Introductions and descriptions

[Richard Woolcock]

Matt Chatterley wrote:
[snip]
> > Description is currently determined by gender and age - so you might be
> > 'a handsome elderly gentleman' or a 'pretty young teenage girl', etc.
> > However, to get around the problem of 'silly names', each player gets a
> > random first and surname when they connect (over 100 first names for
> > each gender and almost 1000 surnames means duplicates are unlikely).
> 
> Now this, is a VERY interesting twist! Does the player get to choose a
> 'connection' or 'account' name to log in under, and then have the 'game
> name' assigned, or is the 'game name' synonymous(sp?) with the 'account'
> name?

The name is purely random, and is seperate from their 'login name'.  I am
using the login name as the person's 'Soul name', which is permanent, and
the other name as their 'body name', which will change when they die, just
as soon as I get my pseudo-perm-death coded (its almost finished).  When
you die, you will keep your Soul points, which represent all exp every
earned.  When you log back and create your new 'body', you keep a number
of exp equal to 100% of the first 100, 90% of the second 100, etc, down
to 10% of all exp over 900.  In addition, I am planning on putting in extra
creation options for players who have a number of soul points over certain
levels.  This could be very interesting for people who want to 'sell their
soul' for power...

> > I plan to have people get a new name if they die, and have to remeet
> > everyone again, although I also intend to try and make death less
> > common.  Another interesting side affect is that you can introduce
> > just your first name - or surname - if you want to (Hi, I'm Mr Smith...).
> > I've also added 'first impressions', which is dependant on your
> > Appearance and Etiquette, so some people make take an instant dislike
> > to you, whilst others might like you.  I intend to work on this so that
> > if you see someone killing all your friends, you'll start to hate them
> > more and more.  Killing people you like, on the other hand, would be
> > very bad for your humanity.
> 
> This is good too - its starting to pull the concept of 'introductions'
> away from the very static thing that it tends to be, into something far
> more dynamic and more involved in the game. How are you coping with 'out
> of character' communications and such? Eg: Who lists, tells, and such?

The 'who' list and 'tells' show your login name (or 'soul name').

> > Players descriptions are also determined automatically, although players
> > can chose their eye/hair colour when they create their character, and
> > these basically sum-up the appearance.  Character descriptions are still
> > a long way from completion though.
> >
> > I'd be interested to hear any of your player-recognition ideas -
> > particularly on how you intend to generate descriptions.
> 
> This is another interesting area actually, and the first point I'd keep in
> mind, is that if you are aiming at a very rp-centric game, fully automated
> descriptions are probably a bad idea (note: for the benefit of anyone in
> the audience, rp-centric mainly refers to Tiny-derivs, but could
> technically be anything. Most tiny-derivs have player-written descs, but I
> know at least one which does not).
> 
> With this auto-desc in an RP environment, you take away the player's
> freedom to embelish upon his character, and risk 'identical copies'
> cropping up unless you do it very well. Even then, there are probably
> going to be circumstances when the player will wish to add small details
> to his description, which the code cannot account for without being
> 'overridden' in some way - for instance, the colour of makeup (although
> you could have *useable* makeup to change this of course).
> 
> One way around this is to give the player some control over elements of
> the description, or the power to write a short addendum to the description
> itself (one or two personal paragraphs).

I understand what you are saying.  I am mainly concerned over player-abuse.
Besides, the mud is not as strictly roleplay as - for example - a MUSH.  It
IS World of Darkness based, and thus I want to concentrate on a more 
roleplaying theme (rather than combat), but more than anything I am trying
to make it as automated as possible.  Think of it as more of a rpg/simulation.

> In a less rp-centric (I shall refer to them hereon as 'adventure' games,
> on the strength of my previous 'types of game' speech/es, and on the basis
> that h/s games will probably not care much about descriptions) adventure
> games, the player-written addendum is probably not needed, and you can
> probably feel free to automate more, since players are not into such
> *intense* characterisation.
> 
> Firstly, consider what you might modify the description based on. Some
> possible elements are: Hair/eye/skin colours, Height, weight/mass, build
> (we will determine this from strength/dexterity statistics in my
> examples), overall attractiveness (charisma), clothing (outer layer only).

I do have eye/hair colour, as well as hair length and a choice of verb for
both hair and eyes - however this is only used in the 'look at' description.
I was considering working on some form of 'priority' to pull out features in
order to create a short description.  I mean, you don't want to see:

A tall, ugly fat man with a bushy black beard, bald head, piercing blue eyes,
heavily tanned skin dressed in expensive clothes says 'hello'.

However it would be nice if it picked for example 'fat' and 'piercing blue eyes'
(your characters most outstanding two features) and displayed:

A fat man with piercing blue eyes says 'hello'.

Even my system at the moment (appearance+age) creates some interesting 
interaction between players that I hadn't accounted for.  For example, when a
very young character logged on, everyone started calling him 'boy' (hey, whats
your name, boy?), whilst an ugly player got severely taunted.  The male 
characters also paid a lot of attention when 'a stunningly gorgeous young
woman' logged on...I think this itself could really start encouraging people
to roleplay without them even realising it.

> >From this list, we produce a 'data bank' of message parts (perhaps just
> pairs of verbs and adverbs), with a text parser capable of assembling said
> parts. Each element has descriptions written for several states, perhaps
> in the form 'element - condition:result,condition:result' etc (an LPC
> mapping type even), so if we take a subject:
> 
> Hair: Blonde
> Eyes: Hazel
> Skin: Ebony
> Height: 170 (cm)
> Weight: 85 (kgs)
> Build: ((str + (dex/2))/10) = 7.5 = 8
> Attractiveness: Charisma/10 = 6
> Outer clothing: Gold-threaded tabard, leather gloves, chain coif, tartan
>                 kilt, leather boots.
> 
> The system feeds this information into the data bank, and retries the
> 'hair:blonde' description, and so on. In the case of build/attractiveness,
> the numbers are used to retrieve the descriptive data referring to that
> value. So now the system has:
> 
> Hair: blonde
> Eyes: hazel
> Skin: ebony
> Height: 170 (cm)
> Weight: 85 (kgs)
> Build: thickly set
> Attractiveness: fairly
> Outer clothing: Gold-threaded tabard, leather gloves, chain coif, tartan
>                 kilt, leather boots.
> 
> And can thread them together, some conditionally:
> 
> This thickly set man is (compare height to lookers, and produce suitable
> comparative phrase.. in this case we are roughly equal.. so..) about your
> height, with (check for special case between hair/eyes/skin.. blonde and
> ebony is a special case..) shocking blonde hair, a direct contrast to his
> ebony skin and hazel eyes. He sports a gold-threaded tabard and tartan
> kilt on his body, with a chain coif on his head, and leather gloves upon
> his hands, his feet covered by leather boots.
> 
> This is still relatively simplistic, I'm sure - the above can be produced
> with a sort of 'marking language' with relatively little hassle, once a
> good databank system is worked out.

It is still a lot better than what I have at the moment.  Don't forget to
add wounds to the description though ;)

KaVir.