[camlorn]

So, here's a novel idea that I've not seen before:

A topics command. Given some room in the newbie tutorial, flag it with some special help topics accessible by the topics command, specific to that room. Have the command by itself list the topics.

Why. Because then, instead of having your generic npc say "Open this chest. To open chests, type open chest.", or somesuch, you can have "Excuse me good sir, but I can't get this open. Do you think you could help me?" Then color the word open to indicate that there's a topic about it, being sure to introduce the fact that colored words can be learned about in that way. For the people using mxp, you could even go so far as to have this be clickable like a link--if you can make it appear the same as a link in a webbrowser, most completely new to mudding users will click it, be hooked on your mud because few other muds have that kind of convenience, and thus never leave.

And those who already know that you can open chests with the open command can move right along.