Tutorial mode for TADS 3?

As I continue designing (and perhaps, in a few days, implementing) my work in progress, I’ve considered adding a tutorial system (or novice mode, or something similar) to the game. Obviously, this would be damned near impossible in ALAN… but it is definitely possible with TADS 3. I’ve considered adapting some code from the testing script extension (tests.t) and taking an approach similar to Tutorial Mode by Emily Short (an inform 7 extension I found when I was searching on google).
Anybody know how I might go about coding this?

By now my memory is hazy, but I’m pretty sure Eric set up some code to do this in “Mrs. Pepper’s Nasty Secret.” You can download the source code at http://musicwords.net/if/pepper.htm. There is also a rather elaborate tutorial built in in response to the ‘help’ command.

Yes, btw. I’ve borrowed some of the newbie bits from Mrs. Pepper’s into my game, especially I’ve been successful with use of ExtraHints. Around 35 messages carefully arranged through the prologue guided the player from the first message explaining something like “you can examine any object mentioned in a room description, try typing EXAMINE T-SHIRT now” through explaining basic actions when player examined different objects (how you can open a box, wear clothes, navigate through rooms, etc., how you can communicate with NPC (in several steps) and so on through helping with steps to first few puzzles where the hints became less concrete about exact commands and more to assure the player how he can think about overcoming the puzzle. Every hint was displayed after game output in light grey so it can be easily ignored.

My game was a special challenge in a puzzle hunt game for children aged approx. 11-14 years old and in the end it was successfully finished by more than fifty teams of (up to) five members who previously not even heard about the existence of text adventure games. They were just thrown into game as a surprise on one Monday morning and best of them finished on Tuesday afternoon. And to this day I’m sure that carefully crafted context sensitive hints presented in short simple messages through the prologue of an actual game was single most important feature which allowed them engage game and start playing so smoothly.

I downloaded the source for Mrs. Pepper’s nasty secret, but I’m not sure which files contain the code I’ll need. I’m considering doing a simple approach, checking if a boolean value is true (libGlobal.noviceOn, for example.)

I haven’t looked at it in years, but just as a suggestion, the file newbieHelp.t would be a good place to start your search.

Thanks. That file contains nearly everything I’ll need to make my game newbie friendly.