Thanks for your reply.
I have a similar suspicion. My first attempt was to use TAction, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with topics. conradcook had very similar problem here:
https://intfiction.org/t/think-verb/3591/1
and he ended up writing a new class, which doesn’t feel right to me. I have a gut feeling that what I’m trying to do is correct in principle, but it’s just missing something. Also, official guides seem to suggest that this type of case should/could be handled with TopicAction:
tads.org/t3doc/doc/techman/t3scope.htm, section “Using Topics for non-spoilery Scope Extension”
tads.org/howto/t3verb.htm, section “Verbs with a “topic” object”
Is there any way to tell the parser that obj == dobj?