Instead of Instead (Inform 7)
Inform 7 allows an author to accomplish things in many different ways. It's easy enough to make a dungeon full of rooms and doors and containers and treasures, but if we go much further beyond that, we have to work with creating rules. All actions in Inform have rulebooks which roughly correspond to phases of time it takes to perform the action. The major three are CHECK - This is where Inform decides if an action can be accomplished. CARRY OUT - This is where the actual mechanics of the action take place. REPORT - After everything is done, this is where the parser can print a message confirming what has taken place. Three other rulebooks are built-in: BEFORE AFTER INSTEAD BEFORE and AFTER slot where you'd expect, but INSTEAD is probably the most powerful and most mis-used due to that inherent power. New authors often find the check/carry out/report sequence confusing at first, and will latch onto INSTEAD like Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver to ...
