8.10. Removing things from play

| Chapter 8: Change |

| 8.10. 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 (object) from play

Removes the given object from play, so that it is not present in any room. We are not permitted to remove rooms, or doors, or the player, from play; but we are permitted to remove backdrops, making them disappear from all rooms in which they are present. Example: remove the gold coin 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]?"

We can even write

> now the gold coin is off-stage

which is equivalent the "remove the gold coin from play", and similarly for on-stage. (If we say "now the gold coin is on-stage" and it already was, nothing happens; if it wasn't, it is moved to the current location.)

"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.

122
| Example Beverage Service A potion that the player can drink. |
RB

123
| Example Spring Cleaning A character who sulks over objects that the player has broken (and which are now off-stage). |
RB

124
| Example Extra Supplies A supply of red pens from which the player can take another pen only if he doesn't already have one somewhere in the game world. |
RB

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