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 

Answering something that some text (past tense answered it that)

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.

Answering is an action existing so that the player can say something free-form to somebody else. A convention of IF is that a command such as DAPHNE, TAKE MASK is a request to Daphne to perform an action: if the persuasion rules in force mean that she consents, the action 'Daphne taking the mask' does indeed then result. But if the player types DAPHNE, 12375 or DAPHNE, GREAT HEAVENS - or anything else not making sense as a command - the action 'answering Daphne that ...' will be generated.

The name of the action arises because it is also caused by typing, say, ANSWER 12375 when Daphne (say) has asked a question.

Typed commands leading to this action

"answer [text] to [someone]" reversed

"tell [someone] [text]" 

"tell [someone] that [text]" 

Rules controlling this action

before    asking someone to try doing something when the person asked is not the current interlocutor  giving orders needs an interlocutor rule   name  unlist 

before    answering someone that "yes"  change answering yes to saying yes rule   name  unlist 

before    answering someone that "no"  change answering no to saying no rule   name  unlist 

before    answering someone that "sorry"  change answering sorry to saying sorry rule   name  unlist 

before    speaking when the current node is not the null-node and the current node is open  decrease node-timer rule   name  unlist 

before    conversing when the noun is not the current interlocutor  greet a new interlocutor rule   name  unlist 

before    speaking  note conversation rule   name  unlist 

NB: the change greeting command to greeting rule is listed before the giving orders needs an interlocutor rule in the before rules 

NB: the check going during convnode rule is listed before the say goodbye when moving rule in the before rules 

check    when the node of the noun is closed  nodal answer response rule   name  unlist 

report    open node response rule   name  unlist 

report    answering someone that something  default answering rule   name  unlist