Can I use '>climb rope' to go down the rope? I did in Dee's Goblin Quest, but it seems strange to me.
A phone rings: ring ring, ring a ling, ring ding ?
> answer phone
To use the phone or call someone ?
>call someone
Viewing post in English vocabulary for dummies
If you have something climbable, you should be able to climb it. The game I'm working on now has several climbable objects (tree, vine, walls) and you can certainly climb them when it makes sense to do so. However, you can also go up or down it you're a lazy typist.
If the phone rings, it indicates an incoming call and the natural response is to answer it. But if you want to make an outgoing call you can use verbs like DIAL (if you need to dial a number on an old rotary phone), ENTER (if you need to enter the number on a push-button phone or smart phone) or RING or CALL (if you need to ring someone by name). It's up to you, but try to cover as many bases as possible if you don't want your players to give up in frustration. This is 2020, after all, not 1980.
CLIMB ROPE seems to have caused some confusion. In English, if you say CLIMB ROPE, the direction is implied. If you're at the bottom, you climb up. If you're at the top, you climb down. If you want to cater for all possible inputs, you can allow for:
- CLIMB ROPE
- CLIMB UP
- CLIMB DOWN
- CLIMB UP ROPE
- CLIMB DOWN ROPE
- UP
- DOWN
CLIMB ROPE works from both ends of the rope. The others only work from one end of the rope.