Should the homonym paddle work with the sage?

[eriktorbjorn]

Should this have worked, or at least produced a more interesting message?

> SHOW SAGE TO BARTENDER
“What do you make of this?” we ask, showing off the sage.

“I don’t think that would turn into anything,” says the bartender. She taps it with the paddle to demonstrate. “See? No change.”

After all, it's implied that it could have turned Mark into a mark, and then back again, though it would have meant paperwork and possible loss of license for the bartender. So maybe that excuse should be used here as well?

[angstsmurf]

The problem with things like this is

SPOILER

later, when the player gains the ability to create homonyms themselves, they would be able to create that "person-sage" at will, so somebody would have to either fully implement a living, talking sage, or come up with an excuse why creating a sage would immediately end the game.

[dfabulich]

Is there a list of "things like this?" Would it make sense to have a "help wanted" tag for this repository?

[angstsmurf]

It is not that simple.

[eriktorbjorn]

I wasn't expecting a living, breathing sage, though. Just a more interesting failure message, similar to how there are some interesting failure messages for the letter remover. Though not having seen that later part of the game that you allude to, I don't know how reasonable that is here.

[angstsmurf]

Well, when I wrote that we would need ”an excuse why creating a sage would immediately end the game,” that is the interesting failure message I’m talking about. There are some standard ones, such as ”Unfortunately, [the X] is more than sufficient to bury us under its bulk”, but that does not really work with a sage.

The general problem is that it is really hard for anyone who is not the original author to add new text that matches the style of the game.