It's the weekend, so I feel obligated to play some more Lifeweb.
Fucking hell is this game a source of frustration. I'm still an utter newb (it's a bit slow-going to get comfortable with a game that you simply don't have access to most of the time, and that actively quashes any form of readable information about it), so I tend to try and go for the newb roles that don't have a lot of responsibility or up-fuckability.
So I play as one of the little servant children helping out around the fortress keep itself, tending to the baron's family and holdings. Mostly they don't interact with you though, so your only real responsibility is to clean the walls before they explode into a deathbomb of choking, explosively flammable gases. You do this by simply hitting the wall with a damp cloth.
Unfortunately, you don't start with any rags in your inventory, and there aren't any in the servants' quarters... Or anywhere else in the keep for that matter. You need to make them yourself. How? You need to tear off a piece of fabric from some clothes.
...so, first I needed to figure out how to do this (the only reason I knew that this was even what I needed to do was because I'd seen someone else doing it before). Turns out that this is one of the very, VERY few things that's actually documented by the ingame help, but nothing in there is really categorized, so you either already know what's shown in the help file or you don't even know what's in there to look for.
Eventually, I worked out what I had to do, and entered the command... But all I got was a message about how I'd attempted to tear the cloth. So I tried again, and again just the message about trying.
These attempts took stamina, apparently, so I managed to make myself pass out a couple times by trying to tear off one of my sleeves. And the effort continued, attempt after attempt, taking breaks to drink (and even take a nap at one point, in order to gain a powerup to see if that helped), while my duties (requiring a rag) went neglected. Vicious clouds of rotgas were released. The clouds came in contact with the torches and detonated, and the fortress was wreathed in flames, so I had to take another break from tugging at my own shirtsleeve in order to grab a bucket of water and play disposable child firefighter.
As it turns out, children (which the servant role is entirely composed of) have such a low strength stat that their chances of successfully tearing clothing are less than 1% (approximately). I spent half an hour of a round continuously failing to get the one thing I needed to do my job.
Gameplay.