I was thinking about look vs whois (the description and the about sections) and I wonder if there’s a place for something akin to a short description. I often see people use desc to elaborate on who’s doing what when a newcomer joins a room. How about making it a feature? It’s often bothersome to add the immediate scene details to the description, and people expect it to be more immutable. A status that is displayed in the scrollback is much more immediate.
I’m thinking about descriptions that are situational and are easy to change and to read. They could be available both for rooms and characters, and, most importantly, they’d be displayed if a character enters the room. To make sure there’s no spam, they would be limited in the length.
For characters that’s effectively a long-form status that provides more detail in the specific scene. For rooms, it’s the immediate context, important enough to be seen in the main scrollback.
I expect that such short descriptions would be assed to the scrollback when a user enters the room by any means or does the look command. There should be an option to turn it off, similar how the travel notifications can be muted.