Actions: Detail view  Back to full view A single action in detail. About the action rulebooks

Standard actions concerning other people
Giving it to , Showing it to , Waking , Throwing it at , Attacking , Kissing , Answering it that , Telling it about , Asking it about , Asking it for 

Telling something about some text (past tense told it about)

The Standard Rules do not include any systematic way to handle conversation: instead, Inform is set up so that it is as easy as we can make it to write specific rules handling speech in particular games, and so that if no such rules are written then all attempts to communicate are gracefully if not very interestingly rejected.

The topic here can be any double-quoted text, which can itself contain tokens in square brackets: see the documentation on Understanding.

Telling is an action existing only to catch commands like TELL ALEX ABOUT GUITAR. Customarily in IF, such a command is shorthand which the player accepts as a conventional form: it means 'tell Alex what I now know about the guitar' and would make sense if the player had himself recently discovered something significant about the guitar which might interest Alex.

Typed commands leading to this action

"tell [someone] about [text]"

Rules controlling this action

set action variables for    when acting fast  acting fast actions are fast rule   name  unlist 

before    doing anything except examining or reaping in Drawing Room   

before    doing anything except attacking when Nomos bonus is true   

before    doing anything  boots of wandering weirdness rule   name  unlist 

instead of    doing anything with clouds of smoke when the smoke timer of the location is less than 1   

instead of    doing anything with rust spores   

instead of    telling about   

check    an actor telling something about  telling yourself rule   name  unlist

report    an actor telling something about  block telling rule   name  unlist