[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is supposed to be playing, anyway? (Was: PK Again)

[Shawn Halpenny]

On Fri, 26 Sep 1997, Michael Hohensee wrote:

> In <E0xDotA-0004Hx-00 at crucigera.fysh.org>, on 09/24/97
>    at 08:46 AM, Maddy <maddy at fysh.org> said:
> 
> >Imagine race X is at war with race Y.  It takes a lot of the fun out
> >of things, if you can sneak up to race X's headquarters and have a
> >good listen to what they're all planning for tomorrow.  The way I've
> >got languages planned out is that each letter maps to another letter
> >(although I'm probably going to use groups of letters).  If I say
> >"Hello world" in human, it might appear to an elf as "Ifmmo xpsme".
> 
> In that case, you may want to give each race a "battle language" as well
> as their spoken language (idea from Dune).  Otherwise, some clever human
> could learn to decipher the language based upon everyday conversation or
> interception of everyday conversation with elves.

Is this necessarily an undesired thing?  Why should the language be
unlearnable simply by studying people speaking it?  One of the key words in
your sentence was "decipher".  Typically, a cipher is just a mapping of
symbols, and there's no requirement that your language cipher be easy to
break.  Let them learn it, IMO, but make it suitable complex.  Rearrange
words, break words in different places, reverse words, etc.

> Perhaps the battle language could be represented by a short (30-90) list
> of words that get encoded to something completely random.  These words
> could be battle specific words, ie: love isn't going to be among them.
> :)

"I'd love to kick yer arse 'round this battlefield!"

What would happen during the parsing process to the words not in the list?

--
Shawn Halpenny

"You can't buy the necessities of life with cookies"
                                    - "Edward Scissorhands"