[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 05:28 PM 9/26/98 -0500, I personally witnessed Koster, Raph jumping up
to say:
>
>I've often seen it cited as a rule that room descriptions in muds should
>not impose feelings on the player or character.
>
>How do you feel about room descriptions like these? These are from an
>area I did for Legend which was never completed, themed around an
>idealized 1950s:

I think my first comment sums up my thoughts pretty well on this, I'll
expound later.

>Before the Sinclair Station~

This one ascribes certain desires to the characters that are just not
generally appropriate. Replacing "Sometimes you wish the dinosaur would"
with "Sometimes you imagine the dinosaur could" would go a long way toward
fixing this. A benevolent preacher would probably not be walking around
wishing a huge monster would rampage through the town and eat everyone, for
example.

>North Market Street

You smoke dope, don't you? ;)

Seriously, these are atmospheric and play some excellent emotional games,
but imposing feelings is something that just screws up the game a lot of
the time. Walking through a park on a WoD MUSH, in the persona of my stodgy
old Ventrue elder, I was once confronted with "You step into the glade,
feeling the warmth of the sun on your face, and smile." Excuse me, but if a
vampire feels the sun on his face, a smile is going to be about the last
thing on his mind. I also saw descriptions of things that made me "feel
like skipping," which is patently inappropriate for anyone with as big a
stick up his ass as the average Ventrue. 

My guideline is that you may plant an image in the character's mind, but
you cannot tell him how to *feel* about it. Active verbs are inappropriate
in a description. "You feel" is only appropriate for physical sensations,
and "You are" is only appropriate for descriptions of physical states. "You
feel a breeze" is fine, "You feel happy" is not. "You are waist deep in
mud" is fine, "You are afraid" is not. 

But even then, there is room for judgment calls -- "You are convinced that
the people in this room are not really here, for some reason; that they are
in fact long gone, and their presence here is nothing more than an echo
down the bottomless reaches of time, a bare whisper of circumstance
magnified into a stentorian chant by the odd acoustics of the present
moment." Effective, creepy, and emotionally charged. But then, "You realise
suddenly that the people in this room are not really here at all, and the
terror it strikes into your soul makes you cry out." -- that's wrong. 

It's hard to quantify this and make real rules about it, because there are
always exceptions. All of the descriptions were well-constructed and nicely
done, and while I could nitpick about the specifics on them -- as I did
above -- I wouldn't shake my head and veto their use on a MUD. 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com>   | "I'm not sorry or 
Darklock Communications <http://www.darklock.com/> |  ashamed of who I 
PGP Key AD21EE50 at <http://pgp5.ai.mit.edu/~bal/> |  really am."      
FREE KEVIN MITNICK! <http://www.kevinmitnick.com/> |  - Charles Manson