Shattered Kingdoms

Okay, so cut the numbers by a third. The point remains... either I'm sitting waiting 20 seconds for you to type a paragraph, or I'm able to identify with, read, and process your actions as they come to you. The second, in my opinion, lends a much stronger sense of immersion.

I also agree that it would be nice if we could use semotes here, but for some reason Dulrik hasn't adopted that (although I thought that was a standard part of the MERC codebase). So we're all kind of used to seeing everything lead in with your adjective (or name, once you've been greeted).

What I didn't include were all of the additional tells and other spam that I'm likely to receive in that timeframe. Trying to force feed everything into a single paragraph means the totality of your carefully crafted thoughts is far more likely to be lost, as opposed to someone being able to process bits and pieces and put it all together. Furthermore, the longer the paragraph, the more likely you are to place your own personal bias of perception into the text: some of the best entertainment (like real life) occurs when a person drops a social and I completely misunderstand its purpose.

There's nothing wrong with paragraphs of text, but sometimes shorter is sweeter.

That or what you think a social will do is not what happens.

For example, someone says something ridiculous and I want to give them the "You're an idiot" look. That is not what 'stare' does.

Using socials is something akin to playing Russian roulette with your dignity.

Assuming that you have an average WPM of 45 and I have a WPM of ~110, it is very likely that I will simply "interrupt" you as you go from one sentence to the other, since each sentence is effectively standalone. This would become increasingly common as the numbers in a particular scene increase, and it would be incredibly difficult to keep up with who is doing what through the lines of emote spam.

The only way to circumvent this, that I can think of, is to either have something very OOCly notable... which breaks immersion... or to stack commands, which, if anything, takes longer than typing out the whole thing in its entirety and invalidates your point of wanting to read and process actions as they come to me.


As far as your tells and such go, I personally feel that it would be more desirable to see :



Compare...



Edit : Applied word wrap at 80 characters.

I don't remember ever hearing of 'semote' before. It's certainly not standard MERC (at least not from when we diverged from ROM back in 1994). Are you talking about 'silent emotes'? I found a reference to that in the Armageddon MUD help pages, but doesn't seem applicable to this thread.

My standard answer to this is to send the imms a social with the universal gesture that we are lacking and we will add it to social list for you. But I feel that it's about time to add some new RP-related feature, so feel free to post some ideas. By default, I will try to do the spoken text in quotes, if I don't hear anything else that sounds better.

semote is emote with string replacement. You put a wildcard (such as "%") in place of your character's name. So it looks like this


The only rule is that use of semote requires a wildcard somewhere in the text, or the line is ignored.

I would love that feature, because starting sentences with the character's name is such a pain in the [REDACTED].