I can't find a way to make a character respond when the player attempts to "speak to" them. How do you get the character to have dialogue?

There are some hints here
http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/conversations.html

(filler for getting my edited post updated/posted)

dialogue/conversation/topics/diplomacy can be simple or very complex/advanced... (Dialogue/Conversation/Topics/diplomacy is a major advanced RPG coding system, as like combat, magic, items, storage, equipment, stealth, transactions/buying/selling/shopping, etc etc etc. People new to coding, don't realize that even the seeming simplest things to them as people playing the game, are actually not so simple to actually code into the game as the game maker / programmer / coder. And these are the simplest things... trying to do major RPG systems... are the hardest things to do, not easy at all... both from pure coding ability and code design ability, as well as game design ability... lol: game making is NOT easy to do, lol)

if you do a simple design... it can be very cumbersome (a lot of manual work for every individual Object and its dialogue/conversion/topics, whereas if you're good at coding, you can do a more advanced design, which takes some extra work up front, but once you get it done, then as you actually implement it, it will be much faster and easier to do so.

the basics of doing most of the stuff you want to do in your game, involves learning:

Attribute and the 'if' Script usage, which while a very big step from just learning the basics of using quest from the tutorial, DOES open up 90% of everything that you want to do for/within your game! After that, even more advanced coding stuff, as you can see, is very diminishing returns... (learning Lists and Dictionary Attributes provides 9% more, leaving you with only 1% remaining of stuff to do in your game for all the other more advanced stuff to learn...)

if you want to try to jump into learning Attributes and the 'if' Script (what I call "The Two SUPER SCRIPTS", as again, they open up 90% of everything that you want to do for/within your game, hehe), you can try to take a look at my guide on it (I have the top part of my post on understanding coding and the quest code structure a bit, but after that I get into the Attribute and 'if' Script usage. I do show how to do it with the GUI/Editor, but my guide definately has a more code focused/oriented/technical feel to it, which usually makes it hard for people new to coding to understand, so I pretty much failed with my guide, as its for people new to coding, lol. Pixie is much better at helping, as he's clear and concise and explains the stuff very well, whereas I'm the opposite):

ht.tp://textadventures.co.uk/forum/samples/topic/5559/attributes-and-if-script-guide-by-hk

(remove the dot/period from the ht.tps for it to work in the url box)

let me know if you need any help or need anything explained, I'll try my best to help you better... might just end up confusing you more, but I'll try.... just let me know, if you need help with something and/or don't understand something.

P.S.

I highly recommand you play through XanMag's tutorial 2 game ("templates and tutroal"), as he made this with the direct purpose of trying to bridge the huge gap from being guided specifically through the tutorial on very specific tasks and trying to do stuff all on your own as you try to make your own game:

ht.tp://textadventures.co.uk/forum/games/topic/5940/quest-tutorials-and-templates-published

(remove the dot/period from the ht.tps for it to work in the url box)

and there's also OniMike's youtube videos:

ht.tps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGSCL0CED0oIG8J1mKyDoMw/videos

(remove the dot/period from the ht.tps for it to work in the url box)