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

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    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 tell response rule   name  unlist 

check    an actor telling something about  telling yourself rule   name  unlist

report    open node response rule   name  unlist 

report    standard response rule   name  unlist 

report    telling someone about something  default telling rule   name  unlist