I need help with the writing for my game. I am trying to make the details in it as complete as possible, but with out over whelming the player. I want those who already know the type of game to enjoy it, while others who are not familiar with it to as well and it is the latter I am trying to cater to.

For instance, in my head I want the player to draw upon the items in their room so I try to describe it by the cardinal directions of where is what. However, looking at it from a new person perspective, seeing all these Ns, SEs, NWs, Es, etc., might be too over whelming and I have not played enough TAs (Not T&A... ) to really know the proper or less migraine inducing way to go about it. I am more into “On your right is a dresser and directly in front of you is your bed...”, but then in reality that depends on which way you came into the room or how you started your game.

To me the cardinal directions make it very explicit where everything is and yet, is it truly necessary for the player? Is just telling the player what is in the room enough and let them place all the objects where they want in their head for the most part? Obviously the most basic things are needed, but do I need to purposely state which corner or which wall this and that is? Also I do not like hyperlinks as much, so I may not have things obvious to the player. In the Info/About/Help file I will explain as much as I can on how a TA works and mine specifically, but I still do not want something to be missed, nor do I want hyper links or even things not needed to be seen on the right hand side of the screen. I like the Novella (SP?) game engine, but I do in fact want some stuff still on the right. Possibly just the compass buttons or Inv for easy access.

But now I am getting off topic, below in an example of what I am talking about. How does it fair with you as a veteran TAer, but also taking the time to put yourself in the shoes of a new player?

[This is your bedroom. It is very familiar to you since it has been your room since you were a baby. There is a bed in the SE corner, with a night stand directly next to it. On the W wall there is a dresser and on the E a window. A standing mirror occupies the SW corner and in the NW there is a rather large wardrobe. There is also the balcony to the S and your door leading to the hallway to the N.]

[Your bed is a queen canopy bed that is rather large for you, but some day you feel you will grow into. It has pink silk sheets with pink pillows and soft purple blankets.]

[Pink silk sheets. Some times you like to run and jump into bed, sliding along the soft smooth sheets as you do so.]

[Purple blankets. You can get cold rather easily and these heavy woven blankets always seem to keep you warm, even on the coldest nights.]


Above has the parent room, with the bed being a parent of the blanket and the sheets. Is describing the sheets and blanket on the parent bed, as in color too much, since when they examine the sheets and blanket themselves, more descriptions will be shown? At the same time though, initially scanning over an object would reveal the color of the sheets and blankets anyway. (Although the same could be said with the room description as you look around...)

How do you think I should proceed? This is only one instance of many that I have done so far. I am going through and proof reading what I already have... You know having an in-game spell/grammar checker/thesaurus would be of great help... and I do not want to get all the way through and then think... you know what... to help everyone I should really change everything. Although the descriptions would primarily stay the same, just where they are located in said room is the issue or the extra descriptions on top of the norm.

Thank you.

I'm not a writer, so I can't help with this main need of yours, but if you got your (for an example) 'se bed' as an actual other room that you go to via the 'se' exit, you can if you want to do so, you can rename your exits: such as instead of 'se' you can call it 'bed', so this could be a possible way to partly deal with how you try to convey a "se bed', better, without the ugliness of 'se bed' used.

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obviously, as you yourself state correctly, you don't want redundency in commands and~or text, so choose one or the other for your descriptions or whatever, and either not have the commands or the descriptive text, or use the commands for telling something else, or use different commands, make custom commands or whatever.

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(I'm wisely staying far away from trying to learn and craft dialogue coding... this is going to be so complex, both from a design and coding aspect, laughs)

Some thoughts:

From what I've read and experienced, we have a love/hate relationship with the cardinal directions in text adventures. They come off as a bit artificial in more modern (e.g. non-cave-like) surroundings, but we keep using them because nothing better has come along to help navigate. The bottom line here is we use them for navigating rooms because they serve a purpose, despite them being a bit foreign to people in normal life. (I typically don't even know the exact compass directions in my own environment unless I look at a map or really think to orient myself.)

So in your room descriptions, I'd say: if they serve a purpose then use them. If it's really *pertinent* to what the player needs to do that the bed is in the SE corner and a wardrobe to the NW, then certainly list it that way. You would especially want to do that if the player actually had to move in that direction to get there.

If the actual layout of the room isn't critical, then I personally would leave it vague or unsaid. Describe things sufficiently that what you wish to convey is conveyed and then let the player's imagination take over. That doesn't mean under-specifying things, as such. It just means you don't need to get to floor plans and feng shui - unless that's what you want to emphasize. I think something like "there is a TV against the wall" is just as meaningful and possibly less to digest than "there is a TV against the north wall", as the latter includes yet another detail that I wonder if I have to remember or not. The player is probably a bit overwhelmed with taking in all the items in a room anyway without having to tackle minutiae on top of it.

One thing you might be able to do is describe things in relation to each other - the doorway leading east to a hallway, with the bed on the wall opposite the door.

But... that's my take. It all comes down to your personal style.

One of the games I'm working on is set in space. I had the dilemma of what North actually means. To solve it the protagonist has a compass in his game start inventory that explains he must be close to a magnetic field of some sort. God knows how it you'd explain it away if you were outside of a solar system or travelling at hyper speeds.

Thanks Khan and Jay. I laughed at the feng-shui remark by the way and everything you said does make sence. However now I have another question... how would you make the player move in the same exact room, but closer to the TV? I can not grasp that concept. One room, the player is already standing in it, unless it is a rather large room like a dinning/livingroom kind of set up. Why would you force the player to move "towards" the TV though? What purpose would it serve? Why not just "turn it on" as it were from where they are standing, since in essence they are standing virtually any where with in the room itself.

I ask this because a second game I had started making, due to my original was still on the back burner at the time, has a character in an outdoor environment, that is virtually limitless. Now I can have them type north and simply "be" in front of the destination. But I wanted to project how really far this place was but with out going overboard with it, so I was forcing the player to go N a few times and while writing the story or their envirnoment make it seem like they are half way there and will have them go further north a ways and have them arrive, but make it seem (Or I hope anyway.) like they traveled a great expance.

And Silver... I am not sure how much of assistance this will be, but there is a movie called Wing Commander, (Yes there was a game as well, although I thought the game play itself sucked, the full motion video acting with Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcom McDowell, Jason Bernard to name only but a few were excellent...) where and this is taken straight from the Wiki-

“...Blair fights the distrust of his crewmates because of the drastic orders he brings from the Admiral, and because his mother was a "Pilgrim", a strain of humans who had fought against the Confederation. Pilgrims have the innate ability to navigate space by feel despite obstacles such as black holes.”

No orindary compass could do what you are suggesting it do. Why do flocks of birds, scores of turtles, heards of buffalo, teams of bass or hordes of butterflies mirgrate every year, some thousands of miles away through unfamiliar terrain, bad weather, human created problems, but still make it? (As a whole, not every single one that left out on the long journey.)

Of course I am not saying rip the Pilgrim idea straight from the film, but I am sure that idea of people having that “sense” was not the first time either. Just probably not call it Pilgrim for sake of the film. Although I do like that name.

I mean how does he navigate around the spaceship using compass commands if he is in deep space, not how would he navigate around space... Luckily my protagonist has a convenient magnetic field close by to solve this quandary.

As for your new question you could create a new room called TV for the purpose of being close to the TV. Then you would just move the player object to it should he wish to interact more closely with it. I kind of have the same idea with a computer. Make it a game inside a game. Use computer would move the player to the room called computer and I'll turn it into a CYOA just for that with one of the options being to stop using the computer which returns the player object to the main room again.

Why would you force the player to move "towards" the TV though? What purpose would it serve? Why not just "turn it on" as it were from where they are standing, since in essence they are standing virtually any where with in the room itself.

As with all things, I'd say "it depends". If your entire game takes place in a single room (e.g. Andrew Plotkin's "Shade"), then you might want to have different areas to "be" within that room. It expands the things to do and gives a sense of space. It also could be used if you had a large room. For example, one game I played (I can't remember its name or when I played it) had a large dining room that had both a "west" and "east" end.

I think you both have the right idea - a Quest room is not necessarily required to be a physical, real life room. It can be anything, including part of a larger space, a realm in the mindscape, the same place at a different time, etc. Other words might be "places" or "stages". It could even be different questions as you advance through a quiz.

Silver, you could always use the standard, but less widely known port (left), starboard (right), stern (back) and bow (front) of the ship. Much like the cardinal directions, no matter which way the player came about getting to it's present location, he still has to go in either of those directions (And I guess up and down, not sure of those exact terms... possibly above deck and below deck, a deck meaning any floor, not just outside the hull... ) and it matters not what cardinal direction or nautical term/coordinates the ship is traveling. Go right of the ship, forward of the ship, etc. could also be used.

I do not think players in general will grasp the concept immediately, but it is not much different than actually telling the player to go West, East, South or North, they just do. Obviously give the info to the player when they start or in the help/info/about section what each nautical/space term means. Or re-map the cardinal directions to the nautical terms.

And Jay, that is what I find so fascinating, while also frustrating as I try to wrap my mind around this concept, about Quest and TA in general. You could have a room the size of a tea cup that an ant has wandered into and it would feel like a mountain or at least a hill. However, that tea cup could be on a much larger table, which of course would be in much larger room like the kitchen or dinning room, which would be in a much larger house, on a street, in a city, in a state, in a country, on a continent, on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe, in multi-verses... Really the possibilities are quite infinite and endless, minus how much space/text a Quest or TA can hold... And of course the programming knowledge of the author. And that does not even grasp the concept of size and the relations to atoms or “strings” before we even get to the ant in a tea cup...

I actually have the game Shade, although I only briefly played it, plus Anchorhead, although I heard that to be a beast of a game... Both from TADS though, not Quest that I am aware of. Regardless, in my main game I also have a north and south part of a room, but that is more or less to give the room more depth or volume, the player is neither in the north or the south part, they are just simply in the room and can interact with anything of the two. But perhaps I should play more of the other two games and see if that helps me to understand the concept.

You can have players navigate using any kind of description you want if you're using hyperlinks. With the parser it's a little more tricky as you have to teach the player the new set of rules. My problem is I only really like the parser. I'm interested in experimenting with the port/starboard idea! Is there any way to change the compass directions to these or will I have to set up my own commands?

for distance... and~or being near-vs-far:

you can set a distance unit Attribute, and add different increments of distance moved via scripts of your game events.
(with good~expert and complex coding ability... you could create a 3d world with non-animated collision physics... laughs)

or you can use a boolean~flag Attirbute and check it:

for example, within a single~same room, there's a river separating you and an 'orc' monster, both of you can't swim nor have projectile weapons nor magic, so you wouldn't want to be able to 'fight' Verb~Command with the 'orc' monster, obviously

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I deleted this part of my post as I was still going way off-topic, I should not post when I'm tired, sorry for derailing the thread away from the subject~topic at hand that the thread creator needs help~advice with, everyone. my apologizes. (I really enjoy talking advanced science stuff, I get so carried away, sighs).

HegemonKhan wrote:instead of you (or your spaceship) moving... you instead pull your destination towards you, and stretch your location towards your destination. this can be done through physics, but we don't have the ability to do so, as we need a new revolutionary tech or science discovery, to reduce the amount of energy needed to create the gravity fields to warp (alter: expand and contract) space (and E-M shields to protect your from the gravity fields, lol).

I did not get that at all, not realistically anyway. How do you pull something towards you? It stays where it is. And even if you could pull it, what if someone wanted to come where you are or even past you, but not "through" you as it were. Wouldn't that tear the universe apart? And what would happen to the inhabited worlds (If there were any.) being pulled even if everything stayed the same, just does not sit right with me. I can see having faster than light travel, either by a mother ship as it were, gates/portals, even wormholes, but I can not see it as the universe moving around you. As I said, what if you had two, three or even four ships all trying at the same time... Just one big tear and we and everything we know is gone?

@Silver:

port and starboard ( http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/ ... board.html )

this is a bit more advanced working with templates, but you can just change the name of your directions, not sure if this link though tells how to do this (haven't read over it yet ~ too lazy).

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I deleted this part of my post as I was still going way off-topic, I should not post when I'm tired, sorry for derailing the thread away from the subject~topic at hand that the thread creator needs help~advice with, everyone. my apologizes. (I really enjoy talking advanced science stuff, I get so carried away, sighs).

I kind of see where you are going with this, but at the same time still not realistic. I have seen on PBS the string theory proposal and it sounds interesting with some things that can even be proven, while others are still on the drawing board. But back to what I was saying, even if it was possible, what if you stretched the rubber band or contracted it with multiple ants? You may make a quicker trip for one ant, but longer for the others or maybe the rest did not want a quicker trip to begin with. And what if you pull the rubber band so far and let it go? No more ants and no more universe... Just saying...

I deleted this post as I was still going way off-topic, I should not post when I'm tired, sorry for derailing the thread away from the subject~topic at hand that the thread creator needs help~advice with, everyone. my apologizes. (I really enjoy talking advanced science stuff, I get so carried away, sighs).

Technically neither are right, since they speak of supreme beings that do not exist or fail to show themselves on a regular basis. But I would rather stay out of a religious argument when the thread was not intended for it. Although ice can burn as well...

All I can say is, although the rubberband/string theory sounds "cool", I do not see traveling like that ever happening, not without serious consequences. There was a comic I saw once for Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Link wanted it to be day time or night time I forget which. So he blew the tune on his Ocarina for the Sun Song and made the passage of time change with in an instant and he continued merrily on his quest. However, someone else in the kingdom or far off land was now being unexpectedly attacked by skeletons that came out from the ground from no where and that appear only at night...

Long story short, someone is going to be inconvenienced for your quicker space travel if we used your rubberband theory. Except we are not speaking of a single sun/moon (With out even taking into consideration the effect and pull of such a large mass being flung up to where you are at on the planet for the convenience of you and you alone.) but the entire universe or the parts you are trying to get to having to warp for you.

I deleted this post as I was still going way off-topic, I should not post when I'm tired, sorry for derailing the thread away from the subject~topic at hand that the thread creator needs help~advice with, everyone. my apologizes. (I really enjoy talking advanced science stuff, I get so carried away, sighs).

HegemonKhan wrote:
7th Saga (SNES)

Reminds me of Saga Frontier for the PS1. Although I never played it, I heard it has a time traveling or at least some form of worlds connecting aspect to it.

As for the rest, I fold. However, I would like any more input on writing proper in game descriptions.

I deleted my last few posts as I was still going way off-topic, I should not post when I'm tired, sorry for derailing the thread away from the subject~topic at hand that the thread creator needs help~advice with, everyone. my apologizes. (I really enjoy talking advanced science stuff, I get so carried away, sighs).

HK edit: err, I can't delete the other posts, only was able to delete the last post of mine, meh.

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here's the thread's topic:

textstories wrote:I need help with the writing for my game. I am trying to make the details in it as complete as possible, but with out over whelming the player. I want those who already know the type of game to enjoy it, while others who are not familiar with it to as well and it is the latter I am trying to cater to.

For instance, in my head I want the player to draw upon the items in their room so I try to describe it by the cardinal directions of where is what. However, looking at it from a new person perspective, seeing all these Ns, SEs, NWs, Es, etc., might be too over whelming and I have not played enough TAs (Not T&A... ) to really know the proper or less migraine inducing way to go about it. I am more into “On your right is a dresser and directly in front of you is your bed...”, but then in reality that depends on which way you came into the room or how you started your game.

To me the cardinal directions make it very explicit where everything is and yet, is it truly necessary for the player? Is just telling the player what is in the room enough and let them place all the objects where they want in their head for the most part? Obviously the most basic things are needed, but do I need to purposely state which corner or which wall this and that is? Also I do not like hyperlinks as much, so I may not have things obvious to the player. In the Info/About/Help file I will explain as much as I can on how a TA works and mine specifically, but I still do not want something to be missed, nor do I want hyper links or even things not needed to be seen on the right hand side of the screen. I like the Novella (SP?) game engine, but I do in fact want some stuff still on the right. Possibly just the compass buttons or Inv for easy access.

But now I am getting off topic, below in an example of what I am talking about. How does it fair with you as a veteran TAer, but also taking the time to put yourself in the shoes of a new player?

[This is your bedroom. It is very familiar to you since it has been your room since you were a baby. There is a bed in the SE corner, with a night stand directly next to it. On the W wall there is a dresser and on the E a window. A standing mirror occupies the SW corner and in the NW there is a rather large wardrobe. There is also the balcony to the S and your door leading to the hallway to the N.]

[Your bed is a queen canopy bed that is rather large for you, but some day you feel you will grow into. It has pink silk sheets with pink pillows and soft purple blankets.]

[Pink silk sheets. Some times you like to run and jump into bed, sliding along the soft smooth sheets as you do so.]

[Purple blankets. You can get cold rather easily and these heavy woven blankets always seem to keep you warm, even on the coldest nights.]


Above has the parent room, with the bed being a parent of the blanket and the sheets. Is describing the sheets and blanket on the parent bed, as in color too much, since when they examine the sheets and blanket themselves, more descriptions will be shown? At the same time though, initially scanning over an object would reveal the color of the sheets and blankets anyway. (Although the same could be said with the room description as you look around...)

How do you think I should proceed? This is only one instance of many that I have done so far. I am going through and proof reading what I already have... You know having an in-game spell/grammar checker/thesaurus would be of great help... and I do not want to get all the way through and then think... you know what... to help everyone I should really change everything. Although the descriptions would primarily stay the same, just where they are located in said room is the issue or the extra descriptions on top of the norm.

Thank you.

Well considering I was the topic starter and was asking you questins and or even the one debating with you, regardless if it was off topic or not, there was no need to worry about it, unless I said otherwise as in when I mentioned about the religion part. Truly you have nothing to be sorry for. I think I got all the suggestions I was going to get anyway, unless someone else was going to chime in. If I can edit my original post and thus it's title, perhaps I will change it to "Writing Proper In Game Descriptions and a Bunch of Science Stuff...

ya, but that off-topic science discussion of mine should have been in the general section, not here derailing from your thread. It was a lot of spam posts by me, having nothing to do with this thread's of yours, purpose. I'm just trying to get the discussion back on track now, for this thread, hehe. Thanks though for not being too upset at me, and again my apologizes.

Hmm, you can give an alias to your exits in Quest, but I noticed that makes the direction buttons stop working. That's a bummer because I like the direction buttons. Plus, I'm not sure how hard it would be to consistently make easy-to-type movement commands across the game. No one wants to have to type "go toward starboard" every time. Even if the buttons did remain available, I think some people like to use the keyboard.

Like, I had a part in the game I'm working on where the player character is in the "square" of a village, there are three directions you can go, and two of those directions where into a building. I wanted the automatic room description to say something like, "You can north, into the store, or into the church," with hyperlinks. That was easy to do. I wanted the player to be able to click the left arrow button to go into the store. That was no problem. I wanted the player to be able to type "w" or "west" or "go into the store" and any of those options would make you end up in the store. I was able to make that happen too. The problem is that I couldn't make it have all those options. So going into the store is referred to as going west, and it sounds super weird.

Thanks Khan and Jay. I laughed at the feng-shui remark by the way and everything you said does make sence. However now I have another question... how would you make the player move in the same exact room, but closer to the TV? I can not grasp that concept. One room, the player is already standing in it, unless it is a rather large room like a dinning/livingroom kind of set up. Why would you force the player to move "towards" the TV though? What purpose would it serve? Why not just "turn it on" as it were from where they are standing, since in essence they are standing virtually any where with in the room itself.

I ask this because a second game I had started making, due to my original was still on the back burner at the time, has a character in an outdoor environment, that is virtually limitless. Now I can have them type north and simply "be" in front of the destination. But I wanted to project how really far this place was but with out going overboard with it, so I was forcing the player to go N a few times and while writing the story or their environment make it seem like they are half way there and will have them go further north a ways and have them arrive, but make it seem (Or I hope anyway.) like they traveled a great expance.

I think you're on the right track. Definitely think of "room" metaphorically. Like a "room" is the amount of space wherein the amount of movement you have to do to get between the different objects is negligible.

Like, to use the living room and TV example two different ways:

Normally, you'd have a living room be one room in a TA game. Realistically, most living rooms are big enough that you'd have to walk around to interact with things on opposite walls, but that amount of walking isn't significant enough to actually be a game action. The player just understands that this walking occurred. If you want, you could mention it in the narration, e.g. the command "turn on tv" gives text such as, "You walk over to the TV and turn it on," but it's not necessary--and probably not desirable in most cases. I think a good rule of thumb for the narration mentioning stuff like that is whether a person would think about doing it. Normally people walk so much that they don't think about taking a few steps like that, so you wouldn't describe it for the same reason you wouldn't describe the character breathing constantly. But if there's a bunch of junk on the floor he's got to step over, or if his ankle hurts, or if he's ticked off that he can't find the TV remote, then you might want to mention it.

Alternatively, even though the living room is a single room story-wise, you could make it two (or more) rooms in terms of game structure. You could have the north half of the living room and the south half of the living room be a separate game room. If the TV is in the south half, the player can't turn it on while he's in the north half. BUT he can still see the TV from the north half, so you'd probably want it in the room description of both rooms, and you'd want to actually make a TV object in each room, even though there's only one TV in the story. That way you could make "look at TV" work in both sections, but things like "turn on TV" or "take TV" can have a different result depending on which half of the living room you're in. If you're using Quest's map system, I think you can make the exits have a length of 0 to put rooms right next to each other, so it looks like they are part of one room.

(I think that second example, as it's described, is kind of dumb and would just annoy the player. There probably wouldn't be a good reason, in terms of game design, to divide a living room up in that exact way. BUT there would be other situations where it would be a good idea, such as outdoor areas or very large rooms.)

Another thought for giving the impression of distance without making the player choose north ten gazillion times and read ten gazillion slightly reworded descriptions of grass.... Just put a "room" at each end of the area, and use the text to describe the distance the character traveled to get from one to the other. You'd probably want this as "once" text in the room description, or with the "before entering the room for the first time" room script. However, I always have trouble describing travel. If you tell the player they traveled x miles or walked for x hours, but it only takes them half a second to read, I think it's not really going to feel like a long distance. Back when I tried to write adventure novels, the tactics that felt like they worked were to either have characters conversing during the travel or describe what the character is thinking about during the travel, but I'm not sure either of those work very well for TA games. Still, this might be a way to handle long hallways, big empty fields, or other such large areas where all the stuff in the middle isn't really important.

Cyllya wrote:Hmm, you can give an alias to your exits in Quest, but I noticed that makes the direction buttons stop working. That's a bummer because I like the direction buttons. Plus, I'm not sure how hard it would be to consistently make easy-to-type movement commands across the game. No one wants to have to type "go toward starboard" every time. Even if the buttons did remain available, I think some people like to use the keyboard.

This might be of interest:
http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/ ... board.html

jaynabonne wrote:Some thoughts:

From what I've read and experienced, we have a love/hate relationship with the cardinal directions in text adventures.

I mull over this every time I create a TA.

This time round, I was determined to do something different, and wrote an intro screen for my game which explained that traditional compass points would not be used for movements. Instead, the player simply types the location to move there.

In principle I think this would have worked, but the problem was the hassle involved, as it meant creating a set of custom commands for each and every room - including return exits if I wanted them.

This meant that: "You are in a forest clearing. To your north you can see a cabin, and to the east a cave entrance."

Would become: "You are in a forest clearing. A cabin lies in the distance, elsewhere you can see a cave entrance."

Players would then type either "cabin / go cabin" or "cave / go cave"

Another thing I do differently (although this is more about mechanics than descriptions) is remove the rule which forces a player to 'take' an object before they can do anything with it. For instance, it's always seemed really stupid and petty (not to mention frustrating) to get the response "You're not holding that" after typing "eat pizza" in a room that describes one being there.

OurJud wrote:Another thing I do differently (although this is more about mechanics than descriptions) is remove the rule which forces a player to 'take' an object before they can do anything with it. For instance, it's always seemed really stupid and petty (not to mention frustrating) to get the response "You're not holding that" after typing "eat pizza" in a room that describes one being there.

Oh, yeah, I notice some text adventures avoid that problem, but I couldn't figure out how to do it with Quest?

The Pixie wrote:This might be of interest:
http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/ ... board.html

Ooh, noted. Thanks!

Cyllya wrote:

"OurJud"

Another thing I do differently (although this is more about mechanics than descriptions) is remove the rule which forces a player to 'take' an object before they can do anything with it. For instance, it's always seemed really stupid and petty (not to mention frustrating) to get the response "You're not holding that" after typing "eat pizza" in a room that describes one being there.

Oh, yeah, I notice some text adventures avoid that problem, but I couldn't figure out how to do it with Quest?

Well I'm sure there's a better way than mine (there usually is) but I create an 'eat' command, which simply means that if a room description includes something that can be eaten - for instance a sandwich - I set the command to eat sandwich; eat it and run a script which gives an appropriate response. This means the default requirement to 'take sandwich' is bypassed.

Here's the scripts I use:

Room script:

if (ListContains(ScopeVisible(), sandwich)) {
  msg ("You are in a kitchen. There is a table here, on top of which sits a fresh sandwich.")
}
if (not ListContains(ScopeVisible(), sandwich)) {
  msg ("You are in a kitchen. There is a table here.")
}

And the 'eat sandwich' command script:

firsttime {
  msg ("Yum yum!")
  SetObjectFlagOn (player, "eaten")
  MakeObjectInvisible (sandwich)
}
otherwise {
  if (GetBoolean(player, "eaten")) {
    msg ("You already ate it.")
  }
}