Having conversation redirect to someone in the room

I’ve been trying to get the following code to work, but it says that ‘the noun’ applies to an object, not text. Any suggestions?

[code]SingleAsking is an action applying to one text.

Understand “ask about [text]” as SingleAsking.

Carry out singleasking:
let Joe be a random person in the location of the player;
try asking Joe about the noun;
[/code]

How about

try asking Joe about "[the noun]";

?

I think for text, you might have to use “topic” or “topic understood” instead of “noun.” (Haven’t tested it though)

Thanks, this is what ended up working:

[code]SingleAsking is an action applying to one topic.

Understand “ask about [text]” as SingleAsking.

Carry out singleasking:
let Joe be a random person in the location of the player;
try asking Joe about the topic understood;
[/code]

Of course, this means you end up asking yourself sometimes, but I’ve already figured out a way to fix that. Thanks for everyone’s help!

And you may ask yourself, “Well… how did I get here?”

Ha!

If the action processing has made it to Carry Out, isn’t it considered too late at that point to try doing something else? Or is it just too late to declare the original action (single-asking) unsuccessful?

I think it’s too late to declare the action unsuccessful. (And whether the action succeeded or not doesn’t matter for most purposes, I guess.)

You might enjoy the chart (attached) I made many years ago to clarify to myself where the “success”/“failure” divide was.
minimal-rules-chart.png