Never met you, but, you are sexy.

[Synthesis]

Forever and always there will be a line players eventually cross when it comes to their characters and staying "in character."  That line usually gets crossed right around the time their character might die.  Some people might suddenly become smart instead of stupid to avoid death.  Some people might give a perfect sdesc example to the law enforcement and have someone killed who mugged them even though they wore five layers of masks and fourteen hooded cloaks in the dead of night.

Its just the way it is, or at least it's how I've experienced it so far.

I do feel like I am one of the few people who see's something happen and when asked to describe the person doesn't give obvious sdesc descriptions.  "The muscular, black-haired man"... which is rather generic becomes "Uh, he was strong and shit, beat me senseless.  Had dark hair too."  Or even better, "He was ten feet tall!  HUGE!  He had hands like a scrab!  Dark and swirly death-magic!  Oh, Highlord!  Help us all!"  Then you can spread mass panic and all that when it was really, "The willowy elf" who kicked your ass and you just dont want to admit to it.

Nothing specific.  Thats how it should be unless someone is the, "Flamboyantly rainbow color haired lass with the obvious hot-pink full-face tattoo."  And even then, if she had a mask on...

I mean its interesting and all to remove the element of knowing who you are contacting, but personally, it would just be annoying and not really solve the issue at hand anyway.  Do you know how many times I've contacted NPC's based on the fact someone's name or sdesc is similar?  I really don't need to be sending way messages and spending more time/stun to find out I didn't even find my friend.  I sometimes did anyway, because I ended up waying the same NPC so many times I just talked to them every so often, but you get what I mean.

With intelligent parsing, it could be coded such that you could > contact Amos tall muscular man and receive both name and sdesc input...e.g. You contact Amos, the tall muscular man with the Way.  So if you really know someone closely, you're never in doubt who it is you contacted.  However, if all you have is a name...sure, you're rolling the dice.  However, if Amos sends you a return message, you'll know who replied to your Way, because I think pretty much everyone is on board with sdesc being visible to the target when using the psi command.

The tough question is how do you get the "intelligent" into the parsing without creating an input hassle.  My guess is that you'd have to flag names with a unique variable, and the parser would look for a name match first, and associate the name with that.  In cases of duplicate keywords (e.g. Blue the blue-skinned half-giant) it would associate the first name match with the name-flag variable, and simply spit the rest out as sdesc.  You could even make it do partial parsing, so if you > contact Amos tall man, you get the echo You contact Amos, the tall hazy man with the Way, so you only return sdesc keywords that you knew to search for, and the keywords in the sdesc that you didn't search for would be replaced by words like "blurred," "hazy," or "something."  Keywords added with addkeyword would automatically be flagged as names.  And that brings up the question of whether you should be able to use multiple names as input, e.g. > contact Amos Ripper and receive You contact Amos, aka Ripper with the Way.  My initial thought is "no," because that defeats the anonymity purpose of the intelligent parser.  In that case, I'd have it so that the parser grabs the first name keyword, associates it with the name-flagged variable, then automatically junks the rest of the input as sdesc...so it would fail to match Ripper with anything, and you'd only see the keyword Amos in the contact echo.  You also have to anticipate generic contact searches, e.g. > contact blue red.  In that case, you could return something like You contact the blue-blurred, red-hazy someone with the Way.  It's aesthetically in-line with the way Armageddon looks on the page, and it doesn't give you any additional information.  Edit:  on second thought, that return echo -does- give you additional information about the format of the sdesc.  For example, if you > contact  talia blue red, and the return is "You contact Talia, the blue-blurred, red-hazy someone," you know the format of Talia's sdesc.  That is, you now know it isn't "the woman with blue and red hair."  I'm initially okay with that--granted, it could be abused, but it would be in a pretty convoluted, low-probability situation.

Overall, it's a pretty minor inconvenience for most scenarios.  Of course, it's a major inconvenience for sdesc sniffing, which is the point.

[Dar]

How's that for a suggestion. Make barrier much more effective for blocking contact attempts, but give everyone an ability to remember faces.

Say every pc can remember so many faces, depending on his contact skill and wisdom. With half giants with maxed contact being able to remember somewhere around 2-4, and an elf with maxed contact AI wisdom somewhere around 12-20.

Remembering a face requires you to be in the same room with him and demands you to type out the "exact" sdesc of the character. Once you remembered the face, you have a 'significant' bonus to breaking a person's barrier and just generally establishing contact.

To a point where it is as easy to break someone's barrier as it is now, provided equal skill levels in psionic skills and whatever stats. And 'extremely' difficult, to break someone's barrier of someone whose face you did 'not' remember.

Make those faces fade with time, based on triggers like character aging, reels, going into neg hp, unconsciousness due to drinking alcohol or even any type of other forced unconsciousness, skellebane, whatever.

[evilcabbage]

stuff

No thanks, I don't approve of code telling me who I don't and do remember, I forget faces easily enough by myself. I also forget names easily enough by myself.