Descriptions

[jhunter]

I really must've missed something. I don't see where anyone was being insulting or flaming. Anyone care to point it out in quote for me? I'm just wondering if I missed it or if there is something considered flaming or insulting that I hadn't when I read it.

[Intrepid]

Just a bit of name-calling in the thread, J.

[amoeba]

Another arguement for keeping things -relativly- short has to do wih the way we visually process text online.  A long description can be diffucult to read.  

Let me give an example, I'll use Vanth's post for this.

Formated nice and neatly for viewing online:

Let's keep it civil, please.

You can state your opinions, or even disagree with one another, without saying or suggesting that the other person is stupid, crazy, twinkish, etc. etc.

The official staff stance as I understand it is this:
Descriptions should be between 4 and 15 lines in length.
You must use vocabulary that can be found in a dictionary.

Those are the facts. Everything else is opinion. Please respect others' right to their own opinion.

Formated the way a long description would be:

Let's keep it civil, please. You can state your opinions, or even disagree with one another, without saying or suggesting that the other person is stupid, crazy, twinkish, etc. etc.The official staff stance as I understand it is this: Descriptions should be between 4 and 15 lines in length.You must use vocabulary that can be found in a dictionary.Those are the facts. Everything else is opinion. Please respect others' right to their own opinion.

The longer the description, the more work it takes to read it in this format.  Their is nothing much that can be done about it, but this is one of the reasons I keep my description relativly short.  The background is another story.  I would love to see the maximum length doubled.

[jhunter]

I'd like to see the max chars on the background lengthened too. I've had to mail in my backgrounds because I couldn't put them in myself before.

[Intrepid]

Amen to that.  I'd love a longer background buffer.

[Vesperas]

I'll agree to that as well.  ^.-

[moab]

I'll agree to this:  good writing is better than bad writing.  
Long is sometimes good.  Short is sometimes good.

To ask someone to follow your (joe player's) idea of what good writing is lame.

Trusting the Imms to handle approval of main descs and control text based descriptions of rooms, npcs and objects in game is best.

Please don't mistake my good = more bad = less as meaning more lines of writing.  I meant more good = more description of things which usually leads to more text.

However, a four word emote can reveal a whole lot about a character.  A simply worded main desc can be a Hemingway-esque bit of art.

It really is what suits the character.

I do not like, myself, a reliance on "unique" short desc which end up - to my mind's eye - making people look funny.  I like the grit and dirt and the joe commoner thing.  Five dollar words fit better in the main description, IMO.

[Bestatte]

I used to see words in descriptions that weren't in the dictionary, or had meanings completely unrelated to whatever the player was trying to convey. Sometimes they were misspellings, sometimes homonyms, sometimes typos. A mistyped "too" as "two" is easily understood, easy to figure out that they mean "two tattooes on his wrist" and not "too tattooes" on his wrist.

But then there are the folks who go out of their way to find an interesting word, misspell it, and it isn't caught by the staff (probably because it's SO obscure or underused in modern writing that it didn't occur to them to even check it - understandable when you're dealing with a dozen apps in the queue). One I will never forget was this character who had the word "exsanguinous" in his sdesc.

I figured it had something to do with wine, because it sounded a little like sangria. But then I remembered (vaguely) that it also had something to do with blood. So I looked it up in the dictionary. No such word, it doesn't exist. Turned out, it was misspelled. It was also an improper use of the word. Exsanguious (without the second n, it doesn't exist in that word) means "lacking red blood cells, as in an ant." So unless the guy literally had no red blood cells, he used the wrong word to describe his character. Since he was either a human or a half-elf (I don't remember which, it was one of the two), I'm guessing he meant to imply that his character was very pale, or had no redness to his pigmentation. There's a HUGE difference between a person who has no red blood cells, and a person with pale, or non-reddened skin.

The point is, you're dealing with readers who just might need to look something up in the dictionary. That's all well and good, but if a templar walks in and the exsanguinous guy just ran out, and the templar asks you to describe him, by the time you finally figure out what the hell that word is so you can give a general description, the templar has already fined you half your sids for being too slow to answer.

You also have to remember that a rather large part of the playerbase does -not- speak english as their first language. Exsanguious (using the same example) is latin-based, and we have a boatload of folks from countries that don't speak any of the latin languages as their first language (Turkey, Israel, and the Slavic countries come to mind). Expecting them to look up obscure words, when they're already struggling to keep up (and doing a damned good job of it from what I recall), is asking a little too much, in my opinion.