Chapter: SUGGESTED TOPICS

As noted under section 1 above, Conversation Rules provides a mechanism for showing the player a list of things s/he can ask or tell the current interlocutor about. As already explained, this is managed by entering a number (greater than zero) in the suggest column against the appropriate item in the appropriate table. This number is reduced by one each time the subject is asked about (or told about, as the case may be) until it reaches zero. The number should therefore start at the number of times you want the suggestion to remain active.

Whether the suggestion appears as a suggested tell topic ("You could tell Bob about Fred") or a suggested ask topic ("You could ask Bob about Fred") depends on whether it appears in the NPC's informing table or its quizzing table (again, as described above).

By default, a list of suggested topics is displayed:

1) In response to an explicit TOPICS command typed by the player; and

2) When a Conversation Node is entered via a "[convnode whatevernode]" tag in a text string, and the Conversation Node in question has a suggestions property that is not "blank".

It may be that we would also like to see a list of suggested topics displayed in response to an explict greeting (such as TALK TO BOB, or BOB, HELLO). To do this we need to dd something like (assuming we have elsewhere defined a Table of Bob's Greetings):

    After saying hello to Bob:
     show the next response from the Table of Bob's Greetings;
     if the greeting type is explicit then consider the standard list suggested topics rule.

Note that in this case it is preferable to use 'consider the standard list suggested topics rule' rather than 'try requesting suggested topics', since if the latter is used the turn count will not be advance (requesting suggested topics is an action out of world, since it seems reasonable that it shouldn't consume any game time).