My games have many tables with topics in the first column, where the player can ask various characters about them, and receive the prescribed responses from the tables. Is it true that if you have a table, where the first column is labeled ‘Topic’, you cannot access ‘the topic entry’ by any means? To be more specific, let’s say you have a character whom you can ask about the presidents or a line of succession (such as one given in the manual), and the table connected to that character (at least about this discussion) also has columns for years(birth, death, election/accession, each as numbers), state of birth(text), and an objects that that character has named after each respective person(take-able objects in the game). I tried to make this kind of table, but I found that if I headed the subject(person’s name) column with ‘topic’, and used ‘topic’ in a rule for ‘asking so-and-so about’, it came out normally, but I could not cross-reference back to the ‘topic entry’, with a rule like–
After taking a pobject listed in table 3:
say "You hear John say, 'Be careful with that, I named it after [the topic entry]!!'"
(where ‘pobject’ is the column name heading the objects)
When I changed the first column’s heading to ‘president’, and used ‘the president entry’, it worked fine, but now I cannot ask John about ‘a president listed in table 3’. I guess what I could do is change the first column back to ‘Topic’, and make another column labeled ‘president’ and simply copy the names…?? I can see how in the ‘Topic’ column, I am allowed to type out variations of their names (and I can see how this would be a reason not to be able to cross-reference back to them–the program preferring one specific value), and the other column would return only one.