Prompting for numbers instead of letters Python 2.7.x

Question

So I have a few questions about the code below.

from sys import exit
def gold_room():
    print "This room is full of gold. How much do you take?"

    next = raw_input("> ")
    gold_greedy = "50"

    if next > gold_greedy:
        dead("You are too greedy to live, die.")
    elif next < gold_greedy:
        dead("You are fair and therefore you win.")
    else:
        dead("Man, you BARELY made it")

def bear_room():
    print "There is a bear here."
    print "The bear has a bunch of honey."
    print "The fat bear is in front of another door."
    print "How are you going to move the bear?"
    bear_moved = False

    while True:
        next = raw_input("> ")

        if next == "Take honey":
            dead("The bear looks at you then slaps you.")
        elif next == "taunt bear" and not bear_moved:
            print "The bear has moved from the door. You can go through it now."
            bear_moved = True
        elif next == "Taunt Bear" and bear_moved:
            dead("The bear gets pissed off and chews your legs off.")
        elif next == "open door" and bear_moved:
            gold_room()
        else:
            print "I got no idea what that means."

def cthulhu_room():
    print "Here you see the great evil Cthulhu."
    print "He, it, whatever stares at you and you go insane."
    print "Do you flee for your life or eat your head?"

    next = raw_input("> ")

    if "flee" in next:
        start()
    elif "head" in next:
        dead("Well that was tasty!")
    else:
        cthulhu_room()

def dead(why):
    print why, "Good job!"
    exit(0)

def start():
    print "You are in a dark room."
    print "There is a door to your right and left."
    print "Which one do you take?"

    next = raw_input("> ")

    if next == "left":
        bear_room()
    elif next == "right":
        cthulhu_room()
    else:
        dead("You stumble around the room until you starve.")

start()

1. When I get to the gold_room, why when I take any letters instead of numbers it gives me "You are too greedy to live, die. Good job!", shouldn't it give me an error message? or give me the "Man, you BARELY made it" message?

2. If the user types anything other than whole numbers, how can I prompt him to type a number?

Answer 1

If you type:

print type(next)

you can see the next variable is of type str. You have to convert it to an integer by using the int() function:

next = int(raw_input("> "))