Chapter: COMBINING ASK AND TELL

Sometimes we want ASK FOO ABOUT BAR to give the same response as TELL FOO ABOUT BAR. If this is always the case for every NPC we can simply write:

    Instead of informing someone about something, try quizzing the noun about the second noun.

We can do something similar if we want this to apply only to a particular NPC:

    Instead of informing Bob about something, try quizzing Bob about the second noun.

Sometimes, however, we may want ASK and TELL to be equivalent only for certain topics. We could cope for this by writing a series of Instead rules:

    Instead of informing Bob about Fred, try asking Bob about Fred.
    Instead of informing Bob about the lighthouse, try asking Bob about the lighthouse.

But this could become a bit tedious and long-winded if we have quite a few topics to redirect like this. An alternative is to use the supplied quiz-inform and inform-quiz rules within the apprropriate table to redirect quizzing to informing or informing to quizzing, e.g.:

    Table of Bob's Informs

	subject	response rule	response table	suggest
	fred	inform-quiz rule	a table-name	0
	lighthouse	inform-quiz rule

It may seem that we could simply have written "bob-fred rule" in the response column to get the same effect, since the same rule would be triggered whether we ASK BOB ABOUT FRED or TELL BOB ABOUT FRED. The problem is that we'd then have to worry about keeping the values in the suggest columns of both tables in sync, and this is a complication best avoided.