View Single Post
Old 08-28-2007, 01:12 PM   #18
Molly
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: 4 Dimensions
Posts: 574
Molly will become famous soon enoughMolly will become famous soon enough
Re: Roomless World Size

Yeah, well, most mud building editors, like OLC for example, don't have built-in spellcheckers to my knowledge. And even if you DO write the descs in Wordpad and then spellcheck them before you copy/paste them into the editor, there still are the classic word pairs that almost all builder misspell, since the spellchecker doesn't catch them, because they are all real words: its - it's, their - there - they're, two - too - to, where - wear etc.
And typos do happen. However many times I go over my own zones, The playtesters still manage to find some typos in them after they are implemented.

Of course, '100 % typo free' does not equal high quality any more than '100 % original zones' does. I've seen zones that were flawless when it came to spelling and grammar, but totally without flavor and suspense. True quality comes from talent, imagination and creativity rather than correct English, even if the latter is not unimportant.

You are totally right there of course. Writing a good Mud zone is also very different than writing a novel, since you need to take many more things into consideration, above all playability. Rooms, mobs, objects and scripts must all work together to create a harmonic whole.

Too long descs only result in one thing; players putting brief mode on. That is where the extra descs come into play. By using those in a creative way, you can add several layers to the zone, making it more opaque, but also more interesting and rewarding for those that bother to delve beneath the surface. The careless hack'n'slashers will just rush through the zone, killing everything in sight. The more skilled and thoughtful players will check the extra desc, and find things that unravels the depth of the zone and allow them to find the hidden treasures, the concealed trapdoors and the deepened plot that will help them solve the quests belonging to the zone.

You should have told your 'arteest' to put more work into the extra descs, and confine the main descs to 4-8 lines. That would have made her a much better builder. (By the way, does 'arteest' have some attributes that I am not aware of, or is it just a typo? Sorry, couldn't resist).

Another important factor is that the character of the world very much depend on what type of Mud it is. For instance my own Mud is focused mainly on Questing and exploring, while KaVir's is focused on combat and PvP. that means totally different requirements for the Mud World. A game focused mainly on roleplay would have yet other requirements for the world.

Anyhow - unfortunately it's very hard to 'quantify' quality in spite of the fact that most people recognize high quality when they see it. No little checkboxes will ever catch the quality of a game, although it is a much more important factor than most things that are checked in the game entries.
Molly is offline   Reply With Quote