[MUD-Dev] Re: Introductions and descriptions

[Maddy]

Previously, Richard Woolcock wrote....
> Maddy wrote:

> > Well you still have to remember the name of things.  If Bob ignores the
> > mushroom and walks back and forth through the room several times, eventually
> > he'll succeed.  Likewise, Fred may eventually fail and think it's a tasty
> > looking mushroom.
> 
> I don't see why you would have to remember the names of things.  If Bob
> doesn't know that the mushroom is poisonous, there is no way he's going to
> find out unless someone tells him or he eats one.  Admittedly, from then
> on he would still be unable to identify which mushrooms were good to eat -
> but its probably a pretty safe bet that he wouldn't try eating another one
> until he did a little research on wilderness Survival.  Equally, Fred is
> hardly likely to forget that the mushroom is deadly - how many times have
> you 'forgotten', for example, not to eat something you personally hate
> eating (or something poisonous)?

Well Bob will find out eventually if he keeps seeing this mushroom, because
for the game to describe it as "Oooh a lovely mushroom", it requires Bob to
perform his survival skill and he could succeed at some stage.  The only way
around this is to store something which says Bob's seen this mushroom and
thinks it's not deadly, hence - remembering the name.  You could I guess
store some kind of flag, it'd have to be very generic though, but given your
ideas on characters having a bit more freewill it'd fit right in.

    >look at mushroom
    [Succeeds the spot well dodgy mushroom skill]
    You see a vile lesser spotted warthog mushroom - highly poisonous.
    >eat mushroom
    No matter how hard you try, you just can't force yourself to eat it.

If you had to make a survival skill every time, you could have ended up
eating the mushroom cos you had forgotten.  But I guess that it'd not make
it hard to check if it were deadly poisonous just by storing the name.

Maddy