| Chapter 8: Change |

| 8.9. Removing things from play

Some things will occasionally be in a limbo state called being "off-stage": like actors or props not needed in Act II, but perhaps to be brought back on-stage later, they wait on the sidelines. Anything created with no apparent location will start the game off-stage, as in the case of the lamp here:

> Aladdin's Cave is a room. The genie's lamp is a container.

(Such things are easy to see in the World index because they are listed after all of the rooms and their contents, not belonging inside any room.)

To move something back on-stage, we simply "move" it back onto the stage set, so to speak: back to a room, or into, onto, or made part of something else which is currently on-stage. To remove something, we use the phrase:

> remove the gold coin from play

(We are not permitted to remove rooms, or doors, or the player, from play.) We can test whether something is on-stage or off-stage with:

> if the gold coin is on-stage, ...
> if the gold coin is off-stage, ...

or could, for instance, write

> say "Ah, so many absent friends. Who now remembers [list of off-stage people]?"

"On-stage" and "off-stage" are adjectives, like "visible" or "touchable", and they apply only to things. Rooms, directions and regions are the stage itself: so it makes no sense to ask the question of whether they are "on-" or "off-". Doors are always on-stage; backdrops are on-stage unless they have been explicitly removed using the "remove... from play" phrase.

101
| Example Beverage Service A potion that the player can drink.

102
| Example Spring Cleaning A character who sulks over objects that the player has broken (and which are now off-stage).

Here we have a destruction action that allows the player to break any fragile items. Once destroyed, these things are removed from play, but we can still refer to them: they are now off-stage. This makes it easy for our sulking character to list the ones that have been destroyed: "Spring Cleaning" A thing can be tough or fragile. A thing is usually tough. Instead of attacking something fragile: say "You smash [the noun] to smithereens!"; remove the noun from play. A knick-knack is a kind of thing which is fragile. Every turn when a knick-knack is off-stage and Granny Blue can see the player: say "'Ohh,' whimpers Granny to herself softly. 'How I will miss [the list of off-stage knick-knacks]!'" The Parlor is a room. Granny Blue is a woman in the Parlor. A china lamb, a porcelain milkmaid, a frolicking Dutch cow, and a crystal unicorn are knick-knacks in the Parlor. Test me with "break lamb / break milkmaid / break cow / break unicorn".

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