after asking someone about something

Authoring Inform 7
1

I always struggle with the “asking” verb. I’m looking to print a reminder after the player has “asked [NPC] about [text]” a few times:

AskingReminder is a number that varies. AskingReminder is initially 0.

Last report asking someone about something:
	if AskingReminder < 3:
		increase AskingReminder by 1;
	otherwise if AskingReminder is 3:
		say "[line break][italic type]A shortcut for asking someone about something is 'a {person} {topic}'.[roman type][line break]";

It’s not firing. I’ve tried just regular “report” and even “after”. What have I missed?

2

Your example works fine with “Report”. It also works with “After”, if you stick “continue the action” on the end.

“Last report” doesn’t work because the regular report rule runs and ends the report phase.

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3

Still not working for me, so I must be intercepting it somewhere. I’m sure somewhere in my conversation rules which are a shaky tower of code I wrote multiple years ago. Thanks!

4

I’ll note that last report would be fine in many cases: by default, report rulebooks continue the action.

But this is the only Standard Rule for asking it about:

Report an actor asking something about (this is the block asking rule):
        if the actor is the player:
                now the prior named object is nothing;
                say "[There] [are] no reply." (A);
        stop the action.

…and as you see, it explicitly stops the action.

5

Huh, I wonder why that is?

6

The other cases of stop the action in report rules are in inserting it into and putting it on (but only for the I6 parser is running multiple actions cases), opening (the reveal any newly visible interior rule), touching, and these:

Report an actor answering something that (this is the block answering rule):
Report an actor telling something about (this is the block telling rule):
Report an actor asking something about (this is the block asking rule):

I think this does reflect a design choice… for a lot of default report rules, it’d be sensible for an author to want to say more after the default, but others have enough finality that it doesn’t make sense, like:

  • "[There] [are] no reply." [answering it that]
  • "This [provoke] no reaction." [telling it about]
  • "[There] [are] no reply."[asking it about]

But these others (that don’t stop the action) kind of sound like the last words on the subject, too…

  • "[We] [discover] nothing of interest in [the noun]." [consulting it about]
  • "[We] [achieve] nothing by this." [squeezing]

It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense for tasting, listening, smelling (which report “nothing unexpected”) or pushing, turning, pulling (“nothing obvious happens”) either.

For touching, my take is that some cases would better be check rules ("[We] [achieve] nothing by this.", "[The noun] [might not like] that.") and result in failed actions, and others (an NPC touches something or touches the player) shouldn’t stop the action.

Anyway my guess is that it’s inspired by “if an author is writing their own report rule here, they wouldn’t want it following this particular default response”.

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