Ballpark

Sometimes it is more sensible to describe numbers roughly than in exact terms. For instance, we might want to have our player perceive "many people" rather than "forty-two people" on entering a room. To achieve this, we might write our own "to say" phrase.

Phrases will be explained more thoroughly in a later chapter, but as we have already seen in the examples, we can make a "To say…" phrase that will allow us to create our own text substitutions. In this case, we are going to replace the specific number with a vaguer one chosen from a chart, so:

The idea here is that we will work our way through the table until we hit a line where the threshold number is higher than the number we want to express, and then print that output: so if we have less than one item, we'll print "no"; if we have more than none but less than two, we'll print "one"; if we have less than three, we'll print "a couple of"; if we have three, four, or five (but not six), we'll print "a few."