Member Discussions

I was just reading over a thread in another forum considering player housing in muds. While one may argue, and someone did, that one of the biggest hurdles to such a project is lack of programming skill in the mud staff; I'd like to analyze a second aspect: Player Descriptions.

Player-generated content is generally an issue of great concern for many administrators. We do not trust our players to be responsible with their ability to make indelible marks on OUR game worlds. Especially when there is no system in place for ensuring correctness with game standards before being publicly viewed. In the case of setting room descriptions, we fear players being too grandiose for their own good (ie, the newbie designing a room so richly furnished it should belong to a king - this is argueable, but I believe it is an issue in RP-heavy muds), not in setting (the knight's bedroom having a spaceship in the corner), or obscene (sexual referances, abusive language, or graphically violent descriptions).

I don't fully agree that our fears of such are sufficient rationale to prevent our allowing the players to generate content, but it makes me cringe inside just thinking about it. A simple solution then is to allow the player to modify the description to suite their tastes while preventing them from directly entering it. To this end, imagine player room descriptions being built off the initial description followed by some arranged set of related object descriptions. For example, a picture 'hanging on' a wall.

An extension to this is the issue of house construction which I have been struggling with for a while. I would like to give my players the capability to build their own homes without immortal intervention, while neither making it trivial nor intensly restricted.

Kelson

i think you are right. That is exactly the biggest problem with this type of system. I remember my first area. Look table -> There's a book on a doily on the table. Look book -> The book is closed. Open book -> You open the book. Look book -> The book describes the way nested items can be used to hide things which the studious may find. Look doily -> There is a book on the doily. Get book -> You pick up a book. Look Doily -> There is a lump under the doily. Get doily -> You get a lace doily. Look table. There is a key on the table.

Aside from all of this, there were two appearance settings for all rooms, objects and mobiles that changed based upon if the PC was affected by a particular spell or wearing a special item.

I wonder why this first area of mine was shot down? I had planned it all out and written a complete background. A few help files were written by yours truly to help add depth to anyone who cared enough to read it. It fit beautifully into the game world. I was even asked to write it as it was the house for my drow matron for that world.

I kind of like the enhancement system I metioned in the thread about player housing. We could allow players to buy rooms with options for material types for walls, floors, and ceilings. Then let them buy things like light fixtures, tapestries, and paint to add to the room which will modify the description by being placed there. Furniture can be brought in as well. have enhancements for some of these other items as well.

Maybe floors and ceilings could be enhancements as well. That way, each room can be one base material to keep things cleaner. You might want to not just charge for enhanements, but also for the installation of enhancements. You could charge on a sliding scale for enhancements to where it costs a little extra for each enhancement. This may help to make certain that things don't become too convoluted or cluttered within each room. You could also charge to remove enhancements such as ripping up tiles to put down carpet.

I'm itching now to tear into some base code and see if I can come up with a snippet to do this. Then each mud that uses it can truly claim unique areas as the players are actually builing even if no one else is. The only real problem I can see then is with people who play on multiple muds using the content from one mud on another. We could use a disclaimer and let the players know that their little slice of mud will be deleted if this happens, but the damage is normally done long before we know about it.

Oh wait, that wasn't an urge to write a snippet. It was an urge for a nice prime rib with garlic mashed potatoes and steamed squash. Damn. I will probably keep this one in the back of my mind anyways. I might actually do it later, but there is way too much on my plate right now to even really consider it.

I like this idea, and would love to see it implemented somewhere. I might even bring it up with the rest of the design team when we write up the design document for our mud this month. if we do something like this, I might take the time to right up a merc snippet version while I write the version for our mud if that's the case as it would take up less time to do it then than later. No guarantees though.

I have actually seen an implementation similar to the one you mention above on Adventures Unlimited, though my last visit there was well past 2 years now IIRC. There was essentially a shopping list that players could select things from and wind up with their home as a result. The problem as I saw it was that the staff, who will never scale to the player base, have to be actively involved in these changes.

What I intended was that the players could bring objects into the room to create its description - objects could merge with the room description. Unfortunately, there are three problems with this.

The first is the base room description I mentioned earlier and how it merges with these objects. Since we're not, I am assuming, following through with the simulationist approach to the degree necessary to have a paint object on the wall object which all exist in this room ==> the wall object actually being shared with another room perhaps...more on this later <== it is necessary that we integrate the original description with object inclusions. This can be solved in a number of ways, but making changes like replacing the wall color (note: this is not based on any specific setting for those wondering about painted fantasy walls) would require a staffer. Still do-able, perhaps including an entire IC component where the player needs to hire an NPC who closes the house for a day or two while it is fixed up (re-described), but violates not involving the staff.

The second is requiring yet another description for objects so that they have a meaningful description for adorning a wall. This is a further burden on the builders, though a nice touch in my opinion. For example, a painting hanging on a wall would be integrated much better if it were described as a painting of a battle between an elf and a band of orcs. Of course, this runs into an issue with maintaining short room descriptions, as the next problem touches on.

The third is maintaining decent length room descriptions and integrating all the objects together. For example, if there are six halberds in the room, they should be listed in one sentence. Whereas, if there are five halberds and a special silver halberd, that should be mentioned. And if all six are different, they should be listed in one sentence as well (all grouped by being halberds rather than a type of a halberd).

Kelson

I think this would be easily doable without dragging the imms in each time someone want to build/alter a room.

The first thing is buying the room. Maybe have a special type of shop in town where you can contract a house to be built. The player orders a room, or set of rooms and a base material type and maybe a selection of sectors as well. They also place an order for neighborhood. Not only do different neighborhoods provide different property values, but can also limit plot size which would be the number of rooms a player may build in that sector.

Then the player can go to that sector and use a command such as 'Home' to be transported to their house. Visitors can use something like 'Visit Nym' and can go into a friends house. You might want to put in a check to see if the player is at home beofre letting them in.

The second concern isn't actually all that hard to take care of. The actual room enhancements can be flags which provide a room description snippet and a description of it's own. In the case of the tapestry, have it add something like, 'A tapestry hangs on the west wall.' When someone goes to look at it, then give a more detailed description of what it presents. Set this up like a normal nested description for a room as well.

Sell the enhancements just like other items that can be carried around, but give them a new item type. Have a special set of commands for room enhancement handling as well to where the player can see a list of what enhancements are in a room they own, along with commands for adding and removing enhancemnts. Have a setting to where some enhancements are lost when removed such as paint, but others can be kept, such as the tapestry. Take away the item when the enhancement is set to a room. Give the player the item back when the enhancement is removed if it is salvageable.

The last example is actually the easiest of all. Keep items the way they are. The furniture and other items do not need to show up in the room description if they are part of the list of items found in the room. It would be really easy to open a furniture shop next to your bakery. The hard part would be getting the furniture to the homes as most furniture is quite heavy. Offer a faux delivery service to where the player can choose which room the furniture is delivered to. The item will be delivered to there home and placed in the room of there choice for later usage.

A realtor would also be nice so players can sell their homes should they want to move to another neighborhood. This would normally only apply if there were some truly tangible differences between neighborhoods. Make it so that it is also cheaper to buy a home than to build a similar home with all of the same options attached. Also, don't forget those realtor fees.

I'm not sure if this is the type of things you are looking for or not. Let me know if you know any muds that are using this type of system. I would love to check them out some time.

Most of this post was in referance to a correction I should have made in previous postings: my intention is to have actual neighborhoods (my main city is going to be gigantic as a direct result of the fact that guards must be made up of local villagers who do decrease in number when the guards are killed and it does take time for new guards to be trained, etc...all in an effort to give players more influence) and I'd like to use normal items from anywhere in the world for these descriptions.

In fact, I don't want to relegate the modifying of room descriptions to simply homes. I think it would be a nice fringe benefit if players could post things up in other rooms (a nail, stuck through paper, sticks out from the wooden gate). This has me thinking of changing things to make walls actual objects to allow this interactivity (although it could, and would probably be better off in many cases, be approximated by a dir-wall flag in the room). This would also require several rooms sharing one object, but it seems a rather elegant solution.

In regards to the neighborhood differentiation, that is already planned where the richer sectors will be walled off with special guards patrolling them. I'm just afraid it is a lot of work for very little benefit (most players aren't going to spend substantial time in these districts).

I do enjoy your responses though, keep them coming :) I'd particularly like to see some expansion on the building of homes issue. In my current design, I have a relationship class that defines a bond between characters (PC and/or NPC) such as wrestling, grouped, horde, or brawling. Perhaps an elegant solution would be to do the same with objects and rooms to create the building relationship. This, while quite potent, seems very simulationist and unneccesarrily complex (since the majority of the benefit of such won't be enjoyed and doesn't make any progress in solving the biggest two issues in house construction...namely, making it interesting for the player and giving them variability in the result).

Kelson

I guess you could have have imms place the basic rooms for the players, or off some basic buildings. Charge more for the custom layout's however as there would no point for the generic layout's otherwise. Then, just divide your areas where you want the plyers to be able to build up into plots. Players have to buy enough plots for the layout of their buildings and yard space as well.

Leave plots open so that neighborhoods can be added to later on without having to expand on the size of the city itself. There are often-times uncultivated fields left in cities so that the space can be used later on.

I'm not really certain how to make all items to where they can alter a room description. I'd love to hear other responses on this though. I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but mushes allow players to build the world around them. You might want to try doing a hybrid type deal to allow the players to have full optimization.

The only other thing I can think of right now is to create an additional item type that can be used to act as a bridge between all of your items, and room descriptions. That, or you could go through and rewrite each and every item in your mud to be able to add onto your rooms. This latter might actually work better in the long run, but takes more work. I recommend working on this separate from the rest of your mud be cause it could take a while and will need a lot of testing before unleashing it upon your players.

We do not trust our players to be responsible with their ability to make indelible marks on OUR game worlds.

We don't? Sure we do.

I know that most role-playing and social muds have very liberal player building policies. Maybe that's because historically player building was built into most of the servers they happen to run on since they crawled out of the primordial ooze of Monster. In any case there's a wealth of experience as to the problems that were experienced and how they were solved. Just a few of these here...

1) Space and crowding issues. Many of these muds lived in confined disk space, so quota systems were developed to prevent prolific player builders from hitting those limits. Sad but true (Most of us covet prolific contributors). Quotas limit how many 'rooms' or 'things' you can create. Also it may be an issue as to where players can build without making certain important locations of the mud overcrowded.

The implications of quota systems today are that it they still be required on some games for security reasons. If you allow unapproved chargen or immediate play, and default access to creation capabilities you may open yourself up to DoMS attacks (I just minted that, don't look it up.) I mean Denial of Mud Server attacks where someone could log in and script Object creation until you ran out of memory or disk space and your game would crash or not be able to boot depending on how your game works. But worse denying other players the space to build. Anyway a quota system is a good safe guard, you can always increase it for players who ask for more. Also limiting access to building until players have gone through chargen and approval, or reached some arbitrary measure of game play time in which you feel comfortable that the player is serious.

One way to limit building to certain locations is to lock the rooms where you don't want it done down. That way players can only link their rooms to unlocked rooms. This is sort of like a city zoning policy. Accomplished easily enough with the addition of another flag on your rooms.

2) Ownership and freedom issues. Yes there are legal issues in regards to ownership, but I'm more interested in the social aspect here. A lot of problems result from players borrowing, stealing or abusing other players objects. Sometimes players leave or are banned from the game and demand their creations be removed. Sometimes players demand other players creations be removed because they offend them, or maybe they offend the owner of the game. Sometimes one of the owners of the game decides to start a new one, splits and takes stuff and starts a new game with all the old muds players stuff.

You need well-written building policy. I mean both legitimate in the legal sense and coherent and understandable in that players grok it. That doesn't solve the problem, it just makes what you're going to do about ownership consistent (assumes the mud implementers aren't weasels and will follow it too). Whether that policy is advantageous to the mud or the player is your business. Of course it assumes you know who authored and owns what. That's easily solved by adding ownership information to rooms and objects. Ownership on rooms and things also prevents other players from abusing another's creations.

Some muds have a sort of publishing system. That is while someone is building rooms and things, linking everything up, spell checking, testing and whatnot, none of it is visible to the rest of the players until it's flagged 'published'. Not to be confused with private rooms, although playing in your unpublished little set of rooms and things would in fact be private. Anyway once published it can either become managed by the game or continue to be managed the player or either. That causes some problems as well. Players often object to some random mud staff flunky screwing with and modifying their stuff even after turning it over to the game. That's another social-policy problem.

--------------------
Now what do you do should you still have an authoritarian fascist urge to oppress, repress, regulate and restrict players because you still don't trust them after playing your game for many months. (*smirk* high drama)

Well should you have the urges above I suppose you could insert a mechanism where it goes first to pending approval and the to published when some *kof* 'responsible' *kof* figure has edited out the hot tub, the micro brewery, the nekkid girls, crude references to Galadriel, elvish wookies, sex toys, sexism, racism, sadism, masochism, anarchism, antidisestablishmentarism, anything political incorrect today, doubleplusungood thoughts, references to Jesus riding in on a pale horse and kicking your arse to Gehenna, and anything that's remotely interesting, inspiring, humorous and fun out of it. ;-)

Lastly what if you're not running a purely social game or role-playing game. Now I do submit role-players will naturally build along the lines of the world anyway. Just like you trust them to role-play via the communication system, their creations will reflect that. A person who comes to role-play in your World of Frodo, isn't going to create spaceships, ewoks, Kirk or laser weapons. That is after all why the came to your role-playing mud isn't it?

But still a lot of people run combinations of social with a hack-n-slash game, or role-playing with game systems. Or pure PK, pure hack-n-slash, adventure/questy games. Or any combination thereof where allowing a player to build things unrestricted might give advantage or disadvantage to them or others in the more important omnipresent GAME. They call this 'cheating'. What 'cheating' is varies from mud to mud, game system to game system, and community to community. Can you trust an group of game-only players to not create uber weapons, traps, link indiscriminately to high-value camping areas, etcetera. Probably and unfortunately not. They came to play the game and often very competitively. You'll probably have to pay a lot more attention to abuse and restrictions. But of lot of what I said above applies.

(Comment added by Tyche on Wed Jan 5 1:32:04 2005)

I'd just add that it makes more sense to allow first, then deny, than to deny first, then allow. Sometimes adminstrators do the kindergarten teacher or nanny routine. Like in "Since Tyche can't follow our policies, we've decided to implement a new rule to...blah blah" Don't do that. Punish or ban Tyche. :-)

Why not apply the principle of the body shop to your
houses ?

Players set the material of the wall, of the floor, select
a room size, buy furnitures which are not items but
elements of the descriptions. And from the sum of all
options set by the players result an house description.

That would , for example , result something like
set size kingchamber
set floor blackmarble
set wall oakwood
set ceiling unholypaintings
add furniture kingbed
make
-> ( sorry i'm not a builder nor an english native )
That room is vast and wealthy. The floor is made of the
precious black marble from the far DarkEden, while the
wall are covered with perfumed oakwood from the elven
forest. Above you, the ceiling has been painted with
sceneries of the unholy wars.
You spot a large and double bed made of precious black
wood.

I was waiting for your response :)

I like the publishing idea, as that'd let players just build things un-linked to the game world and would make it much easier to find good builders. I've been looking for a way of doing something similar to KaViR's personal planes of existance for each player without breaking my vision of the world.

My intentions were to really allow the player to construct, from discrete units, the final description even though they can only indirectly modify it. That is, they can't type in the new description, but by moving an object into the room, they can modify it. I think it could be an elegant solution...not even requiring new object 'types'. All that is necessary are some relationship forming commands (hang painting 'north wall') and a couple modifications to the commands that view the surroundings (I say surroundings, and not room, since the surroundings could be an object, player, monster, room, etc).

Oh...and I agree completely with your comment. My personal view on the issue of irresponsibility of players was that if they abused the creational powers granted to them, they would lose them. It is very similar to how I prefer to deal with channels and the ability to communicate on the mud. Abuse of speech results in loss of ability to speak.

Kelson

I'd actually like to take a step further back. Let the players build the house by positioning objects in it. Very similar to what you said, but it doesn't break the sense of being in the game.

Kelson

(Comment added by Kelson on Wed Jan 5 17:31:11 2005)

*** break interaction with the game world, I meant

There is 1 housing code out there by Dalsor for ROM based muds that has a static list of items that can be added into homes.

To me this idea applies only really to RP muds so most of the other type don't apply cause they don't care about it, they just want to walk around killing things.

As far as my plans:

Buildings built by users will come from a generic description of that type of building or room addition. Initially the player will go to a "property office" and see what 'plots' are available. The plots will have a set amount of "points" that will allow the sizes of the buildings.

So in the property office you get:
1) Small Farm - Includes 4 farm sectors, 10 house points
2) House - Includes 1 garden sector, 10 house points
3) Mansion - Includes 50 house points, 2 Farm, 1 Garden, etc

So say you BUY 2. You get a deed for that property and head to it. You have 2 ways of developing your building. 1 is to hire a contractor that will do it for you for a substantial cost, the other is to do it yourself if you have all the commodities.

To have a contractor do it, you simply go to the SHOP and order it (having your deed in hand and it'll know where to put the type of building from a generic description. The generic buildings will have set rooms and the like. So "Small Home" includes: kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom. Each room taking 2 house points. So that's an 8 point house. The description is just a generic floor, wall, ceiling, window, door setup. All other ITEMS are added to the room.

Furnishings can be made and bought, they are objects as they can be interacted with. I.E. Sit Couch. Other objects such as paintings can use a FLAG type system so when you HANG it, the display is different. "A portait is hanging here."

Unlike other muds though, my descrition of objects blend instead of list. So you have:

[ROOM]
Blah blah blah is a nice room with walls and floors and stuff.
There is a portait hanging here. A small rug covers the floor. A large brown couch sits against the wall.

So just dropping a new object or using a "connection" flag will allow different ways of the same object being displayed. If you DROP PAINTING you get "A painting is sitting on the floor." if you HANG PAINTING you get "A painting is hanging on the wall"

Using flags and other means make dynamics alot easier, personally my object system is completely dynamic and any type of field can be added to any type of object. So in all reality you can "HANG RUG" and you get "A rug is hanging on the wall."

Since all the descriptions are set on the items themselves, players can buy and display items as they see fit without having to write out thier descriptiongs and if something is moved, removed or added it just shows as such.

The moving of furnature in my mud will be using a cart, wheelbarrow or some other form as they are heavy to move, but delivery could be made possible.

The social or different sizes of plots don't relate as much on my map as others. 1 City Map sector is always the same size, but when you buy one in a rich part of town you get more building points to work in that area making expansion less room costly.

To sell your home, you just take your deed and key and post it in the property office and set your price. This covers the house and everything in it. Upon setting this, you will no longer have access to this dwelling by normal means. (You can still break into it as anyone is able to as I plan to have extensive thievery).

With all the code and modifications of objects and rooms a player can: buy property, build a dwelling, furnish it, secure it, make more keys, give others access, etc. Ownership will be set by the "DEED". Only 1 person can deed a property. If you transfer your deed to someone else for ANY reason, it's their property (Unless it's in the name of a church or guild or other organization). If a player is deleted or removed or goes inactive for an extensive period of time thier dwelling and all the property in it will be put up for auction at the property office and the money will go to the citys account.

Also only a certain number of properties will be allowed in cities. But players can also form thier own villages and stuff allowing more expansion of dwellings.

I've thought alot on this and am in the proccess right now of working out my building design (i'm creating the codebase so it works alot different than most codes out there.)

There is 1 housing code out there by Dalsor for ROM based muds that has a static list of items that can be added into homes.

To me this idea applies only really to RP muds so most of the other type don't apply cause they don't care about it, they just want to walk around killing things.

BTW, the snippet wasn't written for a role-playing game but a traditional hack-n-slash game.

I think your missing the greater social design picture. No role-player is going to want someone else describing their own house, castle or shop. It'd be exactly like not allowing emoting and limiting their expression to a selection of socials. Or not allowing them to set their description and instead offering them a limited selection of hair, eyes, clothing, etc. They have zero personal investment or emotional connection with what is really someone else's creation, and NOT their own.

That's not only true of role-players, but it's human nature not to value something that's not theirs nearly as much. Ever had a player completely freak out because they lost a sword, a sword just like every other damn sword of its kind on your mud (stat-wise). Except this one was special and had customizations that they wrote themselves or a fellow player had written and gave to them. It's not real, and they being just as smart or smarter than us implementors know that fundamentally as well. It however does not change the emotional perception whether the property is a real house of their own creation or just some virtual expression of same.

But even on muds where people are happily just slaying monsters and chatting, they love owning personalized things. They are the ones who'd most likely accept the Barbie doll layout collection concept embodied in the aforementioned snippet as satisfactory. But you'll get a never ending demand from them for variation and differentiation. It's not enough that made a red corvette available. It's just like every other red corvette on the mud. A piece of equipment. No they're going to want mag wheels, racing stripes, a hemi, or something on their corvette to differentiate that from all the other corvettes everybody owns. Might as well just give them the keys to creating whatever they want.

The bottom line is if you deny role-players the opportunity to have any affect on YOUR CONTENT they'll go to a role-playing mud that gives them that freedom and trust. Role-players are by and large content creators not just content consumers.

BTW, the snippet wasn't written for a role-playing game but a traditional hack-n-slash game.

The exact mud it was written for doesn't change that there is a snippet that can be used for a basic example.

I think your missing the greater social design picture. No role-player is going to want someone else describing their own house, castle or shop.

This is just your opinion. In general most are happy of owning such things and the exact description isn't a big issue. Some players DO NOT want to sit down and describe rooms in thier castle, they just want to own a castle.

Or not allowing them to set their description and instead offering them a limited selection of hair, eyes, clothing, etc. They have zero personal investment or emotional connection with what is really someone else's creation, and NOT their own.

I completely disagree I think it is more to make choices of the characteristics of your character than it is to write up a description yourself. Especially with RP. I personally think there is no roleplaying to have characters write a 2 paragraph description of thier character like some muds do. I.E. "A male elf wearing all black and has a long sword with a silver skull on the hilt. His black pants cover the length of his black boots." (This is just a sample so dont' nit pick it). Ok now what if the sword is stolen/lost/destroy'd? what if he isn't wearing pants or changed his pants. This static description that the player put in is no longer realistic. What is the same, the eye color, hair color, etc. If a disguise is put on, these things can be dynamically changed.

That's not only true of role-players, but it's human nature not to value something that's not theirs nearly as much.

I have had nothing but people compliment on being able to pick certain aspects like hair color, eye color, and how it is formatted when you view yourself or others are viewing you.

Ever had a player completely freak out because they lost a sword, a sword just like every other damn sword of its kind on your mud (stat-wise). Except this one was special and had customizations that they wrote themselves or a fellow player had written and gave to them. It's not real, and they being just as smart or smarter than us implementors know that fundamentally as well. It however does not change the emotional perception whether the property is a real house of their own creation or just some virtual expression of same.

Yes I have and it doesn't bother me any. I'm a RPer from D&D and in D&D you lose things, you get robbed, you get boiled by imps butt naked and are unable to recover ANY of your belongings. What do you do? YOU START OVER. You work on getting things back. If a user wants to "unique" thier homes or castles, they add furnishings to make it different. 90% of even roleplayers don't want to sit and write up what the walls of thier house look like and the floor. MODULER HOMES.

It's not enough that made a red corvette available. It's just like every other red corvette on the mud. A piece of equipment. No they're going to want mag wheels, racing stripes, a hemi, or something on their corvette to differentiate that from all the other corvettes everybody owns. Might as well just give them the keys to creating whatever they want.

Right, so they go buy a red corvette LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. Then they go buy wheels, put them on, then they get a racing stripe put on. But hey, isn't it still just the same object with additions? Chevy, Corvette, Red, Wheels, speed, etc. You're contradicting yourself.

The bottom line is if you deny role-players the opportunity to have any affect on YOUR CONTENT they'll go to a role-playing mud that gives them that freedom and trust. Role-players are by and large content creators not just content consumers.

Ok, you go hunt down that "perfect" mud. Or maybe go play a mush or something that is just typing exactly what everything is. You can have your uber corvette and your static description. But the group of RP people that come to my mud go for the features and the design that I had explained in the original post. A good Pay-to-play mud has used alot of these same features/ideas and has been running for over 10 years with them. I doubt they would be in business this long with static buildings like i described that players cannot describe, yet everyone enjoy'd if people want to run off to somewhere else. And yes, it's an RP mud.


(Comment added by muerte on Fri Jan 7 13:56:10 2005)

I doubt they would be in business this long with static buildings like i described that players cannot describe, yet everyone enjoy'd if people want to run off to somewhere else. And yes, it's an RP mud.

(This didn't come out right)

yet everyone enjoy'd. If people want to run off to somewhere else no one really noticed. I don't know any PLAYER that wants to just build things, and if I did I wish I had them so they can BUILD. ANd if all these players did want to describe things instead of playing the game, why is every game looking for builders.

Bottom Line: Everyone has thier playing preferences and to state that NO Role-players are a certain way about anything is just wrong. Muds are different, players are different, roleplaying is different. In my mud and others we'll stick to picking attributes and static buildlings and using them in a featureful and enjoyable way.

The exact mud it was written for doesn't change that there is a snippet that can be used for a basic example.

I thought it was important to note that homes aren't just for role-players. My second and third paragraphs expanded on why I think that.

This is just your opinion. In general most are happy of owning such things and the exact description isn't a big issue. Some players DO NOT want to sit down and describe rooms in thier castle, they just want to own a castle.

I probably should have said, 'No REAL role-player is going to...'. ;-P

I acknowledge that some hobbits are happy being limited to spoon-fed pre-packaged content (like WoW, Diablo, EQ, Diku), are denied the ability to create that sort of content in the game, and may likely be blissfully unaware of the hundred or so role-playing muds where they can.

I completely disagree I think it is more to make choices of the characteristics of your character than it is to write up a description yourself. Especially with RP. I personally think there is no roleplaying to have characters write a 2 paragraph description of their character like some muds do. I.E. 'A male elf wearing all black and has a long sword with a silver skull on the hilt. His black pants cover the length of his black boots.' (This is just a sample so dont' nit pick it). Ok now what if the sword is stolen/lost/destroy'd? what if he isn't wearing pants or changed his pants. This static description that the player put in is no longer realistic. What is the same, the eye color, hair color, etc. If a disguise is put on, these things can be dynamically changed.

Descriptions are dynamic on most muds, Diku included. A role-player will change their description to suit the scene.

@set me desc='A male elf wearing nothing at all but black boots.'

I mean muds which give you predefined options like:

Pick a hair color from Red, Black, Brown, or Yellow -> Red
You have red hair.

I've got nothing against this:
Pick a hair color from Red, Black, Brown, Yellow, or describe other -> long straight auburn
You have long straight auburn hair.

I have nothing against the mud generating convenience descriptions from YOUR input, or allowing you the option of doing it yourself dynamically:
@set me desc='A male elf with $(hair_color) hair wearing nothing at all but black boots.'

...is no longer realistic.

No, a role-player knows more what is 'realistic' (in setting) than your game code will ever know. Limiting choice to data the game machine can process makes the world less 'realistic' or immersive IMNSHO. The same goes for clothing, eye color, etc.

For example, which is more realistic or immersive? Allowing a character the option of wearing the 'the black shirt', 'the white shirt' or 'the red shirt'; or allowing them to wear the one they wrote... 'a dull white untucked shirt with fraying sleeves'.

You can create all the canned content you want and still allow players the freedom to create their own.

>Ever had a player completely freak out because they lost a sword, a sword just like every other damn sword of its kind on your mud (stat-wise). Except this one was special and had customizations that they wrote themselves or a fellow player had written and gave to them. It's not real, and they being just as smart or smarter than us implementers know that fundamentally as well. It however does not change the emotional perception whether the property is a real house of their own creation or just some virtual expression of same.

Yes I have and it doesn't bother me any. I'm a RPer from D&D and in D&D you lose things, you get robbed, you get boiled by imps butt naked and are unable to recover ANY of your belongings. What do you do? YOU START OVER. You work on getting things back. If a user wants to 'unique' thier homes or castles, they add furnishings to make it different. 90% of even roleplayers don't want to sit and write up what the walls of thier house look like and the floor. MODULER HOMES.

It doesn't bother me either. The point is there is a strong value difference between to the normal item and the personalized item. Home-steading and the ability to create personalized content creats a higher player investment in the mud.

Right, so they go buy a red corvette LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. Then they go buy wheels, put them on, then they get a racing stripe put on. But hey, isn't it still just the same object with additions? Chevy, Corvette, Red, Wheels, speed, etc. You're contradicting yourself.

How so?
a) you will be creating packaging content to meet player demand.
or
b) you'll tell them to shag off and just pick what you decided to make for them.
or
c) you give them the ability to create unique content themselves.

I consider the latter to be infinitely preferable from both an admin and player view.

Ok, you go hunt down that 'perfect' mud. Or maybe go play a mush or something that is just typing exactly what everything is. You can have your uber corvette and your static description. But the group of RP people that come to my mud go for the features and the design that I had explained in the original post. A good Pay-to-play mud has used alot of these same features/ideas and has been running for over 10 years with them. I doubt they would be in business this long with static buildings like i described that players cannot describe, yet everyone enjoy'd if people want to run off to somewhere else. And yes, it's an RP mud.

Right. MMORPGS certainly fill that role just like McDonald's has their canned dinner selection. It's impossible to get a chicken salad sandwich at McDonald's. Chicken salad just doesn't exist in the McDonald's world; it's not part of their reality because nobody in authority at McDonald's 'coded' it. Doing chicken salad is just too expensive and doesn't justify the potential sales. It's not like it's out of setting, out of character, or unrealistic in their world as they do have chicken nuggets and mayonnaise.

Sure I realize there's a niche for unimaginative hobbitses who merely consume what they are fed. It's McDonald's Mud. I'll never figure out why muds want to compete with MMORPGS on the level of restricted content, when they have the freedom to do what cannot (rather is not) being done in MMORPGS.

I agree with Tyche 100%.

People want customization. People like creating things that are unique and theirs alone. This sort of customization has been around on Mushes, MOO and several other cores since conception.

I've said it a million times, but I really think MOO, or Cold is the way to go when designing a new mud. Get away from those tired old stock cores and grab yourself some modular object based fun!

> Descriptions are dynamic on most muds, Diku included. A
> role-player will change their description to suit the
> scene.

They might - or they might not. And they might change it in a way which isn't correct. Unless you're going to heavily-handedly enforce the accuracy of each description, and verify each one every time it changes, there's no way to know whether or not the description actually reflects the character its being used to describe.

As I see it, this reduces you to three possibilities:

1) Create rules and assign a number of staff to the task of ensuring that all descriptions are accurate (and spelling/grammar checked).

2) Accept the fact that descriptions are cosmetic fluff that have no actual game value.

3) Generate the descriptions from characteristics.

> No, a role-player knows more what is 'realistic' (in
> setting) than your game code will ever know.

In the case of the 'ideal' player, that's true - unfortunately very few players fall into that category. Allow the good minority to pick their own descriptions and they'll likely create something of quality, but the rest of the players will look like drow, daleks, vampires, furry animals, pokemon, etc.

And even the good players will often forget to change their descriptions to reflect new characteristics.

> Limiting choice to data the game machine can process
> makes the world less 'realistic' or immersive IMNSHO.
> The same goes for clothing, eye color, etc.

Yet not as much as inconsistent data, IMO.

> For example, which is more realistic or immersive?
> Allowing a character the option of wearing the 'the
> black shirt', 'the white shirt' or 'the red shirt'; or
> allowing them to wear the one they wrote... 'a dull
> white untucked shirt with fraying sleeves'.

Your example could also be handled through automation - and it would have the advantage that the mud knew that the shirt was white, untucked, and had fraying sleeves. Perhaps certain mobs react a bit negatively towards you because your shirt is frayed and untucked (they think you look scruffy) - and should you wish to dye the shirt a different colour, the description would automatically change to reflect the new colour.

Equally, should the shirt become damaged, soiled, bloodstained, wet, or whatever else, the description would automatically change again. Looking at a player and seeing that their armour is dented and their weapons notched and bloodstained can give you a good impression of what they've been up to recently, but it would be neither practical nor viable to expect players to update that sort of information themselves.

The same sort of logic applies to houses, as muerte pointed out. If you want buildings that can be smashed up, blow apart or burnt down, then you really need some way to represent that fact. Are you really going to ask your players to rewrite the descriptions they've just spent the last week creating, because their homes have just been burnt down in a recent goblin raid against their hometown?

The generated descriptions allow you to make rapid changes to the environment - changes that result in a more believable and immersive world.

LOL. I always thought it would be nice with a more derogatory term than 'stock mud', and as far as I'm concerned it has just arrived, courtesey of Tyche: McMUDS!

Thanks Tyche.

... and no, I have nothing to add to the duscussion. I'm in complete and utter agreement with Tyche.

I run a pur hack & slash fantasy mud. The only RP rule enforced is 'no character name which doesn't suit a med fan world'.

I also have an house system where players can write the desc they want for their houses. I've ran through a set of houses and compiled some stats :

House where the player didn't set any descriptions : 37

House where the player wrote a non RP description ( there is a playstation here, my PC here ), or something that is not a description ( someone made ascii-art Kanjis, another speak of his IRL cat... ) : 23

House where the player wrote a funny med fan description : 7

House where the player wrote a short med fan description : 7

House where the player wrote a RP desc : 6

For those who'll like to comment, i'll add than houses of my mud have a storage space while characters without an house have only the backpack on their back to store all their belongings, so housing is a part of the character equipment system.

(I'll mention that i'm not at all surprised by the stats, my players are the kind who like a good named weapon, but will prefer the +5 damage one with a bad name )

I could see houses going really big in a PK system if there was some sort of trophy display system in place and the owner can invite friends over to either brag, or point and laugh. It might be better to have a public display case or museum type setting to display a grizzly from the time Morty the Mighty lost his ears to Tiny Tim in a throughdown.

What I am trying to say, is the PK muds are often about power and prestige and how we prove our own superiority in these areas. A player home that helps to enhance this aspect might be more enticing to PKers than one in which all they do is change features of a few rooms.

They might - or they might not. And they might change it in a way which isn't correct. Unless you're going to heavily-handedly enforce the accuracy of each description, and verify each one every time it changes, there's no way to know whether or not the description actually reflects the character its being used to describe.

As I see it, this reduces you to three possibilities:
1) Create rules and assign a number of staff to the task of ensuring that all descriptions are accurate (and spelling/grammar checked).
2) Accept the fact that descriptions are cosmetic fluff that have no actual game value.
3) Generate the descriptions from characteristics.


I really want to say #2, but with caveats and reservations about 'fluff' and 'game value'.
From a game-only POV...
whether Bubba says, 'Top of the mornin' to you milady!' and politely removes his hat.
or whether he says, 'Wazzup dude?! and farts in your general direction.
Well both are 'fluff' and have no 'game value'.

From a role-playing POV, and depending on theme of course, they have a different value, one might be bad. And since the 'game' as it were is hopefully about role-playing, well the 'fluff' above may have more value than the stuff the game implementer coded.

If one's description, speech or actions are not IC or current, a fellow player will let you know OOCly. Yes, players make mistakes and typos in descriptions, as well as in emotes and speech. Not only do players make mistakes in spelling and consistency, but so do the mud gods (builders and programmers). So in practice you'd have a guide as to how descriptions work and what should you put in them, what you shouldn't, and what sort of automation or rendering is done (or can be done) with them.

It's like this...
1) Either you already have the ability to enter/affect content or a new game feature is being added.
2) Someone comes along and decides to automate/code it.

Yay! No problems so far...

But they can do two things as a result of automating an existing feature or coding a new one, either offer limited or unlimited player choice. I hate the former. Automation while helpful in some cases is often less than satisfactory. I can best show that with the shirt example below.


> Limiting choice to data the game machine can process
> makes the world less 'realistic' or immersive IMNSHO.
> The same goes for clothing, eye color, etc.

Yet not as much as inconsistent data, IMO.


If it's limited choice versus the chance of inconsistency, I'd take choice every time IF the game is about role-playing.


> For example, which is more realistic or immersive?
> Allowing a character the option of wearing the 'the
> black shirt', 'the white shirt' or 'the red shirt'; or
> allowing them to wear the one they wrote... 'a dull
> white untucked shirt with fraying sleeves'.

Your example could also be handled through automation - and it would have the advantage that the mud knew that the shirt was white, untucked, and had fraying sleeves. Perhaps certain mobs react a bit negatively towards you because your shirt is frayed and untucked (they think you look scruffy) - and should you wish to dye the shirt a different colour, the description would automatically change to reflect the new colour.

Equally, should the shirt become damaged, soiled, bloodstained, wet, or whatever else, the description would automatically change again. Looking at a player and seeing that their armour is dented and their weapons notched and bloodstained can give you a good impression of what they've been up to recently, but it would be neither practical nor viable to expect players to update that sort of information themselves.


You'd have to implement a tuck/untuck command, a dye command, an object decay system, and a system to stain objects as the result of actions like spilling wine, wounds bleeding through to clothing, etc. All that's very nice, but what if I cut myself shaving? It's either 'sorry we don't have a shaving command implemented' or 'sorry it's not hooked up to the wounds systems'. And what about offstage activity? Many role-players, and I'm one of them, don't care to role-play sexual scenes with people over the interenet (nor even less interact with machine-coded system). That my character might instead show up with a lipstick stains on his shirt merely a token of off-screen activity leaving the rest to one's imagination is fine. Even more to the point, on one mud I was married and had a wife who never existed in the game. Just like TV detective Columbo, she never made an appearance in the game, but was significant nonetheless from a role-play view because of the fictional dialog and often humorous situations I attributed to her. I could show up with a wrinkled shirt and when someone would ask, I'd tell how the wife was off visiting her mum, and how I ironed me adventuring shirt myself.

-------------------------
Aside:
It's important to know what one means by role-playing. Maybe I ought to write a 'You may be a hobbit if...' article on the differences in role-play style between 'elvses' and 'hobbitses'.

Like for starters...
1) You may be a hobbit if you think something can never happened because the game system can't handle it.
2) You may be a hobbit if you say yes to the following...
If a player acts out a scene in the game forest and no other player is around to see it did role-playing occur?
3) You may be an elf if you think it only occurred if the player in question recounted it to you and the events occurred regardless of whether it happened in the players mind or in the mud.
4) You may be a hobbit if an elf enters a room riding a black stallion; you type 'kill stallion' - the game says 'huh?', then you type 'help mount' - the game says 'no help on that', and you're angry and complain to staff that the elf is cheating.
5) You may be a hobbit if you demand all OOC channels be removed from the game because they break your immersion and you can't be bothered with turning them off.
6) You may be an elf if 'Dawn fondles you with rosy fingers', 'you are hungry' and 'you are thirsty' messages appear a dozen or more times during a scene with other players and you're pissed because you can't @gag the messages produced by someone's moronic idea of a 'realistic' simulation.

-----------------------

The same sort of logic applies to houses, as muerte pointed out. If you want buildings that can be smashed up, blow apart or burnt down, then you really need some way to represent that fact. Are you really going to ask your players to rewrite the descriptions they've just spent the last week creating, because their homes have just been burnt down in a recent goblin raid against their hometown?


> look north
Tyche's castle
> @unlink north
> @dig north to 'Tyche's burnt out shell of a castle'
> look north
Tyche's burnt out shell of a castle
...
time passes
...
> @unlink north
> @dig north to 'Tyche's castle being rebuilt'
...

The above could have been completely scripted by the game, and one can easily preserve content temporarily unlinked, inaccessible, or even versioned. They might want to rebuild and redecorate it exactly the same, or maybe do it differently. The nice thing is I can burn my castle to the ground manually myself and claim that the orcs did it if I wanted to (maybe for purposes of insurance fraud or maybe to incite the town against the orcs), even in the absence of the game system's ability to do it for me. If there was a game system event to do it, I might even customize the burnt down castle to look like mine would look burned down and keep it around to use as a model to a burnitdown() event issued by the game instead of loading the generic burned down castle.

I'm not really anti-canned content or anti-simulationist, I'm just very pro-player optional customization. I realize not all players want to become full-time full-fledged builders, then canned content is fine. But intentionally and consciously implementing non-customizable content when it could be in a role-playing game should be a capital crime. ;-)

For a role-player your only option in a totally canned-content world is to ignore the content as irrelevant or pretend via emoting that something else is there or has happened. Perhaps I like to eat apples and there are no apples 'implemented' in the game, though they do exist theoretically. What do I do? I can either emote giving apples to my friends to enjoy, and that's quite sufficient in most cases, I can go buy pot pies from the McBaker and pretend they are apples and hand them out to my friends (if they are hobbits they'll scream they ain't apples and complain to the staff I'm not roleplaying, I'm cheating again), or I'll be annoying the staff with requests for apples or 'restringing' the pot pies into apples because they just can't trust me because they are running a game where they assume anyone with the power to create apples is either going to be 'cheating' or constructing 'vibrating *CENSORED*s' to hand out in their medeival world.

In my opinion, they may not really be running a role-playing mud anyway.

(Comment added by Tyche on Mon Jan 10 10:13:08 2005)

To the following...
If it's limited choice versus the chance of inconsistency, I'd take choice every time IF the game is about role-playing.
I wanted to add..
Limited choice is often inconsistent with reality. The hair color example for instance, where there are only red, black, brown and yellow choices. Sure you won't get 'yelolw' hair because of some players dyslexia, but you won't get 'auburn', or 'strawberry blonde' either.

> I really want to say #2, but with caveats and reservations
> about 'fluff' and 'game value'.
>
> From a game-only POV...
> whether Bubba says, 'Top of the mornin' to you milady!' and
> politely removes his hat. or whether he says, 'Wazzup
> dude?! and farts in your general direction. Well both are
> 'fluff' and have no 'game value'.

True. However accurate descriptions are not fluff - they provide information which has valuable game use. If you look at someone and see that they've got glowing red eyes, does that mean they're demon tainted? Can you spot (with a high enough perception rating) small fangs, indicating their vampire heritage? Are you able to roughly access their fighting ability by the tone of their muscles and their lightness of step? Can you take a guess at their homeland by the colour of their eyes, hair and skin? Are you able to make a medical diagnosis by the palor of their skin, the sweat on their brow, and the appearance and location of any injuries they might carry?

If the description is generated then all of the above (and more) can be used to provide useful hints and tips within the mud. If the description is player-written, then there's no way to know whether it's actually accurate and/or up to date - and as far as I'm concerned, it's worthless cosmetic fluff.

Perhaps you see it as the freedom to appear however you like - but I see it as a wasted opportunity that could have been used to improve gameplay.

> From a role-playing POV, and depending on theme of course,
> they have a different value, one might be bad. And since
> the 'game' as it were is hopefully about role-playing, well
> the 'fluff' above may have more value than the stuff the
> game implementer coded.

I'm not much into roleplaying muds. I enjoy roleplaying games, but consider muds to be a poor medium for such activity.

However I do believe in creating an immersive and consistent world, and allowing players to freely set their own descriptions is something which would prevent that goal - unless I were to introduce (and actively enforce) lots of petty rules (and even then, the potential game value of descriptions would be lost).

I'd rather allow players as much freedom as possible to do whatever they can get away with, and prevent them from doing what they shouldn't through code, rather than introduce (and waste my time enforcing) a wide range of rules.

> If one's description, speech or actions are not IC or
> current, a fellow player will let you know OOCly.

If it's not in the description, then the chances are other players won't even know about it - unless you go around asking every player if they're actually a lycanthrope who has just forgotten to add 'slightly pointed teeth' (visible with perception roles of 95+) to their description. I suppose you could OOCly ask every player with blood-red eyes if they're really a half-vampire, but that's going to get stale pretty quickly.

> But they can do two things as a result of automating an
> existing feature or coding a new one, either offer limited
> or unlimited player choice. I hate the former. Automation
> while helpful in some cases is often less than satisfactory.

Emphasis mine, and I think this really sums up the thread. Most people agree that automation is good in some situations and bad in others - however we all draw the line differently. Some people like automated descriptions, others don't. Some people like automated combat, others don't. Some people like automated magic systems, others don't.

At one extreme we have a talker, and at the other we have a fully automated game. Yet I don't think many of us would consider IRC to be the epitome of a roleplaying mud.

All of your arguments here could just as easily apply to combat - do you prefer muds in which combat is handled entirely through roleplay?

I'm not much into roleplaying muds. I enjoy roleplaying games, but consider muds to be a poor medium for such activity.
...
At one extreme we have a talker, and at the other we have a fully automated game. Yet I don't think many of us would consider IRC to be the epitome of a roleplaying mud.

I'm not entirely in disagreement with the above, although maybe your perception of the density of games at the extremes (or maybe not). On the fully automated game extreme there are thousands and thousands of such games, most not muds but yet quite a few games that are muds. On the talker/IRC extreme there are very few role-playing games, and the distance of your average mush RP game is about as far from that as it is from the other end. I mean we're talking the absence of a online persistent 'virtual' world at that point. Those few examples that I've seen in talkerland are mostly attempts to recreate the FTF FRP gaming or even LARP over the wire in exactly the same style. They could have done the same thing and maybe even better using a n-way telephone hookup (though probably prohibitively costly at one time).

Just like you, only a handful of people in my FTF FRP group can stand role-playing muds, and I can easily understand why. And that's exactly the point. The more you try to emulate a simulation or make the 'great' game, the less importance and reliance there is on role-play. The game or simulation becomes the primary source of entertainment and interest. There's nothing at all wrong with that. There is I think something inherently flawed in the notion that you are designing towards the the simulation with the intent of increasing role-play. All signs really point to going in the other direction if that is one's intent.

I think the key here is that even while the roleplayer is playing this semi-automated game, they desire the freedom to express themselves with relatively unlimited power in referance to their persona (not the game character, necessarily). Descriptions have everything to do with that persona's physical appearance so they desire complete control over such; much as they do with emotes (rather than simply using socials).

The original topic had to do with this dichotomy between game world and roleplayer world. To the game world, the description in Tyche's world means nothing. In the roleplaying world, the description in KaViR's world means a great deal, but not necessarily more than the standard view of the equipment a player is wearing. Thus why I personally like the hybrid one generally finds with the roleplay-relevant player written descriptions and then the game-relevant player armor listing. Just trying to find something similar, yet unobtrusive, for player rooms. I may wind up simply giving them the ability to write the descriptions, but I would very much like to give them the ability to make an actual mirror in the room when it says 'A mirror hangs on the wall' in the description. And, when that mirror is taken by a player, for the room description to change accordingly.

This is likely the course I'll take; allow players to set their own descriptions for every room in property owned by them, then append to this description the object-relevant descriptions.

Kelson

> I think the key here is that even while the roleplayer is
> playing this semi-automated game, they desire the freedom
> to express themselves with relatively unlimited power in
> referance to their persona (not the game character,
> necessarily).

But as I've said before, it's a line that different people draw at different places - there are mudders out there who desire the freedom to "express themselves with relatively unlimited power" in combat situations, for example, yet many other mudders prefer to see that side of the game automated. Why? Because they feel a coded combat system adds to the gameplay - and IMO it's important to remember that roleplaying games are games. Take away the gameplay elements and you end up with an online version of "lets pretend".

The same logic applies to pretty much every aspect of a mud. Imagine a mud based on "Mage: The Ascension" - such a magic system would be pretty much impossible to model with code, being limited only by the imagination of the caster, but I'm sure there are many players out there who would prefer to see a well-coded attempt that covered most of the possible scenarios than always having to wait for admin to turn up and manually handle every situation.

> Descriptions have everything to do with that persona's
> physical appearance so they desire complete control over
> such; much as they do with emotes (rather than simply
> using socials).

Actually I'd be happy to play a mud without emotes, if the socials were integrated into the actual gameplay (eg a mud where the mobs responded positively to laughter, or cowered before your evil grin).

Regarding appearance...I've recently been playing Fable. Not sure if you're familiar with it, but in Fable your character's appearance can be fairly heavily customised - you can get various haircuts and/or beards, get tattoos, earn scars, become fat or muscular, etc (as well as change your clothing of course). I find it's a really nice touch - it's even more flexible than the new GTA3 (which I also liked).

However you don't have full control over it like you do in games which allow you to select your own skins. When I used to play Action Quake a few years back, my friends and I downloaded numerous customised skins for our characters - Homer Simpson, Cartman, wierd alien things, and pretty much anything else you could imagine. It was amusing for a while, but it utterly ruined the immersion of what was otherwise intended to be a fairly realistic simulation (Action Quake had bleeding, injuries, etc). Obviously we didn't play the game for any sort of roleplaying value, but I still felt it detracted from my enjoyment.

The mud I'm creating now is not a roleplaying mud, but I still feel immersion should play an important part - thus the theme is consistent and elements of gameplay have in-game reasons for being there. I don't want a Cartman lookalike running around, beating up Bart Simpson with his intergalatic toothbrush, but neither do I want to waste my time enforcing things which can be handled perfectly well through code - particularly when, by handling it by code, it allows me to add actual game value to that feature.

If you want players to value their character and equipment, there are plenty of ways to do so besides allowing them to write their own descriptions.

Great thread, and a subject close to my heart.

A bit confusing at times, though, and in view of the many comments that seem to be MUSH experience applied to MUDs (if Bartle and Leong will forgive me for using the narrower definition of 'MUD'), I feel obliged to point out:

On most RP MUSHes these days, there is a very extensive application and approval process in place. Enough typing is required to prove linguistic competance, resumes of previous game experience to show familiarity with the on-line environment and tests of the understanding of the rule books are common. Most MUDs, however, seldom require more than choosing an acceptable name and email address.

Despite KaVir's fears, MUSH descriptions are relevant and accurate, being updated by the players themselves to reflect current events. It does, however, involve extensive staff intervention even after the approval process, something he obviously finds distasteful, as would most of those that choose to play (and staff) MUDs.

Kelson, for a while I reverted to the original DIKU sentence format for EQ, and displayed it in a linear fashion. That is, 'An Elf sits here. He is using a small helmet, a black robe, a pair of swordsmans gloves, a pair of muddy boots, and is wielding a long thin dagger.' Players didn't like it, so I went to a list format:

An Elf sits here. He is using:
a long thin dagger in his off hand
a small hemet on his head
a black robe about his body
a pair of swordsmans gloves on his hands
a pair of muddy boots on his feet

You could add some positions to the objects though, and have room descs reflect their contents in a more narrative manner, 'There is a painting on the wall, a rug on the floor, a large pot pie on the floor, a small table on the floor, a Sword of Immense Destruction on the small table, and a knapsack on the small table.'

I realise this has pretty much been suggested, just thought I'd provide an example.

As to your initial query, I think you tend to reap what you sow. If your areas are IC, and your code strives for ICness, then players will respect this and behave accordingly. But, you will have to play Editor, and even ask some to leave, to preserve the belief among your playerbase that you care, and their efforts to stay IC are appreciated and supported.

Lastly, Tyche, I'm intrigued by your Elf and Hobbit, but can't say I fully understand the distinction you're making. Please, start a thread on this and give more details.

Thanks, all, for a good read,
Keri

(Comment added by Keriwena on Tue Jan 11 10:34:07 2005)

First post after lurking for years, I'll get the hang of it.
I *did* edit the oringinal, thenhit the button under preview, alas.
Obviously (I hope), I meant to say "MOST mush descriptions..."

And while I'm at it, I should explain my heart is with Tyche, but my head agrees with KaVir. Especially what he outlines in his latest post which he made while I was typoing. The difference between MUSHes and MUDs is the conecpt of "immersion".