The light from your torch is waning.
Benjamin walks in from the north.
With a series of deft maneuvers, Benjamin makes you drop your torch.
Benjamin drops a torch.
A great earthworm rises from the ground and consumes a torch.
You have been given a torch by Benjamin.
> hint torch
hint: Do you want help with general commands, or the immediate problem of your torch that was low on batteries, got punched out of you by Benjamin, dropped on the ground, and devoured by an earthworm? Or the other torch he gave you which doesn't have the low battery problem but otherwise is exactly the same as the one you lost?
I've been playing on Epitaph and one thing that struck me is how much "guess the verb" I play. I logged in, and got a message about the light from my torch waning, which was reasonable given that I left the batteries in. So I tried "turn flashlight off". Is this the right verb? "help turn" gives me information relating to directional facing. "help flashlight" tells me that it is a weapon. How do I know what verbs I have available for a given object?
Epitaph being based off the Discworld mudlib provides a "syntax" command, so I can go "syntax turn" to see how it can be used. And in fact, this is what every command used with incorrect syntax ends up informing the player. But I find it grueling. When I get a command wrong, surely there can be an easier way than forcing me to read a manual that doesn't always help.
Take for example the non-gameplay command bug. When a runtime exception happens when I use a command, I get a message saying use the bug command. So I do "bug when I try and 'some command' I got a runtime error" and get "USE 'syntax bug'" as a response. I understand that there's a system in which developers desire a player use to report bugs, where they specify which entity they are referring to, and the related object and it's code can be linked in. But the onus here is on the player, where perhaps there's a way to remove the cumbersome struggle to not just "guess the verb" but "guess the verb's arguments".
Some MUD-Dev mailing list posts referred to a set of interactive fiction games that had more intuitive and less cumbersome commands. "take the pen" might get the response "There are two pens here, a red and a blue one. Which pen?", and then the player could simply type "red" at the normal command prompt that followed and the red pen would be taken. And similarly, should a command result in a yes or no based output, then they could type "yes" or "no" and it would refer to the last command they did. I think that this is something worth looking at further.
In the base of the "bug" command, what should have happened? Perhaps I should get a message informing me that the bug command associates my message with the thing that caused the bug, and could I choose whether I am referring to a command, object, npc.. But really you could just give them a prompt and get them to enter a keyword, and then it could locate anything in all the known systems that match that keyword and just give a small multi-choice menu. "> bug unparseable text" -> "Were you using a command or an object or something else? Type it's name: " -> "… Type it's name: bug" -> "There are two possible matches, please select the one you are referring to: a) command: bug b) room object: cockroach …" -> "choice: a".
I think that's a big improvement, perhaps not as an exact approach, but as a direction. But then writing it, I pictured doing so using the interactive fiction method further above. To write the name of a command at the normal command prompt, rather than a custom one which isolates whatever is entered to whatever is wanting the input, is ambiguous. No idea of the best way to fix that. And additionally, there really isn't that much difference between the prompt-less and prompted input of additional information. In theory, you could switch between modes.