[DGD] Relative Naming Problems

[elemel at bredband.net]

Quoting Steve Wooster:

> The best system I could think of that would solve this pretty well would be "facial 
> strings"; Upon creating a character, it is randomly assigned a face, denoted by a 
> string of letters. If each letter is a-z, A-Z or 0-9, then as little as five digits would 
> provide a billion possible faces. When you see a character you haven't nicknamed,
> it might be something like the following:
> A short orc (a5Tc2) waves to you.

This is not so bad but I would dislike it as a player (and as a
developer) because it seriously hampers the suspension of belief.

I remember trying out Genesis, where I could choose two traits for my
character. So I went with a green-eyed, blue-eyed adventurer. You
could go for something similar but ensure that the combination
[trait 1, trait 2, race] is globally unique. If there is only one
"bald, scarred orc" in the character database, then it is safe to
let a player assign a nickname to that character whether it is
currently in the same room or not, or indeed currently logged on or
not.

  > name bald, scarred orc "Jack"
  You now know the bald, scarred orc as Jack.

If you can come up with 100 traits and 5 races, then you should be
set for 50,000 unique players, or slightly less if some combinations
of traits (and races) are disabled in the interest of avoiding the
occasional "fat, thin elf".

You could also automatically pick up nicknames from your environment,
so that if you first encountered Gandalf in Gondor or among the Elves,
you would know him as Mithrandir. If you encountered him in the wild,
perhaps he would just be a white-bearded, bushy-browed wizard.

Regards,
Mikael

-- 
In Soviet Russia, bug reports you!