The Disappearing Bob

[Zed (Zed Lopez)]

I didn’t know about this until this thread in September:

Role-based interactive

Congratulations! You’ve uncovered your first I7 undocumented weirdness. Terror of the Sierra Madre says: If “player” is not set to any named person, Inform creates a bland person called “yourself” to represent the player. To avoid this, we set “player” to the person we want to begin as. And this is a fib, as I said above: it always creates a yourself object. But because I had set the player to Alice in a when play begins rule, instead of in an assertion, I had missed noticing weird details. …

It turns out setting the player in an assertion is a very different thing from doing:

when play begins:
  now the player is Bob;