PC ldesc's ...

[musashi]

Is it just me or do other people also really wish we could have longer ldesc's, and be able to start them with someone other than our character's sdesc, and put that in later with a @ or something?

[Barzalene]

Not just you.
I'm less certain about referencing others. What if they leave or hide, or change their ldesc?

[musashi]

Yeah I wouldn't want to be able to reference other people in my PC's ldesc.

But I'd like to have the same amount of flexibility with it that I have when it comes to arranging objects, for example.

[Bacon]

But I'd like to have the same amount of flexibility with it that I have when it comes to arranging objects, for example.

Yeah, longer limit and more flexibility.

[Dakota]

youre not the only one.

[Ghaati111]

change ldesc %me hair dangling down over the couch, p@ sleeping body swings gently to and fro from the rafters.

>Her hair dangling down over the couch, the bat-winged wrinkled woman's sleeping
body swings gently to and fro from the rafters.

[MeTekillot]

The pronoun you're looking for is ^me, not %me. THE MORE YOU KNOW

[Ouroboros]

The pronoun you're looking for is ^me, not %me. THE MORE YOU KNOW

:having planted &me firmly by the sidelines, @ observes with notable interest as ~metekillot takes %ghaati111 scenario and, with surgical precision, #metekillot proceeds to split hairs with !ghaati111, causing that head of =ghaati111 to explode just as the words "up" and "+metekillot" escape ^ghaati111 lips.

And yes, longer ldescs would be great, as well as more options.

[chrisdcoulombe]

Agreed.

[My 2 sids]

I don't know about longer so much as diverse.   I wonder if we've not painted ourselves into a corner a bit by basically limiting ourselves to "man/woman" "female/male"?

Sometimes someone looks like "brute"  or "urchin" or "grubber" or whatever.   Judge a book by its cover.

[X-D]

Being able to move your sdesc around, good idea, Longer...BAD idea.

[Delirium]

I gotta agree with X-D on this one.

[musashi]

y?

[FantasyWriter]

Because, when you start making things larger, where do you stop?



(personally, I would love to see an extra ten character)

[Thunkkin]

y?

I wish we could limit emotes to five words only. It would make us choose our words more carefully. Anything more than five words will inevitably lead to page long emotes. There's no middle ground. If you can't express yourself adequately by pairing your sdesc with one verb and possibly a direct object or adverb, then you're just not a badass writer.

"The brutish dwarf laughs wildly"
"The brutish dwarf pats axe"
"The brutish dwarf says in sirihish, 'you die'"

[Down Under]

y?

I wish we could limit emotes to five words only. It would make us choose our words more carefully. Anything more than five words will inevitably lead to page long emotes. There's no middle ground. If you can't express yourself adequately by pairing your sdesc with one verb and possibly a direct object or adverb, then you're just not a badass writer.

"The brutish dwarf laughs wildly"
"The brutish dwarf pats axe"
"The brutish dwarf says in sirihish, 'you die'"

Hah, yeah.

The only problem I foresee with putting a larger cap on ldescs is the screen wrap. That and sentences that don't make sense.

[X-D]

And yes, if you go making it longer, where do you stop, as it stands you can get 2 line ldescs, so, we go to three...four?

It is good length wise now.

In fact, if you could put your sdesc anywhere it would be easier to make it work more often at the current cap.

[Thunkkin]

Personally, I have enough faith in staff that I believe they wouldn't be idiots and slowly make ldescs pages long. But maybe that's just me.

However, their choice not to extend it means that they don't want to, which is also fine by me. I do find the vigorous opposition to adding a word or two to ldescs to be amusing and bemusing, however. The slippery slope fallacy is just ... silly.

[musashi]

Ok, so it's a personal preference thing. That's cool.

[DustMight]

Maybe if we just didn't count the sdesc part of the ldesc as part of the length of the ldesc?

[HavokBlue]

The vast majority of the time I try to use the ldesc function, I'm cutoff due to a few extra characters, and there's not really a way to get the same point across without them. Longer ldescs would be supercool.

[X-D]

Far from fallacy.

I can point you at any number of muds that started with a 60 or 80 char ldesc and have slowly moved up through the years to where now you routinely see 4 line ldescs.

Fact is, No matter how long you make it, somebody will want it longer. So, you must pick a point to stop at. Staff picked that point many years ago, they have stuck with it. One thing I give them kudos for.

[musashi]

I'm really not feeling the slippery slope spin myself; and even if it were true I don't think that having 3-4 line ldesc's describing what a PC is doing would adversely affect the game in any way.

But to play devil's advocate to myself, here is a concern I thought about while on the train.

If we can put our sdesc in the middle of our ldesc like in an emote, instead of having to have it at the front, would that make it difficult to tell if other characters are in a room when you walk in? As it stands now I think my eyes are trained to immediately scan the tail end of room desc's for "the blah-blah, blah blah'ed blah". If that were hidden somewhere in the middle of an ldesc I wonder if I might not notice a PC in a room.

[Ouroboros]

You say that like it's a bad thing, Musashi.

I think it might be good to start paying more attention to the lovely objects and NPCs in a room, instead of usually dismissing them as non-essential and going in for the PC's attention. It would be good to have to guess whether that breed sitting quietly in a corner of the street is a harmless NPC or a PC about to backstab you. Or whether it's a PC or vNPC sitting on the edge of the table, smoking a pipe. At least, in theory it would be good.

[RogueGunslinger]

Far from fallacy.

I can point you at any number of muds that started with a 60 or 80 char ldesc and have slowly moved up through the years to where now you routinely see 4 line ldescs.

Fact is, No matter how long you make it, somebody will want it longer. So, you must pick a point to stop at. Staff picked that point many years ago, they have stuck with it. One thing I give them kudos for.

But the question is; Does anyone like the point in which they chose? It's way too short. A whole line more would put it just right, imo. I'm pretty sure most people in the game feel it is too short, judging by how often this is brought up. I hardly see people in-game using the command anyways.