§10.9. Heat
Since we prefer not to simulate burnt skin, and it is unsporting to kill a player outright merely for touching a hot object, heat is mostly used as a reason why something cannot be picked up at a given moment. This very basic puzzle is demonstrated in Grilling.
With the naked eye, it is not always easy to detect what is too hot to touch - a point made in both Masochism Deli, where the only solution is to keep picking up potatoes until one doesn't burn, and in Hot Glass Looks Like Cold Glass, where infrared goggles turn the scales.
If a hot object is not to be touched, will it stay hot forever? It might well, if it is a steak on an electric grill, but not if it is a recently-baked apple pie sitting on a window-sill. Entropy simulates the gradual return of temperature to equilibrium.
See Electricity and Magnetism for items which shouldn't be touched because they are hot in a different way
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Suppose we have a situation where the player is allowed to talk about the heat of an object only if he's properly equipped to detect it.
So far, so good. Now, what if the player tries to GET HOT DISH when the goggles are off? "You can't see any such thing." doesn't seem like quite the right response: he can see such a thing. He just doesn't know which it is. We could go on to write a mistake rule that would scold the player for trying "get [heat] [text]" when not wearing the goggles. The problem is that this would not cover any other phrasing of the command, nor would it account for all the many other things the player might try to do with an object specified by heat. What we really want is to catch all instances of the player using the property name when not allowed to do so; and for this purpose we can borrow a trick from the chapter on Activities:
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Suppose we have a situation where the player is allowed to talk about the heat of an object only if he's properly equipped to detect it.
So far, so good. Now, what if the player tries to GET HOT DISH when the goggles are off? "You can't see any such thing." doesn't seem like quite the right response: he can see such a thing. He just doesn't know which it is. We could go on to write a mistake rule that would scold the player for trying "get [heat] [text]" when not wearing the goggles. The problem is that this would not cover any other phrasing of the command, nor would it account for all the many other things the player might try to do with an object specified by heat. What we really want is to catch all instances of the player using the property name when not allowed to do so; and for this purpose we can borrow a trick from the chapter on Activities:
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