[dark acacia]

When you create a character which encourages or requires a physical description (long desc) and a short room description, do you have your own set system for how you describe your character to conform to the game's rules?

When I create a character's long description, it always seems like mad libs. I start with the most obvious features first (skin color, height, hair length and color, and build), then work my way down towards the features which would require a person to look closely to see (hand and feet size, facial features, and eye color). It comes out something like this:

"You see a [sex] [race, if applicable] with [hair length] [hair type (curly, straight, etc)] [hair color] hair and [skin color or type] skin. He/she is about [a relative height, rather than specific] feet tall with a [build type] build, [hip, shoulder, and bust size], [arm and leg length and musculature], and [hand and feet size] hands and feet. He/she has [lip size and color] lips, [chin shape], [nose shape], [eye shape and color], and [ear type, if applicable]."

I don't see any reason to have a terribly long or extremely detailed long description, as I personally never pay a lot of attention to other players' descriptions unless for some reason it's important for current roleplay.

For the short description, I usually include some combination of hair length and color, race, and skin color. If there's some obvious and immediately noticeable, perhaps unusual, feature, I include it here. Especially short or tall characters would have some mention of height, but I wouldn't include something like a small scar on the cheek.

A couple things which annoy me about other players' descriptions are eye color in the short description, and $5 words picked up from the thesaurus. Eye color is not something easily noticed from a distance or at a quick glance, but for some reason there are always people who have "sapphire blue" or "twinkling emeralds" or things like that in their short descriptions and it's allowed.