I am brand new to designing Text Adventures, but I've already learned a little about programming and want to start making games.

However, I just can't seem to figure out how to make conversations with NPCs. The Ask/Tell script doesn't lead into conversation trees like I want, and even as I type the sentence I want to ask the game just seems confused for some reason. So putting it simply, I would like some beginner's help, if someone could please tell me how to get started.

What might help is if you could say what your design criteria are. Just by perusing your question, you specified that you want conversation trees and to be able to type to ask by typing (as opposed to clicking on links)? Or what would you like specifically?

If you could give an example of how you'd like it to work, someone can either point you to something that exists or give ideas how to make it happen.

Well, when you find an NPC the player should click the "Talk To" button and the PC should say something like "Hello." Underneath that should be a list of questions and replies for the player to choose from and each one will print a different reply from the NPC, as well as another list of questions and replies. The older choices can't be asked if you didn't select them the first time, and you can can't stop a conversation until you've chosen the "Good Bye" option.

That pretty much sums up what I'm going for.

A tree dialog pretty much like those found at Aurora tool set. Jay, please, I am not studying dialogs yet as I still a little far to implementing NPCS in my game, but I got curious about how setting this on Quest.

If you are editing offline, I suggest you use this library to do that (if you are on-line, you cannot use libaries):
http://textadventures.co.uk/forum/samples/topic/5510/updated-convlib

there's a few resources here on dialogue, mainly by Pixie and Jay, who're very good programmers with very advanced dialogue systems (Jay has such a game, if you're interested in seeing/playing it: Spondre, and Pixie has some games too, not sure how much dialogue is in them, as they seem more focused on combat/magic/etc --- I haven't played them yet), and with what you said in your posts, you seem to be interested in those more advanced/efficient dialogue systems. Or, there's much more simple ways to do dialogue, but they're not very efficient for large scale games requiring such an efficient complex dialogue system.

maybe, you might want to just start with the basics of doing simple dialogue, and then after that, you can jump into learning how to do more complex dialogue systems (I'll be easdropping on them too, as I'm still a total noob with how to do better more advanced dialogue systems, too, lol), or you can just jump right into doing the advanced dialogue systems (I think they use Lists/Dictionaries and Parsing), if you're ready to tackle some of this more advanced coding stuff.

here's some of the resources:

http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/tutorial/
http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/guides/
http://textadventures.co.uk/forum/samples

Actually, I was wondering I would probably end using the Ask / Tell system for this initial project. I suppose I already said that somewhere here, but eve if it is an experimental first game design on Quest, I am doing it fully as if for publishing. However, I try not messing much around, specially because it is my interest to find out what would be done only using Quest's basic resources.

But I was curious about what would be said on this thread. I am, because this thread, reading more about dialogs in Quest already, even if too soon on the creation process.

I suppose at some point I will need finding a more complex way of NPCs interactions at the final stages of game production. But I guess would be better postponing this problem for the due time or I will get crazy with too much information and too few advance.