[MUD-Dev] Dynamic Descriptions

[Tess Snider]

On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 11:12:28 +0200, Bernard Graham
<bernardgraham at gmail.com> wrote:

> Things I have started to think about include having weather, time
> of day and seasons affect the description.  Also, how would you
> properly implement smells and even things like the size of a room,
> for example, if you are in a small room it might feel
> claustrophobic, whereas if you are on a road inside a town it
> might feel "open".

We used to do this extensively on TinyMUSHes.  We wrote up
time-of-day code that would change text descriptions based on the
time of day.  We had ambience code (intermittent environmental
messages).  We had weather systems.  All kinds of things.  It was
both important and unimportant to us.  It was important, in the
sense that most of the game consists of descriptions.  That is,
because of the nature of TinyMUSHes, the environmental descriptions
of things are an integral part of the game's *value* -- that which
would separate it from, say, a bunch of people roleplaying in an IRC
chatroom.  They are the scenery on the stage.  They set the backdrop
for the action.

At the same time, they were unimportant, in the sense that, once you
saw them for the third or fourth time, you generally didn't read
them anymore.  So, I imaigne that a considerable amount of the work
we put into making descriptions mutable went largely unnoticed.  In
the end, it may have been done more out of personal satisfaction,
than because it added value to the typical player's experience.

And, that, I would say, is an important point, if this is a topic
that interests you.  If you are going to make these things mutable:
1.) It should be important to the typical player's experience in
some way that they are mutable, and 2.) it should be *conventional*
for these descriptions to change -- so that your players come to
expect change, and know that they should pay attention, just in
case.

Tess
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