I am building a large area and during an inspection it was pointed out that ALL my exits are bad because I made the Travel message first person I.E. “You exit the” which would make sense as YOU are indeed exiting one area for another. But Wolfery has it set up as a THIRD party event. It adds your own name to the action. It reads like you made a clone of yourself and sent it through the exit to the next area and now you are trapped here forever as your clone lives it’s best life away from you. Can we PLEASE have the Travel message be a First person event?
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Just to point out two things (because it came from me): they are not bad, they just don’t create a coherent sentence given the name prefix. And that’s second-person, still. The first person would be I exit the ...
Yeah, I found it quite hard to work with my first time as well. Maybe a re-write of the labels name or a little ? Symbol that can explain it further would be helpful to new players.
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The easiest fix is probably: Ideally, the field where you type your exit would contain ‘Soandso’ as an static prefix to the rest of the field which users cannot remove, so they’re able to add to it and see accurately how the message will be displayed, with no illusions about the idea that it will be displayed inaccurately in first or second person perspective.
TheirName leaves toward the place
TheirName arrives from the place
YourName goes to the the place
–
In this way, if people ‘still’ ignore the direct example on display in the field they’re typing in then its… kinda just sitting there staring them in the face that third person is the defacto for online roleplay involving more than two people.
Third-person is the most sensible (preferences or not) while second person is conditionally used for rare circumstances where two people are present, or the user is directly ignoring the existence of others present. First person can be used while writing but due to the nature of first name always being present, it doesn’t make much sense outside of typing lore books or anything else where somebody is reading a journal from the person who wrote it.
People are free to use whatever they like of course, but some forms are less disruptive than others.
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Sorry, little bit of an extended thought. Maybe like a formatted string where {Gender} {Species} and {Name} gets formated with the appropriate text
e.g.
{name} the {gender} {Species} walks into the female feline changing rooms
which becomes
Ben Stophan the male dog walks into the female feline toilets.
May add in some small interesting ideas.
First to clarify the different perspectives with some examples:
| Perspective | Example |
|---|---|
| First person | I walk over to Shinyuu. |
| Second person | Accipiter walks over to you. |
| Third person | Accipiter walks over to Shinyuu. |
All three of them are valid styles for text. But I think third person is most suitable for this type of game.
I think you get a better reading experience if the text you read doesn’t switch perspectives. And the only perspective that allows this is the third person one. Second person is nice (lets you identify more with the character), but also works poorly with +2 characters. And even with just 2 characters, the you keeps changing back and forth.
So yes, I suggest third person for all exit messages. But the travel message, seen by the one using the exit, should preferably be as if you are following your character on their way.
Accipiter follows the small path leading away from the road, soon reaching a clearing in the forest.
Forest Clearing
Good suggestion 
This is something I do have in mind, possibly using the ICU Message syntax or similar. I want this especially to allow us to use correct pronouns in our travel messages. Though, it requires me first to implement pronoun selection for characters.
But I still recommend third person descriptions in all travel messages still.
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The issue with changing perspectives for certain messages from 3rd to 2nd person (which by the way there are multiple kinds of second person, the kind from the original post, “You walk into the bar”, would honestly be a syntax nightmare to implement, as changing it from 2nd person directed at the subject, to 3rd person would require a tense change for many if not all of the verbs.
Take the above for an example, changing “You walk into the bar” into “Xetem walk into the bar” directly breaks the syntax, as it should be “Xetem walks into the bar”
I understand the original sentiment of wanting it for room transitions, but keeping the entire site in the same tense, and having that same tense be 3rd person, is not only the easiest on bosswolf for development, but it’s the most consistent to compose messages in.
I personally prefer to pose using objective 2nd person with a subjective 3rd person (“Xetem walks over to you.”), it feels the most “RP conversational” if that makes any sense, but as soon as a room contains more than two people, that has to go out the door for clarity, and I switch to 3rd person because “You” doesn’t have a clear target in English, and for me it’s easier (and imo, clearer) to switch to 3rd person than to turn every pose into an address-pose.
But it does help show that 3rd person is the least ambiguous default for the site to adopt.
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@Accipiter can we maybe incorporate the @Jagrabbit’s suggestion above? I guess at this point we decided it will stay in 3rd-person POV, so some help for the exit writers will reduce the amount if things to be corrected.
Yes. But. Does <textarea> HTML tags support this type of ‘prefix’? I don’t think so. But maybe there are some hacky way to solve it. I’ll have a look!
While I agree with you mostly -
The tense of the travel message specifically doesn’t matter, in relation to the others. The travel message is only visible to the user of the exit, and no one else. Every other MUCK/MUD/MUSH I’ve played uses a second person travel message “You use this exit”. Because having your name there gives off the impression that it’s not you doing it, but someone else - And in a game where you could have multiple people with the same first name in a room, which is what shows when an exit is used…
You use this exit is more clear, then Faye uses this exit but there are 3 Faye’s in the room.
Edit: Edit just to add that in it’s current iteration, the use travel message is basically the same as the ‘what others see when you use the exit’ message. If it’s going to stay like it is, you could just get rid of it completely and have that one message be both.
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We can’t easily remove them for the same reason we can’t easily change to the second person PoV: a lot of writing depends on the way it works now. For an excessive and brilliant example of the travel message abuse, I’d like to point you at the Empyrean Blaze shrine in the valley.
Otherwise I tend to agree with you; the second person PoV is nicer.
It’s awkward when importing zones because you have the usual Osuccess, Odrop, Success, only the latter needs a tweak.
Sometimes it’s more detailed because it’s what you’re doing rather than what others see, but often it’s the same - perhaps UI-wise a checkbox to customise, else default to the first box?
You can start with 's in some cases to make it nicer, or more suitable for a hidden exit implementing a room detail/looktrap, e.g. GreenKai's coconut has a fuzzy brown husk, but inside is a tasty treat of white meat.