[KaVir]

I once discussed a similar concept on Mud-Dev:

"As a 'cheap' alternative, you could use skills for this. Thus Bob, who has Survival 0, looks in the room and sees 'a tasty-looking mushroom', while Fred - with Survival 5, sees 'a deadly skull-cap toadstool'. This is not as 'nice' as learning about each object, but would be less cpu/memory intensive. Skills such as 'Occult' could be used for strange artifacts, whilst 'Melee' might show you 'A finely crafted steel katana' rather than 'a sword' - perhaps someone with a little Melee might see 'An oriental sword'."

The same concept also works very nicely for room descriptions - for example, someone with weak language skills might just see some old writing on a tomb, while an expert in ancient languages would see a warning message about the nasty undead creature trapped within.