, I have a clone of the Enchanter Trilogy magic system, in which a spell is a table-defined kind of value and the casting action applies to one spell and one visible thing. Since some spells in the original game, such as GNUSTO (copy a spell scroll into a spell book), target spells (> GNUSTO REZROV), I told Inform to understand the inscribed spell property as describing a spell scroll.
The edge case in this is if the player has two gnusto scrolls and tries to > GNUSTO GNUSTO. The game asks which gnusto scroll she wants to target, even though it’s not obvious to the player why this happens. And since a scroll is consumed when you cast the spell, the decision really doesn’t matter–both are destroyed either way.
And as part of the plot, this exact situation comes up. I already have some code in place specifically for this, to prevent the player from using > GNUSTO GNUSTO with only one scroll. Is there something I could put in there to instruct Inform not to disambiguate and just pick one at random?
If the two scrolls are formally identical – two objects of the same kind, with no distinguishing synonyms – the parser should do that. (Skip disambiguation, pick one at random.)
It sounds like this isn’t how you’ve set it up, but I’m not sure from your description how you have.
Maybe it’s sufficient to write a “does the player mean” rule which gives one scroll priority over the other. (An arbitrary choice rather than a truly random choice, but that should be enough for you.)
The player has a burin and can copy a scroll onto another, which changes the “inscribed spell” property. At first the player has four scrolls of the “blank” spell, and I gave them different colors to prevent a different bug. But this means that they aren’t identical enough for this one usage, which only requires that the spells be the same.
Also, since the player has four blank scrolls, only two of which are used here, I don’t know how to make a does the player mean rule give them all different preferences. Is there a way?