I despise descriptions that include anything that relates to how I might feel, if I might be able to detect an emotion or state of mind, or if I can detect what a person is thinking. WTF is that? Is everyone suddenly gifted with Telepathy and Empathy? It would do the mush a service if the mood descriptor from the UMD code was deleted. It was a mistake to add it in the first place. If you want to show people that your character is current happy, pose smiling rather than another round of sipping your favorite drink.

Pascal is controlled chaos! Look at those eyes!!!! A 6'2 human male in a black shirt and with high cheekbones. Uh oh.... Everybody watch out!!!


Is it just me? And I do mean this with all due respect, but isnt it incredibly lame to put that sort of stuff in your desc? It detracts from the entire experience and I think it's foolhardy to use these kind of things in examples. Just a thought, and no disrespect intended to Dreamer.

I like Dreamer's descs.  They create a mood to go with the picture.  A pure textual photograph isn't all that much fun to read.  Nothing in her descs are anything like what Pascal writes above.  There's just a few mood generating sentences slipped in, targetted at you the reader, not you your character, to jazz it up.  Descs should be able to include a bit of poetry and take some license to make them interesting.  Obviously, there are limits.  But everything on a MUX is fair game for people who like to write creatively, even if creative writing isn't required.

Unfortunately the limits are that anything more than the short description included in the +scan are ignored by the majority of the player base. No one cares that one writes a paragraph to describe a leather jacket. It's a player walks into a room, types +scan, and OOCLY goes "Oh charisma 8 female elf, must be an elfbian, or, charisma 2 troll must be a samurai, or, average looking human with a datajack, he's a decker."

This is why you have people walking around in the barrens described as wearing corporate secretary attire complete with silk stockings and it's cool. No one cares. Or you have the guy described as wearing a latex body suit, yet he can still conceal his assault rifle while being downtown.

Is staff actually going to inforce descriptions this time around? If not, why waste our time with them?

For the record, how is the stuff I wrote any different?

Oh where is she? There she is.

That Hair!!!

the list continues. You want ridiculous descs? Next thing you know, you'll have people using poems as their desc, song lyrics as their desc, and all sorts of other trash. Descs are descriptions. It's my opinion that if you want to fill it up with fluff, put it in your +finger. I dont want to read a bunch of garbage, I want to see what the character looks like so I can pose accordingly. Once again, with all due respect.

For one, not everyone is that way, Abs.  Please try not to read everyone else's minds.  If it's your experience, say so, because it's not mine. 

And, I admit I failed to do more than glance over the descs I received/wrote before I put them up.  Typically I try to keep metaposing stuff out of my descs and tell people to keep it out.  The descs included were supposed to show a variety of how to create a desc for newbies, and in that, I think they do alright.  But descs are something not everyone will be happy with. 

If you think they are totally horrible, show some that you don't think are too bad and maybe they will be switched out.

I'm amazed you people have more problems with descriptions than with background examples.  Geez. 

+scan was already discussed and it was decided that CHA wouldn't be included. The discussion on it can be found here: http://forum.newseattle.org/index.php?topic=280.0

Criticism is fine if you have something better to offer. We asked for sample descs a long time ago, remember? http://forum.newseattle.org/index.php?topic=326.0 If the players prefer these, we can replace them. But don't dog something without offering a better alternative in return. It's counterproductive.

If someone is dressed inappropriately in the Barrens, I suspect players won't need staff to enforce repercussions. Players should be able to do that themselves.

Descs edited. Fire at will.

I like odd descs, actually the odder the better! I mean when I read a desc I don't just only want to know how the person looks but far more, if you look at someone you don't look on a person either. If the desc is descriptive to give a good feeling how the character generally behaves and is getting beyond pure description? Great go on moooooooorrrrreeee of it!

For example, I've written a desc (perhaps for the char I hope to play) that starts with (and yes it goes on after that):


guess what? The first time someone read the desc they looked quite odd at me after that sentence but after reading the whole sense they said it makes absolute perfect sense and gives a good feeling for the char.

...Well, backgrounds are more or less meaningless, really. I mean, yeah, it's nice if everyone keeps their rp internally consistent, but people tend to either paint themselves into a corner with their backgrounds or else keep it nice, vague and completely unnecessary. It's like my creative writing professor once said, sometimes the least important thing about a character is his story, since that will practically write itself once you understand and believe in what the character would do in various circumstances. I've never ran into an issue where a background becomes a big issue, at least as long as it's not completely ridiculous and the player doesn't try to actively retcon their own past. Plus, from a strictly practical point of view, a background will spend most of it's time containing information only a handful of people will be privy to ICly at a time, whereas a description is available to everyone who bumps into the character and needs to make some snap judgements. A background, if for whatever reason, I have IC access to it, might just tell me that someone comes from a duplex in Boise. A description can tell my ork that an otherwise random 2 charisma human is actually a skinhead openly displaying heavy cyberware and a shirt that cheerily encourages white supremacy and death to all Metas. One set of information can be just a bit more... urgent.

I do not have any problem so to speak with the actual descriptions - They are pretty average. My problem was with all the OOC stuff that was thrown in. I just thought it would be inappropriate to have newbies reading that as their example for how to desc themselves. Thank you for taking out the fluff, and im glad that it was just overlooked and not intentional.


Last time I checked, what you just described is called "Metagaming "Crossover" Passing IC information through OOC means, or anything else. A desc is how you LOOK. You shouldnt put stuff in there that people would not know from taking a glance at you... This is like, basics man.

Descriptions, more than anything, we run into on a regular basis.  They are there in rooms, on chairs, guns, armor, people, and regularly must be made up on the fly by GM's.  In a plot room I'd let a GM do more than just describe the objects in question, I'd let them tell me "You feel nervous about this chair..."  Maybe I had a perception test I did not know about,  that's fully within the rules, maybe my GM rolled my Willpower to give a good estimate of how concerned my character would be in such a situation.  And now, there I am, face-to-wood with a chair that is telling me all sorts of vague clues that I can't quite figure out 'automatically' by dice.  I've got to investigate, and I know just enough to know something bad happened with it, and that it is important.  Unless I just rolled really crappy and am beginning to freak out about random normal chairs.  I don't know till I ICly investigate.  That's fine by me.

Descs have seen a huge alteration in my time gaming.  I used to primarily play on MU*s that had no system backing them up.  Everyone there, primarily, wrote something of a page long description that flowed into prose now and again.  I find most of those sorts of description writers on D&D MU*s still.  There was someone I knew so prolific with their descriptions and the poetic wording they used, that I could never really tell what was going on with their desc.  I wasn't the only one, but it seemed like she had put so much work into them to make them sound pretty (which they did) that despite no detail coming from them that we could use in our RP with her, we never said a thing to her.  Before then, and especially since, I've tried to keep descriptions on my character down to the details.  I want something that might be two small -> medium sized paragraphs that offer up specific details about my character.  So someone who scans my actual description will gain useful information rather quickly.  The problem with most descs is length, if they are too long they make it impossible to read quickly (thus avoided, or slows down RP), or they are too short and prevent any real detail to come into play.   I have never written prose for my descs, but I do more and more strict detailing in my descs as I get older in this hobby.

For rooms, one of my friends was able to argue me into a stand still.  He told me, "Unless you are making a description for every minute of every day that changes as the time cycles with random elements YOU HAVE to include something about the mood.  You HAVE to include something beyond the details."  He's right.  Rooms are there, all the time, you run into them a multitude of times but only have to read each one once (or maybe twice for review sake) and what you should take away from it is not how many tables are in the dining room, but 'what kind of place is this?' at any point in time.  Without a bit of embellishing you can not discern that.  With characters you do not have that problem.  If I want to make my character scary I can do a number of things.  I can pose it, based upon my stats, or I can roll it and attempt to pose it based upon my rolls.  Whatever others require me to do.

So, in the end, I like descs on characters to be strictly details, and I let the RP of the person modify those strict details into a feeling of the character.  Its natural that I don't get to know the character with the first meeting or first glance, that it takes some talking, some 'feeling out' as it were to get to understand them.  I must admit though this is not a post about any particular descriptions I've read here, since I've not gotten to those posts yet.  Just an understanding.

Yeah, the thing to remember about descriptions is that they're a piece of a puzzle, they don't exist in a vacuum. They're a tool, not an autobiography. There are plenty of things that can and should be played out rather than indexed, itemized, and buried in a 2 page description.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

Only staff and, not all staff, for that matter deal with backgrounds. Everyone who is on the grid, however, has to deal with a description.

As for descriptions I prefer them to be short and to allow me to use my imagination. I do not need a  two page essay about someone's dragon tattoo. Simply saying that one has a tattoo of a western dragon on their left cheek is enough for me.

My pet peeve are lines such as "she smiles and you think it might be at you." Who are you to decide what my character is thinking? Let me decide for myself.