Conversation Package: Prompts for asking about the unknown

I’m a newbie in Inform7. I’m using the Conversation Package by Eric Eve. I want to have a default prompt (like say “You are not really familiar with [subject] so you don’t know what to ask.”) when the player tries to ask anyone about subjects that are unfamiliar / unknown.

What is the most simple way to do this? I can have a default ask response for a person but that will also be triggered when the player asks some NPC about known stuff that the NPC doesn’t have an answer for so I’d like that to be a different answer.

There’s probably a very easy way to do this but I’m stuck. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

SOLVED, thanks (see last post).

Have you tried something along the lines of “Default ask response for a person when the second noun is an unfamiliar subject: say “You are not really familiar with [second noun], so you don’t know what to ask.””?
(I haven’t checked to see if it works, so it’s just a suggestion.)

I’ve tried something similar (“Default ask response for a person when asked about an unknown subject: say “You are not really familiar with [second noun], so you don’t know what to ask.””), but unfortunately it didn’t work.

So thanks for the suggestion, I’ll try that next.

Nope, did not work. I’ve turned on all the rules and it seems that the rule that is chosen is the (default) block asking rule which says the basic response There is no reply. What baffles me is that Eric Eve’s conversation framework has a separate rule for when someone is asked about something unknown:

Check quizzing someone about something unknown (this is the block asking about something unknown rule): abide by the block asking rule.

This doesn’t seem to get triggered. Any thoughts?

It looks like the Conversation Framework defines the grammar line for quizzing it about action as “ask [someone] about [any known thing]”. Unknown things fall outside the definition so ASK X ABOUT Y is understood as asking X about a topic “Y” when object Y is unknown.

If you add the line

Understand "ask [someone] about [any thing]" as quizzing it about.

to your code you should be able to catch all topics. You might need some additional tweaks to prevent giving accidental information in disambiguation prompts (ASK GUARD ABOUT KEY -> “Which key do you mean, the treasury key or the super secret twist ending key?”)

Thanks, that did the trick.

In addition to what you advised I unlisted the block asking about something unknown rule in the extension and replaced it with my own:

[code]The block asking about something unknown rule is not listed in the check quizzing it about rulebook.

Check quizzing someone about something unknown (this is the block asking about something unknown mark 2 rule):
say “You are not really familiar with that, so you don’t know what to ask.”;
stop the action.[/code]

And now it works (or at least seems to work :wink: ) as I intended. So, yes, thanks again, I was driving myself mad when I couldn’t figure out why the rule I mentioned wouldn’t even get triggered and replacing it did nothing.