Standard actions concerning other people
giving it toshowing it towakingthrowing it atattackingkissinganswering it thattelling it aboutasking it aboutasking it for
Answering something that some text (past tense answered it that): applying to one thing and one topic
The Standard Rules do not include any systematic way to handle conversation: instead, Inform is set up so that it is as easy as we can make it to write specific rules handling speech in particular games, and so that if no such rules are written then all attempts to communicate are gracefully if not very interestingly rejected.
The topic here can be any double-quoted text, which can itself contain tokens in square brackets: see the documentation on Understanding.
Answering is an action existing so that the player can say something free-form to somebody else. A convention of IF is that a command such as DAPHNE, TAKE MASK is a request to Daphne to perform an action: if the persuasion rules in force mean that she consents, the action 'Daphne taking the mask' does indeed then result. But if the player types DAPHNE, 12375 or DAPHNE, GREAT HEAVENS - or anything else not making sense as a command - the action 'answering Daphne that ...' will be generated.
The name of the action arises because it is also caused by typing, say, ANSWER 12375 when Daphne (say) has asked a question.
Typed commands leading to this action
"answer [text] to [someone]" - answering it that reversed
Rules controlling this action
report an actor answering something that block answering rule name unlist