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Old 05-15-2008, 01:31 PM   #41
Spoke
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Re: Quick, short descriptions

From what I read, the problem with an exact name for the item is that it may "destroy" the immersion feeling of a player in a RP Mud. This may make sense, true, but on the other hand, if it is done sparsely and thoughtfully you would be giving a player an option to role play around either knowing or not an specific item. I do know that as a player you carry around tons of OOC knowledge. I know this mainly from table-top D&D, where you had all these bestiaries and manuals you had read, you knew details about all the classes and many of the weapons, you knew about critters and their weaknesses etc. But there is no reason to believe that your Lvl 1 Thief should have known what the Lvl 5 Cleric was capable of. So, it was up to the player to role play accordingly and imbue their character with just enough knowledge and consciously decide to act as the character would with what the character would know instead of making decisions based on what the player knew. Hard, but all the more enjoyable when you worked to make it work.

So, in this context, I understand that RP RPI ASRP TSRP (Threshold style RP for those who didn't know), may want to be as immersed on their simulated reality as possible, but without a very elaborated code to work how famous a 'named' or 'unique' item is, and how recognizable an item should be (of course, what if my newly created character happens to be in a party with an older, knowledgeable character, who tells him about this immensely powerful sword with this particular engraving, these colours in the hilt, etc, etc ... well, my dumbinewbie should be able to recognize Excalibur should he not?,) you will be restricting and not enriching the experience a player can have. On the other hand, if you openly identify a famous or unique item, maybe even with a really soft code to determine how recognizable it is (maybe even a toggle flag players can turn off or something if they are playing some impaired character or similar) you are allowing the player to decide how he/she wants to role play the situation. If they decide they do not want to know Excalibur they can just role play accordingly, but if they do want to recognize it, then they have to option to Ohh and Ahh appropriately, which would not be an option if they were not shown the 'uniqueness' up front.

I hope it does make sense, maybe I am giving too much credit to Role Players and they really need to be spoon fed what they characters may or may not know and cannot decide for themselves how much they want to incorporate into their character's story, or maybe I am being too ignorant of the subject and it really is such a big deal to have anything that may be perceived as OOC shown to you when you are playing in a RP Mud. I do not know which is true or if there is a single right answer, I do know though, that if you over-restrict what a player can see, you are restricting the spontaneous awe at something you recognize on the spot ("Isn't that David Beckham??", "Woao, look they have the Mona Lisa on loan in this museum!!", "Hmmmmm must buy coke when the movie ends hmmmm hmmm coke when the movie ends hmmmmm")
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Old 05-16-2008, 02:29 PM   #42
incognito9
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Re: Quick, short descriptions

I think this thread is great.

Still more things come to mind:
Can simply having a certain skill allow one to recognize certain objects better? To me they're a bunch of pills. To my father-in-law the pharmacist, they're antibiotics. To me it's a guitar. To my brother, the guitar player, it's a fender stratocaster.

Can one artisan's work seem just like another's to the untrained eye? While certain artists are pretty distinctive, other's inspired a whole school of art. There are a whole bunch of impressionists whose work resembles Manet, for example. Could someone's apprentice make a work that looked like his master's?
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Old 05-16-2008, 04:09 PM   #43
KaVir
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Re: Quick, short descriptions

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.
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Old 05-16-2008, 06:54 PM   #44
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Re: Quick, short descriptions

I think you're hitting the nail on the head here, Spoke, and why this is such a decision for me. There's probably no "right" answer, which is why the discussion helps work through all the possible issues in addition to possibly creating a few fun mechanics and code projects.

On Threshold, all of our unique objects are "named". People really like getting their hands on these things, and it's almost like graphics for them. They know they have something REALLY COOL, and I like to maintain that. Unfortunately, we didn't start out with a solid plan when we were creating items and their short descriptions, so a few things got "named" that probably shouldn't have been. Now, with a new game that has an incredible number of objects and the ability to create unique objects, I feel that having a naming protocol is the best way to go. So, my goal is how to I keep the "REALLY COOL" factor for some objects, and in giving all that information away in a single glance, how does that impact the discovery factor for other players? Some players really enjoy discovering not only areas but items as well, and they like that they're able to recognize things by sight that other people really don't know much about.

I lean more towards giving more information to players and letting them decide what their characters know, but I'm pretty intrigued by a "recognition system" for items as well as areas.
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