Is it unreasonable to be uncomfortable with the ‘and’ in ‘Maximum Occupancy, Description, and Exits’?  I’m still trying to figure out how much language lawyering is considered reasonable. =’)

hmm, I guess the way I phrased it, a legal move has to end up in a location with:

A defined Maximum Occupancy
Description
Exits

though, I don’t see why this should cause any problems.

I read that “and” meaning I can’t move to a Location that lacks either a Maximum Occupancy, a Description or an Exits list.

Since the rule doesn’t state otherwise, it’s interesting to point thar Glossary forces step to hold only non-negative integers, and any action that would set those values below zero instead sets them to zero.

Well, contingent on everyone agreeing that foo, bar, and baz means any of the three,  .

danopato: I think (hope?) that the argument is that the ‘and’ is causing a clause. As in: if it doesn’t have “a defined x y and z”. If any of the three are not defined, then it doesn’t have all three defined. It’s a bad precendent, though ;P.

i don’t get danopato’s complaint.

you cannot move to a place without x y and z means that unless the place has all three of them, a move there is illegal.

what’s the problem?

Yeah. I’m actually having a hard time coming up with the word chunking that would cause a problem. Apply DeMorgan’s law: “A Protagonist may not move to a location that does not have a defined Maximum Occupancy or does not have a defined Description or does not have a defined Exits.” Perfectly safe.

I do find it irritating that it wasn’t factored as “A Protagonist may not move to an Undefined Location.”, considering there was already a flag in the Rules to determine this (Undefined) without having to spell it out.

(Ok, I guess “A Protagonist may not move to a Location that has only a name and includes the text -Not Yet Defined-.”, after looking at that Rule again. That’s also kind of unweildy, though.)

Doesn’t this violate the spirit of a text adventure game? 75th, the Narrator, went through a lot of trouble to get Erratatime passed to add this mechanic of Threads and Commands.

That’s okay.  All it means is that there’s a disjoint between saying something in Threads, and making it part of the Gamestate.  I knew this would be possible from the get-go.

Although, of course, I strongly hope the two are linked together (and soon), so that the way you perform an Action is to make a corresponding Command.

But no problem establishing the two separately and bridging the gap later. 

Fair enough: .

I think a valid reading of “A Protagonist may not move to a location that does not have a defined Maximum Occupancy, Description, and Exits.” is that as long as any one of the three fields is defined, it’s legal to move there.  If I were writing this and wanted to suggest that any one of the three being undefined made it impossible to move there, I would have used ‘or’ instead of ‘and’: “A Protagonist may not move to a location that does not have a defined Maximum Occupancy, Description, or Exits.”

In fact, the more I read it, the more firmly I’m convinced that and is inapropriate here.  I agree with the intention, but not the wording.  I’ll defer to the majority on this.