On Writing Areas

A Brief Interlude...

The #ROOMS section of the area file is perhaps the most difficult section to work with. Not in terms of coding; in fact, rooms oftentimes require little coding on the part of the builder. There are the exits with which one must also contend, and for large areas this can be straining. No, the most difficult part of building a room is the description that goes into it.

When describing a room, it's not enough that you say briefly what it is and then go. As a builder you must walk your reader into the room and give him some details, just as you would walk a guest into your home and show her around. You take her into the living room and say, "Oh, that there is a lamp I got from my grandmother. And this table I bought last year from an import place just two miles from here. That painting on the wall...". Like any real life room, a MUD room will have details, maybe a few, maybe many, but they are there.

There are several other suggestions for building rooms that one should bear in mind. One is the strict use, or disuse, of the passive voice. Another is refraining from describing circumstances or states of the MUD out of the room's control. A third is learning to use extra descriptions for a room. And finally, one should try to furnish at least a few of the rooms.

To better understand what we're discussing, let's take an example of a room and tear it apart:


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn.  The hall
has been wisely decorated with simple but functional furniture.  A small
staircase leads up to the defunct reception room and the bar is to the east.
~

The above is from the famed Grunting Boar Inn, a bar commonly found on most ROM MUDs that use Midgaard as a town. It is also a good example of how NOT to build a room.

The most important point to note about the room is the lack of detail. There is one sentence about the room itself, and it reads, "The hall has been wisely decorated with simple but functional furniture." While this may be true, what kind of furniture? Maybe an old rocking chair with its leg cracked and looking about to bust? Maybe an ordinary oak table with the words "Herbie Loves Sally" carved into the top of it? Is there a coat rack? An unlit lantern? A spit bucket? A flimsy piece of carpet on which to wipe one's feet?

Detail, detail, detail. Even if only one or two details are put in the room it is far better than none. Here, let's update the room a bit with only two details:


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn.  The hall
has been wisely decorated with simple but functional furniture. Near one
wall a table stands with a half-deck of cards beneath a leg to keep it
stable. Into the top of the table someone named "Herbie" carved a heart in
honor of his true love "Sally". A small staircase leads up to the defunct
reception room and the bar is to the east.
~

Mmm, better. The room now has a bit more detail added; it's come alive for the reader. Still, the room can use more improvements. Here again is the same sentence we were working with: "The hall has been wisely decorated with simple but functional furniture." Notice anything wrong with it? Take your time...

Voice. The writer of the sentence uses what we call "passive voice" in the sentence. Passive voice is the clinical term for sentences that are limp and lifeless due to an arrested heart. Passive voice is used primarily by people who either wish to escape responsibility for their actions or by people who want others to believe things just happened. "The house was burned down...." "The money was grabbed..." "The goblin was killed by his own hand." (Crazy that the goblin's hand had a mind of its own.) People can easily spot passive voice in a sentence by finding a combination of any form of the verb "to be" and the past tense of another verb, eg. "was burned", "was grabbed", "was killed". People can just as easily fix the problem by re-wording the sentence so an actor—THE actor—initiates the action, for example, rather than "The goblin was killed by his own hand.", one can write "The goblin killed himself.", or to be more specific, "The goblin slit his own throat."

Not to say that passive voice doesn't have its uses. If one doesn't know how something happened, but knows something did happen, then passive voice may be the way to go. For example, "Hassan took a look. The house was burned to the ground." The second sentence contains passive voice, but in this case it works, because no one, including Hassan, knows who or what did it, if anything did it. The same applies in the sentence we're discussing, ie. no one knows where the furniture came from or who put it there. On the other hand, one can rewrite the sentence so that it reflects the uncertainty of where/who, but refrain from using passive voice—"Someone wisely decorated the hall with simple but functional furniture." Let's apply this to the room description as a whole:


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn.  Someone
wisely decorated the hall with simple but functional furniture. Near one
wall a table stands with a half-deck of cards beneath a leg to keep it
stable. Into the top of the table someone named "Herbie" carved a heart in
honor of his true love "Sally". A small staircase leads up to the defunct
reception room and the bar is to the east.
~

The description is a little better, but not by much. Sometimes, no matter how one rewrites a sentence or paragraph, the sentence or paragraph just doesn't fit. If you come to this point, just drop it. Let's see what happens when we remove the sentence from the paragraph:


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn. Near one
wall a table stands with a half-deck of cards beneath a leg to keep it
stable. Into the top of the table someone named "Herbie" carved a heart in
honor of his true love "Sally". A small staircase leads up to the defunct
reception room and the bar is to the east.
~

Better again, but the paragraph is missing something. Let's rework that one sentence one more time, only leaving out "Someone wisely decorated...". Here we are:


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn. Several
pieces of simple, but functional, furniture occupy the floor. Near one wall
a table stands with a half-deck of cards beneath a leg to keep it stable.
Into the top of the table someone named "Herbie" carved a heart in honor of
his true love "Sally". A small staircase leads up to the defunct reception
room and the bar is to the east.
~

Stylistically it sounds better. There's a sort of lead-in before one reads "Near one wall a table stands...." Leaving it all by itself is somewhat jarring to the eyes and ears. As that is not relevant to the discussion at hand (after all, whole books have been written on issues of style, and this is but one teeny-tiny guide), we can take it or leave it.

State and Circumstance

What is relevant to the discussion, however, are things a builder should not do when making a room. Recall that the builder wrote, "You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn." This might be true, if one is human. One may instead be a flying pegasus, or a floating ghost, or an ogre magi gazing into the crystal ball from far away in the Dark Tower. What about being a plain ol' human and resting or sitting?

The problem with the sentence is that it assumes a circumstance that is beyond the scope of the room. That is, the sentence tries to incorporate into the room description the actions or state of being the player character is in. This is a common mistake for area builders, and one, as with passive voice, easily corrected. What a room description should try to do is describe the room itself and nothing more. To this end, a brief list is given below that reminds a builder what not to assume when building a room:

If a builder remembers these six guidelines, the builder will avoid most of the errors commonly found in rooms. Let's illustrate with an example of each kind of description culled from live MUDs:


You have managed to walk the first part of the bridge. You catch a glymse
of what lies below, a 300, perhaps more, foot drop to your death. Still the
white foam at the bottom looks as soft as clouds...

This is a good example of the first kind of assumption. The builder supposes the player character to have walked the bridge. Not just the bridge, but a particular part of the bridge. In other words, it assumes the player character to have come from a particular direction, and to have performed a certain action. By just describing the bridge, eg. "The wooden planks that make up the bridge are full of holes and smell of rot...", one would easily avoid both problems, and still have a good description of the room.

Here's our next example:


You come face to face with a mighty mountain wall, blocking your path. You 
feel like you have waisted all your time and effort just to get here, to
find a dead end. Right before you give up you notice a flicker of movement
to your right. You turn, yet you see nothing.

Again we have two assumptions at work in this room: that the player has been journeying a path to "come face to face with a mighty mountain wall", and that the player is about to "give up". A rewrite of this is in order:


Climbing high into the sky, a sheer face of rock blocks the passage of any
who would journey further along the dirt path. There doesn't appear to be
any way around the obstacle: a dead end perhaps? The path winds its way back
down the hill in the opposite direction...

If a player feels frustrated, the player will feel frustrated. If not, the original room description given would be wrong. This is essentially the problem of assuming player actions or states of being, that is, the room could well be wrong, thus making a description that makes little sense in certain situations. This is what a builder should strive to avoid.

Here's an example of the third and fourth assumptions:


  You suddenly realize that the forest around you has changed drastically.
The once bright day is now quite overcast and dull. A sharp wind suddenly
picks up and brings a cool chill to your bones. All around you you hear the
chilling sounds of the forest, almost like it was out of a story book.

If you, as a player, were to teleport into this room in the middle of a snowy night, wouldn't you find the room description a little strange? Not only does the builder assume you-as-a-player came from a forested area, and that you've never been to this room before, but the builder also assumes it is the middle of the day and that you-as-a-player came from a sunny area. The builder makes many, too many, assumptions about the state of the room, and tries to describe variables, such as time and weather, beyond the room's control. Stick to describing only those things that do not and will not change, for example, the forest, the trail, the plants, and so on, and the room description will be that much better.

We will briefly go through an example of the fifth assumption:


The Checkpoint
  You are met by a group of heavily armored knights.  They check you over
for contraband, and then allow you to pass on.  One of the knights cautions
to not stray into the desert, lest you lose your way.

This may be the case if there were actual knights. Unfortunately the knights were met by Dhrah'Nrah of the evil Skrrie, and subsequently eaten. So who's meeting the players? (Not to be picky, but—what would heavily armored knights be doing in or near a desert, except baking alive?)

The sixth assumption is generally rare, but does happen. Sometimes a builder will want to place a takable object in a room, for example, a flower growing in the middle of a ring of mushrooms or a broken piece of metal used in the forging of a unique necklace. While this is a great device for builders, and is fun for players, describing an object as part of the room can lead to confusion if the item is missing. To correct this, if one is going to place an object in the room and use the room description to describe it, make sure the object is not takable, not sacrificable, and not purgeable, eg. a fountain. Otherwise let the object stand on its own in the room.

All of the assumptions above can be summed up in one sentence: when building a room, do not describe changing circumstances (*). Weather, player actions, time, takable objects, roaming mobiles, anything that can change should not be made a part of a room's description. By avoiding these kinds of pitfalls one can prevent player confusion and frustration, and lead to an overall higher level of player satisfaction.

Knowing what we do about how not to describe a room, let's resume our discussion of the entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn:


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn. Several
pieces of simple, but functional, furniture occupy the floor. Near one wall
a table stands with a half-deck of cards beneath a leg to keep it stable.
Into the top of the table someone named "Herbie" carved a heart in honor of
his true love "Sally". A small staircase leads up to the defunct reception
room and the bar is to the east.
~

The room header, "The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn", tells the player where she is. The beginning of the room description, "You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn.", not only describes a circumstance beyond the room's control ("You are standing") but is redundant. Let's instead change the sentence, making it describe more of the room: 


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
The air in this entrance is half-filled with grey wisps of smoke. Several
pieces of simple, but functional, furniture occupy the floor. Near one wall
a table stands with a half-deck of cards beneath a leg to keep it stable.
Into the top of the table someone named "Herbie" carved a heart in honor of
his true love "Sally". A small staircase leads up to the defunct reception
room and the bar is to the east.
~

The sentence is okay, better at least than the one it replaced, but can be pepped up even more:


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
Small tendrils of grey smoke twist and writhe their way past the doorway to
the east to waste away and perish in the air here. Several pieces of simple,
but functional, furniture occupy the floor. Near one wall a table stands
with a half-deck of cards beneath a leg to keep it stable. Into the top of
the table someone named "Herbie" carved a heart in honor of his true love
"Sally". A small staircase leads up to the defunct reception room and the
bar is to the east.
~

Mmm, perhaps a little dramatic, but the sentence is a far cry from "You are standing in the entrance hall of the Grunting Boar Inn." That is, dramatic, but eye-catching. Since we mentioned the smoke coming from the doorway to the east, we will need, then, to change the last sentence:


#3036
The Entrance to the Grunting Boar Inn~
Small tendrils of grey smoke twist and writhe their way past the doorway to
the east to waste away and perish in the air here. Several pieces of simple,
but functional, furniture occupy the floor. Near one wall a table stands
with a half-deck of cards beneath a leg to keep it stable. Into the top of
the table someone named "Herbie" carved a heart in honor of his true love
"Sally". A narrow staircase rises along the northern wall up to a room, and
westwards the swinging doors lead outside.
~

Unless a player has been to the Grunting Boar Inn before, she will not know that a "defunct reception room" exists upstairs from the entrance; so we remove that tidbit of knowledge. Also, the player knows an exit exists to the east; supposing the player teleported here, will she know of the exit to the west? By adding the west exit to the description we've covered all the exits, and made the room description better, to boot.

Extra Descriptions

We can improve the room still more. The entrance to the inn has simple furniture in it, particularly a table. We can describe these in further detail, using what are called "extra descriptions":


E
furniture~
Near the south wall rests the short-legged table. A three-legged stool sits
next to that, and on floor at the opposite end of the table is a brass
spitoon. Next to the staircase a bench waits for some warm buns.
~
E
three-legged stool~
The wood is severely cracked and looks like it might break under the strain
of the next squatter.
~
E
bench~
It could use a little paint.
~
E
spitoon~
Blackened and tar-like liquid grease the outer lip and side of the spitoon.
I wouldn't stick MY hand in it.
~
E
short-legged table~
There might be a good story behind that there carving. Whatever became of
Herbie and Sally?
~
E
stair staircase~
The stairs may be narrow, but they are safe to walk on.
~
E
smoke~
*cough*
~

Extra descriptions are the little bonuses a player gets for looking at the things that are said to be in the room. Believe it or not there are players who do look for these objects, and who are glad to see them there. It may be work, but as a builder you will impress players (and administrators) when you take the time to describe a room in detail, even if the details are short, one-word vocal imitations (*cough*). One can also write descriptions for objects that aren't in the room description, but which the player might look for anyway:


E
ceiling~
It looks sturdy enough to last for years.
~
E
floor~
The years of many passing, muddy feet have worn a dark trail from the west
exit to the bar to the east.
~
E
walls~
The walls are bare of furnishings, except for some lights spaced every pace
or so.
~
E
lights~
They appear to be magical in nature. Too bad you can't take them.
~

Okay, so it's a little work. Good areas are work, and you are here to learn how to build good areas, right? When building an area, the little things count. Eh, so what that it may take you three months to build a sixty-room area? People will definitely want to go into that area, not just to kill mobs, but because they like the atmosphere of the place.

Furnishings

Which brings us to the last suggestion: when building a room, furnish it. Not just with room descriptions and extra descriptions, but with actual objects. Take, for example, the bench that we described above:


E
bench~
It could use a little paint.
~

Rather than merely make this a part of the room's extra descriptions, we could make it a non-takable object, thus allowing players to actually rest, stand, sleep or put objects on the bench. Building such an object, a piece of furniture, is not difficult. However, it does take us beyond the scope of this part of the guide. We will return to this topic when we take up creating objects for the #OBJECTS area header.

Now on to part two of building rooms.

* The case could be made, for example, that a river changes, so you should be able to describe it. To which I reply, yes, the river itself does change, but if the river is never leaving the room, ie. there will always be the same flowing river in this place, then feel free to describe the river. That goes for anything in motion, eg. clocks, blowing fans, magical flames in a fireplace, and on and on.