Difference between revisions of "Area Style Guide"

Revision as of 10:07, 7 February 2008

= Area Style Guide, 2nd Edition = 
I. Overview

     Welcome to the Area Style Guide, originally written by Iandir and updated
by Dovolente. This guide is  intended to a) Help new writers find out what we
expect of them, b) Give the areas of Avendar a consistent tone/mood/feel,
c) Aid builders in thinking up areas.
     Many of these points will seem minor, or pointlessly strict. What we're
aiming for here is to maintain the quality of Avendar and increase it. Minor
sloppy points make the MUD look bad. Many of the founding staff endured years
of MUDing on very poorly-written MUDs; if you think no one cares whether all
the room titles match, you're wrong.
     Anyway, on with the pretentious and pedantic Area Style Guide!

II. Area Design

  A. Area Concept

     1. History
     One thing that's important is that an area is well thought-out. This
means having some kind of story to the area, a history behind it, and a 
purpose for each room. The history doesn't have to be complicated:
     Krilin Fortress was built by Baron Krilin to protect the people of the
mountain community after their city was destroyed by hill giant raiders.
After the fortress was built, they conducted several campaigns to wipe out
the giant menace. Now the fortress has become the city, for the safety of the
people, and Baron Krilin leads them.
    A very simple story that adds a nice feel to the area, and gives it a 
purpose. Iandir could have just as easily said "Well, it's just this fortress,
and everyone like lives in it and stuff." But that's not as cool.
    An area that's not planned out will usually have things that don't fit,
or don't feel right. For example, one builder had a forest with a garden in
the middle of it. Who put the garden there? Why would there be a garden in
the middle of the woods? When asked to explain these, it became obvious that
he had not thought the idea through.
    Something that the development staff expects to see are areas the build
on the specific history of Avendar. Read through the MUD history, look at
texts in the Earendam library or entries in the Canon. At this point (Feb 08)
we still need an aelin home area (Ilodaiya? -- and even if we get one for each
race, why not two?) For more  specific inspirations, read all the pillars/mob
descs in the Titan Castle. 
   Or, many of our writers come up with ideas that are completely new but still
build on the universe. Melikor came up with the idea for a tower of fire
mages that lost control of their magic (or something) and their souls got put
into the bodies of fire elementals. A great idea! (He left before he built
much, but Iandir still hopes to do that tower someday.) Nordath and Arisuth are
good examples of fresh but fitting Avendar concepts.
    Areas that don't specifically build on the world history (example, my
monastery) were OK as the rough form of Avendar took shape, but after a decade
of development and lore, there's no excuse for writing an area that is disconnected
completely from the lore and backstory of Avendar.

    2. Area Originality and Tone
    Make sure that the area fits in with the feel of Avendar, as well. For 
one thing, we don't want areas that are based on a fantasy novel, movie,
comic book, or anything. Inspired by, sure. Many of our areas will have the
same tone as, say, Tolkien, but we will disallow areas that have Bilbo,
Sauron, or Gandalf.
     Furthermore, many times the area won't be the right mood, even if it
doesn't directly take from a series. One builder wanted to make a Ravenloft-
like area, but early implementors agreed that it really didn't go well with
our other areas. Be sure to run your idea by some of the senior staffers (Chadim,
Kestrel, Dovolente, Ramc, Girikha) before you get too excited about it.
     Original, fresh ideas that build on the fantasy landscape are superior
to boring, unoriginal ideas. (Although some of the old standbys are always 
good.) For example, it would have been OK for Avendar to have a cave system
inhabited by gnolls. But to go on and add a cave system inhabited by goblins
too... that's a standby, but in this example we already have something like
it. We would want something more original, like Iandir's chaja caves.

    3. Area Location in Avendar
    Make sure that we have a place to connect it in the world. Before you write
it, you should know where it goes in relation to existing areas and how it might
connect to them. Talk to senior staffers about where we could fit your area, and
if there's nowhere, maybe you could write a connecting area just to lead up
to your main area (like the Vorinden Road and Kor Thrandir).

    4. Types of Areas
    There are several basic types of areas. You have to decide which your
area is. The question at hand is, why would adventurers want to go into your
area? For most areas, the amount of traffic they get determines how
successful the area is. (Although some areas aren't meant to be heavily
traveled.) The area types are basically different reasons for folks to go
into an area. The types may be mixed, and usually a successful area either
does more than one of these, or does one extremely well. Area types:
a. The City. People come here because it's their hometown, to buy things, to
practice, or to cower in their guilds.
b. The Ranking Area. People come here because it's got good ranking mobs.
c. The Equipment Area. People come here to kill the mobs for their eq.
d. The Linking Area. People come here because they want to go somewhere
connected to the area.
e. The Quest Area. This is usually a rarely-traveled area with some really
deadly stuff, used as a base for quests, or to hide really tough eq.
    Some examples. The Griffin Aerie is intended as a ranking area. It can
also be used to link some air-type areas later. It's also got some rare 
equipment. Krilin: City, Ranking, Equipment. Chaja Caves: Ranking, Equipment,
Linking. Some plain old linking areas are the roads and the rivers (which
by modern standards are very basic and wouldn't be acceptable without a
lot more development).
    So, plan ahead which types of area you want yours to be. Remember it's
better to make it have more than one function. There are several areas we
have right now that no one hardly EVER visits, because they don't serve the above
purposes.

  B. Plan Your Area

     1. Area Map
     You should map out your whole area on graph paper before you begin, and
be sure that you have everything where you want it before you dig. It's 
annoying to see  someone dig a 150-room area and then say "Can we delete this,
I did it wrong." Well, either plan it out meticulously before you dig a single
room, or look foolish and get used to unlinking rooms. (In the 20 areas Iandir
planned/dug, he never changed the layout of one once it was dug.)
    So map that baby out, and then number each room. For ease of writing in
tiny squares, I just number each room 01, 02, 03, and so on. If my vnums are 
1500-1599, I can just mentally add the 15 when I dig. (If I have more than
100, I use 2 digits for the first 100, then go 601, 602, 603 for the second.)
     Also be modest with the size of the area. Areas with 50-100 rooms are

good for new builders (and old builders). Trying to tackle enormous 300-room monstrosities can be overwhelming and drain one of energy and enthusiasm. Insanity lies that way.

     2. Area Realism
     As you plan the area on paper, try to think of the way a real building
would be laid out, or how a real landscape would be formed. Avoid pointless
hallways, or rivers that flow uphill, and so on. Don't get obsessed with
this, but do pay attention to it.

     3. Room Realism
     As an extra, it's nice to have some realistic rooms. If I made a
gigantic castle with no living quarters, kitchens, nothing, one would have to
wonder where all the inhabitants actually live. But please don't go overboard
on this, building in 100 bedrooms, 2 kitchens and 3 dining rooms. It's just
nice to have *some* realism. Too much will make your area needlessly huge,
and boring to boot. Not every area needs a kitchen!

     4. Noexits and Traps
     Make lots of nasty traps, if it suits your area. But limit the use of 
noexit rooms. Noexits should really only exist if there's some type of puzzle
or quest or mechanism to escape. 
     ALWAYS put warnings before traps or noexit rooms. Nothing is worse than having
an inviting passageway that suddenly traps you for no reason. The idea here
is to reward people who are careful in their explorations, and punish people
who charge recklessly around. There should usually be something in the room 
desc that hints to what's ahead, or at the very least an exit description.
(look west, "The ledge looks weak to the west")
     Norecall, nogate, nosummon and nomagic rooms had better have a good 
reason for these properties. Rooms that have no possible way of escape, 
ever (noexit AND norecall or nomagic) shouldn't exist. If you have a great
reason for a ton of noexits, ask senior staff about it.

     5. Mazes/Randomized Rooms
     Mazes are ok as long as they're not overdone. Ask us if your maze is
worth having randomized. Don't make them too hard, unless it's a high-level
area or an area that's supposed to be a real pain to get into. (A newbie area
with a 15-room maze is way overdone. Newbies have problems with a 4-room
maze, and even one randomized room can baffle a newbie. :P)

     6. Area Credits
     To set the credits, first, aedit your area. Then type 
"credits {lo hi} Immname   Area name". The spacing should not vary
from this format. lo/hi = lowest levels that can go there, highest levels
that benefit from the area. Start of the area name should be 10 spaces from
the start of the immname. Just type "areas" for countless examples.

III. Room Descs

  A. Basics

     1. Length
     Room Descriptions should be at least 3 lines, and less than 15 lines.
Too short, and it looks like the area was slapped together with minimal
effort. Too long, and your writing needs to be more concise.

     2. Spelling/Grammar
     Rooms should be meticulously spellchecked. Spelling errors make our
glorious MUD look like trash. Likewise with grammatical errors.

     3. Room Names
     The room name should be capitalized like the title of a book, with the
first word and all major words in caps. Example: "The Lair of the Ice
Wizard". Also, every room name should composed so that it could complete the
sentence "Iandir is standing in/on/at __________". (A redundant in/on/at is
ok, but not required.)

  B. Content

     1. Originality
     Be creative in describing a room. People get tired of repeatedly reading
"to the north is a hallway, to the west is a large alcove, and to the east
is..."

     2. No Narrative
     Narrative in a room desc is a bad thing. What do we mean by narrative?
Narrative is a) Telling the player how she feels as she walks into a room, b) Telling him
what he's thinking, c) Describing a specific action that's taking place. An 
example of a and b:
     "You stand in a dark and scary room. You are very frightened as you look
around, and you edge toward the door out. You almost panic as you twirl
around and find it gone!"
     What if I'm playing a character who is absolutely fearless? What if my
character was raised underground, and loves darkness? What if I know exactly
where I'm going, and the disappearance of the door doesn't disturb me in the
least? This is why you must avoid telling me my thoughts and feelings in a
room desc. Using "perhaps" doesn't help any, as I've seen some do...
     "You stand before an enormous gate, craning your neck to see the top.
Perhaps it was built to keep invaders out, or perhaps to keep people in."
     There we are, telling me my thoughts again. These things are anathema.
Also avoid describing specific actions or mobs in the desc:
     "Sitting around the table, a group of barbarians laugh heartily as they
gulp ale and spit on the ground. One barbarian stands and stretches, then
reaches for his axe."
     The problem with this is: Why can't I see the barbarians as mobs? What
if I want to kill them? Rather than putting them in the room desc, make them
mobs in the room, and give them some fun progs that make them come to life.

     3. Progs
     If you want to do anything special in a room, a sleep trap, a special
effect, or whatever, let experienced builders know and they can help with it.
There  are many, many examples of what can be done out there. Use 'mpstat' for mobs,
'opstat' for objects, and 'rpstat' for rooms to see how others have set up progs
for these things.

IV. Mobs

 A. Mob Variety
    There should almost always be a great variety of mobs in your area.
Ashur has asked that we use at least 1/4 of the vnums for mobs and objects.
Exceptions may be made, but not usually.

     1. Mob Population
     It's the mobs that make your area come to life. Along with a great
variety of mobs, we want to have a great number of mobs. However, don't go
overboard. One builder put maybe 1 or 2 of each type in the area, and when
told to put a lot more, the builder put (seriously) 45 of each mob type.
It was kind of silly to see 15 mobs in each room. In general, a good
sprinkling will average to about 1 or 2 mobs per room, although of course 
there will be clumps and bare spots.

     2. Progs
     Please use progs on the more important mobs in your area (maybe a 
cluster of basic ranking mobs don't need progs, but an individually named NPC
who has a particular purpose in the area should have some sort of interactivity).
If you don't know how to prog, we can teach you. Mob progs  make the world
live and breathe, and  nothing turns us on more than an area that interacts with the player.

  B. Mob Act Flags
     1. Always make any non-magical vertebrate animal act_animal. This makes
it so that our precious rangers can befriend them. (Note: griffins, etc,
count as magical, for those of you who didn't get my drift.)
     2. The act_badass flag is absolutely not to be used without senior staffer
permission. The use of this flag will cause us to glare at you and lose
respect for you.
     3. The act_mage flag is broken. It will do bad things to your mob if you
use it. Out of the different class flags, the only one that does anything at
all is act_warrior; this flag gives you mob an extra attack.
     4. The class flag is not fully implemented and is buggy. Do not use at the present.
     4. The track_gate flag is absolutely not to be used without senior staffer
permission. See above for consequences.

  C. Mob Levels
     A variety of mob levels is usually good. Think of the level you want to
have ranking on these mobs, and make the mobs 5-10 levels higher.

  D. Mob Affects
     Make sure the mob's affects are appropriate. Sanctuary should only be used
on mobs who can supposedly use water magic. Use resistances rather than sanctuary if 
you think the mob should be extra hard to damage.

The same goes for detecting invisible... Maybe a bear could detect invisible by smelling you out, but how
could an ordinary merchant see an invisible guy?

  E. Mob Names

     1. Be sure to make the mob's name include all the things anyone would
think of to call it. If the mob's long desc is "A tall bearded swordsman
stands here." You would want to make the name "swordsman tall bearded".
Nothing is more idiotic than seeing "a hairy black beast" and typing "kill
beast" only to have it say "They aren't here." This is extremely poor mob 
design.

     2. If you name your mob, like "Jorgar the Barbarian Lord" or something, 
please do not use a non-fantasy name! This includes real life names like
"Jonah", "Harold", or "Granny Smith". Would you really expect to see a guy
named Harold in a fantasy world? We have guidelines that we will be enforcing
for character names. I would deny someone named "Candi" in a heartbeat... so
why should we have a mob named Candi? We absolutely should not.

     3. If you're using one of our races, please make an effort to name them
using our racial naming conventions. See the builder's page for resources.

  F. Mob Damtype
     Make the mob's damtype appropriate for the mob. We don't want little
girls who smash, or cityguards who have flaming bites.

  G. Mob Hit/Damdice
     Read "help hitdice" and "help damdice" on 5555 for the appropriate
values. Also: make sure that the mob's hitroll is level/2, or higher for mobs
meant to be particularly tough.

  H. Mob AC
     Use "help mob_ac" to determine armor class values.

  I. Mob Offenses
     Please use your head on this. I've seen people make little girls who can
parry, dodge, bash, trip, disarm, and dirt kick. Tell me, if it takes a
freaking warrior 15 ranks before they can disarm someone, how did this
little girl learn it?

  J. Mob Wealth
     Don't go overboard here. One builder put 1,000,000 gold on a mob. Wtf? Follow the guidelines 
     for wealth given in the oedit documentation.

  K. Mob Descs
     Mob descriptions follow the same rules and restrictions as room descs.
No saying "The woman drops her bundle and attacks" or anything like that. For
a mob's short description, you must start non-proper-name words with a lower
case letter. Wrong: "The mudslider" Right: "the mudslider"
     TAKE NOTE: Race names are NOT capitalized! Wrong: "the Shuddeni priest"
Right: "the shuddeni priest".

V. Objects

  A. Object Variety
     Just as with the mobs, we want to see at least 1/4 of the area's 
vnums used up by a variety of objects. If this means you have to put tables,
chairs, cups, bread, shirts, and gloves all over the place, then do it. It
brings the area to life.

  B. Object Names
     Just as with mob names, make sure the name includes everything an item
would be called. It sucks to see "A blazing broadsword is here, shining 
brightly" and when you type "get broadsword", "I don't see that here." You
should name such an object "broadsword blazing shining", and maybe even
"broadsword broad sword blazing shining". On another note, *always* make sure
that the FIRST word used in the name is the most common word you would use 
to describe it. If someone can't carry that much weight, it says
"broadsword: you can't carry that much weight." Now, if someone had named
this object "shining broadsword", it would say "shining: you can't carry that
much". This looks silly.

  C. Object Flags
     Very rarely, if ever, use the anti-alignment flags. They should 
generally be saved for magical artifacts or other high-powered items
that it really makes sense for. It's better to make more equipment usable
by everyone, so that players have more reasons to slash each others' throats.
     NOTE: the v4 values for weapons generally suck. The only ones that
should be used are "twohands" to designate that the weapon takes two hands,
or the poison flag. (Poison must be used rarely).

  D. Object Values
     I've had more fights with our builders over the subject of equipment
values than anything else. People put an avg 25 whip where it's easy to get,
and then complain when I tell them to make it an avg 17 whip. What we're
trying for here is a world where good items are hard to get. It should be a great
day when you finally get your hands on an avg 25 weapon... NOT the day that
you reach 15th level. I'd say the upper limit for normal eq is avg 28, and
even that should be limited to maybe 5 or 10.
     It's far, far better to make 3 swords, avg 28, and limited to 5 than to
make 1 avg 28 sword that's limited to 15. We like variety, we like rare
weapons, and we adore a variety of rare weapons. Example: My death knights in
Gogoth Castle. I gave them each their own weapon, and I limited each to 15.
It would have been a lot easier to give them all the same weapon and limit
it to 45, but again, we adore variety.

  E. Magic Items
     1. When you make potions/wands/staves/pills, please don't use a greater
spell unless it's really hard to get. Ksathan the Lich Mage, he can have
them, but a level 35 mob with greater spell items is unacceptable.
     2. When you are setting the spells on your item, don't forget to change
"ghost" to "none". It looks bad otherwise.

VI. Flag, Exit Descs, and Finishing Touches

  A. Room Flags
     1. Please make sure that all the room flags used in your area are 
appropriate. Nomagic, nosummon, nogate, and norecall rooms all need a reason
for being the way they are, and should be extremely rare. If your area is
very special, these things can be justified, but I've seen far too many rooms
flagged for no reason.
     2. Do not use the "solitary", "private", "vault", "safe", or
"newbies_only" flags.
     3. The "nowhere" flag makes it so that people outside the room don't
see you on "where". The "noneforyou" flag makes it so that people inside
the room don't see anyone else on where. The "indoors" flag makes it so that
area-affect spells rebound on your group, and so that you don't see weather
reports. The "noweather" flag is for non-indoors rooms where you still can't
see the weather.

  B. Room Sectors
     Do not forget to go through your area and change all the sectors. It 
starts out as inside, and most of our areas aren't all inside. (Even if your
area is indoors, you have to go through and set the room flag "indoors" on 
every room.) If you're not sure what sector to make your area, ask me.

  C. Exit Descriptions
     Exit Descriptions are the picky little things that you get when you 
"look north", and you see "The trail winds to the north." These are most
important if you've got a trap, a noexit, or a maze coming up. These are
required for any new area (though some of our original area set may still
be lacking them).

Appendix I: Fantasy works to read for inspiration
George R. R. Martin (Song of Ice and Fire)
H.P. Lovecraft
J.R.R. Tolkien
Lawrence Watt-Evans (Lords of Dus, Heroes of Ethshar)
Gary Gygax (Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide, Gord the Rogue books)
AD&D Modules
Robert Jordan (I guess... Put in at Jolinn's request :P)

Appendix II: Ashur's Appendix
Ashur sez:

Regardless of the type of area you try to do, I have one major pet peeve
and one major piece of advice (well, a few).

* Use mobs and objects. Use mobs and objects. Read this sentence again.
Too many people map out some huge area without any theme, write 99
rooms, then have 6 mobs and 4 objects. That is so shatteringly lame, its
unbelievable. When you have 80 mobs and objects, your area is thick with
the chance to explore.

* A theme. Don't form scattershot crap, where you just plot terrain and
then add random mobs. We want an area with history and depth-- mobs that
have a reason for doing what they're doing, conflicts amongst your areas
inhabitants, etc.

* Do NOT design your area around making an area for equipment or levelling
or anything. Design an area built on the concept that no matter where you
go, there's something interesting to see. When you suck people into
looking everywhere, identing everything, etc, etc, you have succeeded in a
great way.

* Make a mythos. Your area needs a background...it needs history, or
culture. And that should be compatible with the rest of Avendar. All
pre-conceived mythos (wheel of time books, xanth areas, whatever) are
banned. Think it up yourself. No Tolkein mobs without permission,
especially the demi-humans (elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc -- we don't have
them)

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