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Old 04-12-2004, 02:34 PM   #3
katywollups
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Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Seattle, WA USA
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My favorite tricks for spicing up otherwise dull areas:

1. In large zones such as city streets, forest, desert, etc., create a base inheritable for all the common describes, zone designations, light levels, room chats, sounds, smells, including those things which change by night or day. I don't reuse room longs, but this helps me a lot for filler/atmosphere rooms and speeds up the qc process since I only have to correct spelling mistakes in one room rather than tracking down all the rooms where I misspelled part of the description for 'leaf/leaves'.

2. Create a base inheritable for monsters that share the same behaviors. They can still have their own unique fights, but I have used this technique to make them go home at night (or come out at night), stay within their districts if they wander, check the same array or add to the same array if they defend each other - or in one case, the array is read by the local law enforcement to see who's murdering town folk.

3. In the case of wandering 'average joe' city folk:
a. Create an array of first names and surnames so that these are randomly generated at creation, giving the illusion of the population being quite large since with a combination of 50 names in each of the arrays, the mix and match is quite varied. Sites such as can help get names filled out.

b. Create a mapping that chooses a trade, gender, size, parses a unique racial description and fleshes out what would normally be a boring city person.

c. For their treasure, make a similar object that randomly generates a type of armor a city person might wear - i.e. rough tunics, leggings, doublet, hose, etc. To reduce the object load, in their base inheritable, make it a chance and give coin half the time rather than an object. Not all of them are going to have usable items after all.
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