[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Caliban Tiresias Darklock [mailto:caliban at darklock.com]
> Sent: Saturday, September 26, 1998 6:28 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions
> 
> 
> 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? ;)

Heh, no.

Here's the thing: the area is written about an idealized 1950s from the
point of view of a child. So the area does impose not just feelings, but
a whole worldview on the character.

> 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. 

This is what I was getting at. This is indeed the accepted wisdom. And
your vampire example is indeed a classic case (a technically impossible
one within Legend's rules, as characters are technically all human, but
that's beside the point).

What I was hoping to lead towards with the post was a discussion of ways
in which muds help players experience things from a different
perspective. Accepted wisdom says that players get to pick that
perspective.

Is accepted wisdom right? What about a mud whose entire point is to
OBLIGE players to experience the world from a perspective they did not
choose? This seems like a really interesting area to explore, and
something that I think some muds here on the list are getting at with
their alteration of room descriptions based on the character's traits.

> 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. 

Here's another point: if you are trying to immerse players in a
narrative fiction, you generally have to impose feelings. After all,
narrative cohesion depends on that. I've often said that fiction is
largely about mind control of the reader.

In the case of the above area samples, the idea was to magically change
the player's character into a child when they entered the area. Does
that make the descriptions more palatable to your criteria?

-Raph