|
Well one option that can help is to add additional keywords to each mob, selected from a list appropriate to that mob, and avoiding duplicates as much as possible. So rather than three versions of "a stern guard" you might get "a tall muscular guard", "a fat dark-haired guard" and "a thin pock-faced guard".
If it were relative to the viewer I don't think it would be that bad - you're fighting a guard and another walks in, so he gets called "the second guard" while the first is now called "the first guard". However I think it would get really confusing if there were lots of mobs and they were moving around during the fight.
A good idea, although personally I'd rather see something like:
Three stern guards watch the gate.
Obviously that would require the addition of a plural description for each mob, but I already do that for objects and I think it was worth the effort.
I didn't bother doing this for creatures because:
1. I use randomised keywords, so you're unlikely to have two guards with the same name.
2. It's not common to encounter more than one mob at a time.
3. I include distance/direction, so both mobs would need to be standing on the exact same spot.
What I've considered in the past as an alternative is to provide some sort of grouping mechanism for mobs, so that I could take my three guards ("a tall muscular guard", "a fat dark-haired guard" and "a thin pock-faced guard") and put them into a container called "Three stern guards" that patrols the city, and spits out its individual guards when they're needed for a fight, grouping them back together afterwards.
|