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Terminology in Phantasmal for Occurrences

It's a little hard to tell what's going on, word-wise, when you have all sorts of actions, events, visibility and various sorts of perception going on. There really are a lot of choices. So let's establish some definite terms.

A Phantasmal Event is something that occurs within Phantasmal that may be perceptible to somebody. It may have side-effects (that is, change things after the immediate event) or not. It may be instant or take time to occur. It may occur in one sense (say, just sound) or several. It may be perceptible or not to a given character. All of this is described in the event model document.

Action

An action is taken by a character or mobile. It will often generate one or more perceptible events, especially if it is performed successfully.

Event

See Phantasmal Event.

Instant

An event is instant if it takes place instantaneously rather than having duration and being interruptible.

Perceptibility

A numerical rating of how easily detected an event is. The Perceptibility of an event is compared to a character's Perception to determine if s/he can detect the event. Perceptibility may be altered by distance or other factors, depending on the nature of the event.

Perception

A numerical rating of how easily a character can detect an event. The Perceptibility of an event is compared to a character's Perception to determine if s/he can detect the event.

Phantasmal Event

A perceptible event. See the event model document.

Timed

An event is timed if it has duration. Normally this means it will have a distinct beginning and ending, and will be interruptible.

Virtual

An event is virtual if is not represented explicitly in the game engine. So it is an occurrence, but not one that the game represents in this way. See the event model document for further description.