01 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
This is another issue that's been annoying me for a while.

Supposing you have an introduction system where people's names are typically unknown to one another. People can remember people by whatever name they like, and people can introduce themselves to people, and so on and so forth. Unknown people are not seen by name, but some sort of description.

The problem is that every example of this type of description I've seen tends to be ugly or have other issues.

I've seen RPI muds that have people write out this description pending character approval, which could work, except that I'm not fond of character approval, which means I'd have to generate them automatically, which is even more of a pain.

Worse, many of the more striking features are subjective. "A tall man" is probably not tall to anyone taller than him. If these descriptions are inconsistent, it will be difficult for players to describe an encountered but unknown entity to one another without some sort of "describe" command, and some sort of "recently encountered unknowns" list, which I'm not entirely opposed to, but I'd like to hope there is a less kludgey method.

It's not too hard to throw a bunch of adjectives together, but then you get descriptions that are full of superfluous commas, and I get tired of seeing descriptions like a "short, thin, gangly, spotty, half-halfling bastard/lunatic stands here before you." I also wouldn't have the luxury of classes and class names.

Furthermore, obvious features may change with the circumstances. The "young man with bright red hair"'s hair probably isn't noticeable if he's wearing a helmet. If the description changes to accomodate this, we run into the problem above.

Also, lots of noticeable features (like eye color, for example), may be immediately noticeable, but start to generate comma awfulness when included in such descriptions.

Anyway, this whole concept is annoying.

Suggestions welcome.
01 Jan, 2010, Barm wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Like a long joke with a weak punchline, the whole concept doesn't excite me. You enter a town for the first time and see:

  • Guard Warwick
  • Guard Stephens
  • Guard Captain Benedict
  • Food Seller Frobitz
  • Rufus the Helpful Trained Rat
  • A mysterious young female elf with eyes of fire and a penchant for dark poetry.


I didn't have to meet Rufus. Why do I have to meet Emolissa the Elf? Alternatively, you could fall back to computer generated descriptions based on race, gender, and class;

  • A youthful female elf clad in leather armor.

But you'll spend all day running into the same "models" over and over with no idea if it's the same person.

What about a system that rates your relation to the player based on the number of chats, shared groups, duels, etc?
  • Tomlo the Human, a mild acquaintance.
  • Grandar the High Elf, your friend and cohort.
  • Emolissa the Elf, a stranger to you.
  • Darcul the Goblin, an unwelcome foe.
01 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Worse, many of the more striking features are subjective. "A tall man" is probably not tall to anyone taller than him.

I don't really know how to fix the more general introduction problem, but I don't think that this particular statement is true. We tend to know who is tall and who isn't relative to some general standard. A tall person IRL can still identify which men and women would be considered 'tall' be society's standards. A 6'5" man still knows that 6'4" men are generally considered tall.
01 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
Actually, I agree Barm. If you're going to mask player identities, you also need to mask NPC identities. Until you buy a grue steak from "a nervous, sweaty merchant standing over a very hot and bright grill", you can't know that he's Frobitz, unless he has a sign or something.

I've always wanted to have it be tricky to tell NPC's apart from players who are being anti-social. So, I'm inclined to go the opposite direction and give every NPC a name, even the throwaway ones.

You see Klarg the orc, standing near two goblins.
Bezbo spots you and screams!
Klarg and Gibbits turn and draw their weapons.

Sure, there's no real reason to know their names. But maybe you get a trophy decapitation and then have the Head of Klarg to stick on your wall, instead of just another orc head.

*shrug*
01 Jan, 2010, Sandi wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Quix, I like that idea, except every cat would be known as "The Center of the Universe". ;)

David's right. I have that thing where I don't remember names or faces, but I realise most people do. I think names provide a reasonable shorthand expression for whatever tags people have in their memories to accomplish this.

The fact that "Knowing someone's name before you're introduced is unrealistic." is rather far down my list of unrealistic things that bother me in a text based game. Rather, I tend to take it as a big flashing sign in the sky that the game caters to lamers that can't roleplay and move on. :rolleyes:
01 Jan, 2010, Barm wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
To build on my earlier suggestion, you could have the system track personal faction with other players so now emotes would actually do something;

:wave +1
:cheer +5
:hug +20

:annoyed -1
:rude -5
:divorce -200,000
01 Jan, 2010, Tyche wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Wouldn't it be more interesting to take it to the extreme and allow players to name everything they come in contact with?
But not just for the social effects, what if knowing the "true names" of things gave you power in the game?
01 Jan, 2010, Orrin wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
We have a simple introductions system where all PCs and NPCs are seen by a short description by default. PCs can then introduce themselves to one another and you can configure how PCs that you know are displayed with either a short description, name and title, or short description and name. Our PC descriptions are generated during character creation where you can either pick from different features or get a random description generated for you. You can repeat as often as you like until you get a description you are happy with.

It's far from perfect and does throw up some oddly generated descriptions from time to time, but I look at it mostly as a bit of fun rather than as a serious role-playing mechanic.
01 Jan, 2010, Greyankh wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Like Tyche suggested…

I hope to implement an introduction-type system in my game.

Here is what I plan:

Basic short description will come from the player. They will need to provide something that is in line with certain attributes they pick at chargen. Hair, eye, build, height and weight will be selectable.

So, the player will type in their short description with their race being at the start. A human <with short black spiked hair>

Now, for the introduction stuff, each character will have a database of names attached to them. 99 names they can remember. The names are what the player gives, not the true name unless they give it, so thieves and assassins and evil-type players can give nicknames or such, or the player can type in their own, for those who don't want to give a name. These names will also show up on the who list.

Player commands…
database add <name> // Will attach the character ID number to the database
database remove <name> // Will free up the space for another name
database rename <oldname> <newname> // Simple change name once true name is learned.

So, now the player has a reference and is able to "know" certain players. By doing this, players can even learn other character's names just from being in the same room, without a formalized introduction. They can also put names like Dumbass or Rudejerk

I am also debating modifying this to let players add simple bullet comments to names.
database info add <name> <comment> // 80 character bullet comment, will probably limit it to 10 lines
database info <name> // Lists the comments on that name

This is far down on my todo list.
Grey
02 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
I think the problem with systems like that, Grey, is that it makes explicit a process that is usually implicit extremely quick in our minds. As Sandi said, as human beings we have all kinds of processes for recognizing faces (even if we don't remember particular faces until we've seen them several times, we can still very quickly differentiate them from people we do know). So, forcing people to make this process explicit – when we can't use all of our built-in circuitry – will make life rather difficult.

Even though it sounds nice to be able to tag people with custom names, how does this process work? What if a "tall, brown-haired human male" does something rude to you and, before you can tag him as "RudeJerk" he runs off? The next time you see a tall, brown-haired human male, it might be somebody else – as a player you don't really have any means of knowing this despite your character knowing this near-instantaneously.

A name, while breaking immersion to some extent, is indeed a very convenient way of grouping together all the subtle traits that we notice that help us identify faces – it's a form of communicating to the player information that the character knows (i.e., that they've seen this person before).

Now, perhaps this information could be learned over time, such that at first all you see is a generic description, but as soon as the character does something "noticeable" (even just talking) you might get a name (of some sort) associated with that character.
02 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
I think the problem with systems like that, Grey, is that it makes explicit a process that is usually implicit extremely quick in our minds. As Sandi said, as human beings we have all kinds of processes for recognizing faces (even if we don't remember particular faces until we've seen them several times, we can still very quickly differentiate them from people we do know). So, forcing people to make this process explicit – when we can't use all of our built-in circuitry – will make life rather difficult.

Even though it sounds nice to be able to tag people with custom names, how does this process work? What if a "tall, brown-haired human male" does something rude to you and, before you can tag him as "RudeJerk" he runs off? The next time you see a tall, brown-haired human male, it might be somebody else – as a player you don't really have any means of knowing this despite your character knowing this near-instantaneously.


For this issue, I was thinking of tagging individuals a person came in contact with with a sort of "recently encountered list", with their short descriptions, full descriptions, and maybe last seen location, so you wouldn't have to insta-tag people, and if you did tag a person, it would tag them by the character's id or whatever, so you could differentiate between that person and a different, but similar-looking entity.

David Haley said:
A tall person IRL can still identify which men and women would be considered 'tall' be society's standards. A 6'5" man still knows that 6'4" men are generally considered tall.

Whether or not that is true, if you have different races of varying sizes, would a 13 foot tall troll/ogre consider a tall human tall?

Tyche said:
Wouldn't it be more interesting to take it to the extreme and allow players to name everything they come in contact with?
But not just for the social effects, what if knowing the "true names" of things gave you power in the game?

I'm pretty much in favor of this (possibly even the true name part), with a limit on the number of things you can name. However, I was thinking of doing this as a convenience, and so people could unknowingly possess a "famous" named item. Aside from true name bonuses (which would probably be fine for magic users), in what way would this be interesting?

I do also agree with the convenience of naming people, but, if possible, I would like to come up with a system to track people by description and whatnot easily instead of having everyone know everyone else's name. For reference, I don't really consider this a realism issue. It interests me more as a method of furthering immersion and establishing a mystique. It could probably be useful for a sense of exploration as well. Not to mention the amount of hilarity things like mistaken identity can lead to.

That said, I'm not entirely confident I'll be able to come up with a design I'm happy with.

P.S. I just noticed Greyankh's "comment" comment. That's a great idea. Could possibly also have things auto-comment people, and/or give them auto-generated "names".

An ugly bald man stole your applesauce jar!
You remember an ugly bald man as the thief who stole your applesauce jar.
The thief who stole your applesauce jar runs west.

recall thief
A short, ugly, bald man with blue eyes.
He was wearing:
blah
blah
blah

Notes:
He robbed you in Darkhaven.

et cetera
02 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
it would tag them by the character's id or whatever, so you could differentiate between that person and a different, but similar-looking entity.

Given your previous statements on the utter, paramount importance of immersion, I'm a little surprised to hear you talking about a "character id" which can only possibly be some kind of OOC construct. Am I misunderstanding what you mean by "id" here?

Tonitrus said:
Whether or not that is true, if you have different races of varying sizes, would a 13 foot tall troll/ogre consider a tall human tall?

I know which cats are large or small, which dogs are large or small, and even to some extent which animals of a particular species/breed/etc. are large or small compared to their peers – I certainly know the ballpark range for many, many animals. Yes, if you've never seen an ogre before, you might not know if it's big or small for an ogre, but presumably in such a world people generally know these things (much as we IRL generally know, ballpark, how big most animals are – if you saw a bear 8 feet tall on all fours, you'd consider it pretty big, and likewise an adult polar bear only 2 feet tall would probably strike you as small). I'm not entirely sure why this is under discussion; am I missing some subtlety somewhere?
02 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Given your previous statements on the utter, paramount importance of immersion, I'm a little surprised to hear you talking about a "character id" which can only possibly be some kind of OOC construct. Am I misunderstanding what you mean by "id" here?

You're not misunderstanding, and it's an OOC construct, but I wouldn't display it to the players. I meant that if I maintained a list of recently encountered individuals, they would be tracked by other than their short description, and so you could distinguish between similarly appearing individuals.

[Edit: And rereading that, it's still not very clear. The idea is that I'll be keeping additional data on the recently-encountered lists so people can hopefully differentiate similar people, by a "recall" command, or some such, and that when they do choose to remember an individual by one term or another, the game will know the individual it refers to and only alter his "name", not the name of every similarly described individual.]

David Haley said:
I know which cats are large or small, which dogs are large or small, and even to some extent which animals of a particular species/breed/etc. are large or small compared to their peers – I certainly know the ballpark range for many, many animals. Yes, if you've never seen an ogre before, you might not know if it's big or small for an ogre, but presumably in such a world people generally know these things (much as we IRL generally know, ballpark, how big most animals are – if you saw a bear 8 feet tall on all fours, you'd consider it pretty big, and likewise an adult polar bear only 2 feet tall would probably strike you as small). I'm not entirely sure why this is under discussion; am I missing some subtlety somewhere?

No, I was just attempting to gauge how common the tendency is to think of things in terms of size as relational to the viewer instead of relational to the type of thing viewed.
02 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
No, I was just attempting to gauge how common the tendency is to think of things in terms of size as relational to the viewer instead of relational to the type of thing viewed.

I think it depends on what you're trying to do. If I were to describe a halfling to you taller than his peers but still quite shorter than both of us, it is more useful to describe him as a tall halfling w.r.t. halflings than a short halfling w.r.t. us. Similarly when we point out cats to each other, I might say "the big one". I think it's actually quite common to describe things w.r.t. the type of thing being seen; you might describe something w.r.t. the viewer if it directly matters. (E.g., better watch out for that ogre: he's a young one but still 6 feet taller than you!) Since in this case we're trying to distinguish people from each other (and not from the self) it's not useful to describe all ogres as taller than a human, all dwarves shorter, and so forth; the useful information lies in distinguishing the shorter dwarves from the taller ones.
02 Jan, 2010, Scandum wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
I like the idea of a faction system where you gain reputation. High reputation in a faction makes it more likely you know N/PCs belonging to that faction, and also makes it more likely that other people know you due to your reputation. Downside is that it can alienate newbies, but an introduction system can take care of that.
02 Jan, 2010, Greyankh wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
I think the problem with systems like that, Grey, is that it makes explicit a process that is usually implicit extremely quick in our minds. As Sandi said, as human beings we have all kinds of processes for recognizing faces (even if we don't remember particular faces until we've seen them several times, we can still very quickly differentiate them from people we do know). So, forcing people to make this process explicit – when we can't use all of our built-in circuitry – will make life rather difficult.

I think this is flawed when dealing with text based games. To make this work, one would have to really look at the subject. To remember someone, we have to "notice" something distinguishable about them. So this, in a text based game, would mean I would have to look at their description.

We see hundreds of people every day, if we go outside to a mall or shopping, and we can barely recall a handful, at best. Now, go to the same store on several occasions and you may recognize a face, but to be able to actually say, yes I remember that person from the other day, and it was here in this store, is quite difficult. This is why I came up with the tag idea.

Visually, we see many things about a person, but textually, we have to look at someone's description to get that same visual reference.

Quote
Even though it sounds nice to be able to tag people with custom names, how does this process work? What if a "tall, brown-haired human male" does something rude to you and, before you can tag him as "RudeJerk" he runs off? The next time you see a tall, brown-haired human male, it might be somebody else – as a player you don't really have any means of knowing this despite your character knowing this near-instantaneously.


Again, this "knowing" can only come with being able to look at the different descriptions to determine if, it is infact, Rudejerk or some other brown-haired human.

Quote
A name, while breaking immersion to some extent, is indeed a very convenient way of grouping together all the subtle traits that we notice that help us identify faces – it's a form of communicating to the player information that the character knows (i.e., that they've seen this person before).

As a form of communication, it is extremely powerful. And as I have had in RP muds, experienced, it is a line that some players do not wish to have known.

I like my system for Rp purposes. I like the fact that "true names" can lead to something I can add later. I also like the fact that players can give an alternate name when meeting people. In the RP realm of thieves, assassins, evil types, giving false names to government officials, law enforcement, and the like, can add hours of enjoyment to the RP type players. Players can now decide what 'friends' truly know them. Also, game stats, like PK leader, RP leader, and so forth will have true names, yet some players may interact with these leaders without ever knowing they are standing next to them.

I like the more possibilities this 'naming system' provides in the guise of roleplay. No system is going to be complete, but I feel this one offers more possibilities rather than be the catch-all for introductions and realism.

Grey
02 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Grey said:
Visually, we see many things about a person, but textually, we have to look at someone's description to get that same visual reference.

Yes, exactly. The point was indeed that we process things visually far more rapidly than we can read and remember a description. My point is simply that forcing the process to be explicit rather than implicit (which is how we recognize people IRL) is not going to work very well because it's not how our "circuitry" is wired.

Grey said:
In the RP realm of thieves, assassins, evil types, giving false names to government officials, law enforcement, and the like, can add hours of enjoyment to the RP type players.

In a game where I can far more easily falsify my appearance or mimic somebody else's – precisely because the textual description lacks all those small details that set apart faces and appearances generally IRL – this sounds quite nice in theory but it also seems that it wouldn't work too well in practice.

For this to even start working, you'd need some way to recall (long, not short) descriptions of people you'd seen recently without having explicitly looked at them while they were in front of you. This is basically what happens IRL anyhow because the "looking" process is extremely quick and often not highly deliberate. Forcing players to belabor the "looking" on every character in the room is just not likely to be pleasant.
04 Jan, 2010, Confuto wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
What about colouring characters' room descriptions in such a way that it becomes possible to tell how familiar your character is with another just by looking around the room? It probably wouldn't work too well with ANSI, but with 256 colours it might be neat:

Quote
A tall man with dark hair is here.
A tall man with dark hair is here.
You point accusingly at a tall man with dark hair.
You say, "That's the man, officer. That's the one who stole my car and/or wallet!"
A burly police officer says to a tall man with dark hair, "You're free to go."
04 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
While I can no longer get away with the argument, "But they look the same on my amber vt220 terminal!", I can imagine the horror of seeing "A tall man with dark hair is here." in XTERM:26, and then a few minutes later seeing another "A tall man with dark hair is here." in XTERM:27, and trying to decide if they were the same shade of medium-blue, or not. :)

Personally, when I'm dictator of the intertubes, all MUDs will use custom clients so that the server authors always know exactly what the players are able to see and use. Until then though, I wouldn't bet on colour being a good way to do this. That's not even taking into account people using triggers to map all NPC's as the same "red" or "green", for killable or not.
04 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
I think the problem with systems like that, Grey, is that it makes explicit a process that is usually implicit extremely quick in our minds. As Sandi said, as human beings we have all kinds of processes for recognizing faces (even if we don't remember particular faces until we've seen them several times, we can still very quickly differentiate them from people we do know). So, forcing people to make this process explicit – when we can't use all of our built-in circuitry – will make life rather difficult.


Quote
I think this is flawed when dealing with text based games. To make this work, one would have to really look at the subject. To remember someone, we have to "notice" something distinguishable about them. So this, in a text based game, would mean I would have to look at their description.


Nail, meet hammer.

Text is an incredibly limiting medium. Graphics are the way to go for this kind of complex relationship based purely on the mind's visual processing capabilities. You can add introduction systems to a MUD, but they will always be clunky, require extra work, add extra confusion, and (in my opinion, at least) don't add a damn thing to the game worth any of that.

MUDs in particular suffer from a huge problem that most other textual works do not: lack of knowledge. One of the posters mentioned maintaining a list of recently seen people, which is a start, but it still fails way short. In a book, the author can describe a man in a bar as "a large man in a green shirt with a sour demeanor, arguing with the bartender over the proper way to mix an Apple Pie." 100 pages later, the author can then refer to the same person, e.g. "Newly introduced, Ben looked at George. He looked familiar, though Ben could not recall why. Then it struck him. George was the surly man at the bar last week telling the bartender how to mix Apple Pies."

Even with an automated tracking system that remembered everyone each player has seen, where they were seen, and what interesting activities they were engaged in when seen, the MUD is totally incapable of figuring out _who actually matters_. When I log into a game and there are 100 players online, chances are I don't and won't give two shits about 90 of them. They might be the center of their own universes, but to me, they're noise and background fluff. If your game is attempting to pretend that it knows that most other people are background fluff while automatically figuring out which ones aren't, it will fail. The failure will be painfully obvious. It's like how a game with no soundtrack can be bland, but a game with an annoying or jarring soundtrack can actually be unplayable (without turning off the speakers, at least). Regular MUDs ignore the issue of separating important players from unimportant ones and just let the player himself figure out how to deal with the information in a natural, if unrealistic, fashion.

The only real use I can even think of for such a system in any case is allowing players to disguise themselves as other players. That opens a whole can of worms you DO NOT WANT to deal with in any kind of social situation, and I'm dead serious about that. You might want to pretend that characters and players are two separate people, but they're not. If I logged into a MUD I was playing with my fiance and her character walked up to me and told me she was sleeping with someone else, there would be trouble. It might not be serious trouble (I'd ask my fiance about it, she'd claim it wasn't her, and that'd be the end of it), but even that little bit of friction transfered from the game to real life is unacceptable… and it WILL happen. I've been playing far, far too many social games for far too long to believe otherwise.

If you merely want disguises without the ability to impersonate other players, you don't need a description/memory/introduction system for PCs. If all NPCs are given descriptions instead of names (which is fitting, because they are supposed to be the background fluff to the players), then letting a player specify a random description works. So long as the NPCs are relatively active and interesting, it shouldn't be too obvious when an NPC is really a PC in disguise. With named NPCs it becomes a bit harder to pull off since the NPC in that case is generally going to have some kind of known behavior and speech pattern that will make a PC imposter stand out.

If realism is your only goal, then take this word of advice: realism sucks, these are games, design a game and not a simulation.

If dead set on this, then at the very least force PC descriptions to be unique. If you have a wide range of available descriptive attributes, you can easily guarantee that no two players are both given the same short description ever.
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