All right, you've applied for and got your brand new character on the muck. On to the RP, right? Wrong! At the bare minimum, you should have a description set for your character. This walkthrough will show you how to set everything up.

Character Description

Writing Your Description

This is the most essential part of your character, beyond the way you RP them. Often this is the first thing another player will see or find out about your character, even before you've started RPing; it gives them that important first impression.

Since one looks at your description with the look command, what they "see" should be the first thing in your description. No need to be excessively precise or detailed, but give enough information that people can use your desc in RP. Some things you might include in your desc:

• Species - At least mention it in your desc. It'll save people having to use whospecies to look it up.
• Notable physical features - This is especially important if you're not playing a mouse, rat or other easily recognizeable species. Do you have a tail? Wings? Webbed feet? Include it in your desc!
• Coloration - This includes the color of your fur, eyes, skin, scales, feathers, or what have you.
• Body Type - These are things like your height, girth, weight, and build (i.e. tall and slim, short and fat, muscular, anemic). Generally, it's a good idea not to go overboard with specifics; instead of "six inches tall and four ounces" use "short and slight".
• Clothing - usually only NIMH mice and rats wear clothing, although feral creatures might have simple articles if they were given them by a NIMHed creature (or a human). Again, no need to be overly descriptive; generally a basic idea of the cut and color is fine.
• Other accessories - perhaps your character always carries a piece of jewelery, weapon, hat, or what have you.

You may also want to consider the other senses as well. Perhaps your character has a certain kind of voice. Maybe your character's armor clanks around as he walks. Perhaps she perpetually smells of perfume made from flowers, or refuse from working down in the sewers. See also: Setting your Scent

Avoid revealing more about your character than what one can directly observe. You can't know a character's complete personality and life's history just by looking at them any more than you can do so by looking at someone in real life. While you can mention some of these things when you set your pinfo, it's best to let other players find out about them through the course of RP as you reveal them.

While writing your description, keep in mind that this will be everyone else's first impression of your character. You might even want to write it in a text editor with a spell checker and save it somewhere, just in case it gets lost for whatever reason.

So, got your description ready then? Congratulations, the hard part is over! Now we've just got to tell the muck about them.

Simple Descriptions

For descriptions that are only one paragraph, often it's more than adequate to use this method for setting descriptions. To set your description, just use the following command:

@desc me=[your description here]

To test the description, just look at yourself to see how it looks:

look me

Complex Descriptions

All right, so you'd like something a bit more impressive than your one-paragraph submission. Maybe add a bit of formatting. Or perhaps you'd like to be able to easily change among a set of descriptions, for different changes of clothing for example. Though this is beyond the scope of this article, you could even have different descs depending on your IC/OOC status, whether or not you're asleep (disconnected) and the like.

To do any of this, we'll want to use lsedit, an editor for any multi-line chunk of text. Rather than print my own lsedit tutorial, I'll refer you to Redwall MUCK's lsedit tutorial. Our version of lsedit works in exactly the same way as it is described there.

So, let's start lsedit and put in our new description. You can store the list you use anywhere you'd like; I use /desc/desc for my default description. You'll see why I do it this way when I get to adding clothing. Here's what I'd do to create my new description:

lsedit me=/desc/desc
.del 1 999
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Timothy is a smallish, thin mouse, with a slight build that could best 
be described as wiry. Though once sickly and weak, one can tell that this is 
no longer the case now that he is grown; in fact, he seems very agile and 
energetic. 
     One can easily see the features he inherits from his parents. His fur, 
for instance, is a rather non-descript grayish-beige somewhat reminiscent of 
his father's, though he lacks his father's distinctive dark-gray markings. 
Through a pair of round-rimmed glasses, his eyes shine bright blue with 
intelligence and thoughtfulness, much like his mother's. Other features are 
apparent as well, like his impish grin and mischievouseyes from his father, 
tempered by a kind smile from his mother.
.end

For you, obviously, you'd want to use different text. But note how I can use formatting, additional paragraphs, indentation and such, now. Looking good! Now, to add clothing. If you don't want to add a clothing part to your desc, skip down to the section on Applying your description.

Clothing / Changeable Descs

Here's where descs can get fun. First, we'll assume that you've created a fairly generic description of yourself in the previous step. This is important--whatever you use for your "default" description should only contain a description of those things that don't change about you.

Basically, for clothing, we'll be creating seperate lists for each outfit we want to have. You could provide as many outfits as you want, though, perhaps one for work, one for formal occasions, one for going out in the winter, a costume for Halloween... well, you get the idea. For Timothy, I want to give him an outfit that he uses normally when he's at home in Thorn Valley, and a second one for when he's at the NIMH Mouse Colony.

First, his normal Thorn Valley description, which I've given the name /desc/valley:

lsedit me=/desc/valley
.del 1 999
     His clothing is simple, to match the wearer's tastes: usually a dark-green 
or blue short-sleeved tunic with a breast pocket for a pen or pencil and a 
simple brown belt. Recently, he's also taken to wearing a (small knife) which 
he carries in a sheath attached to his belt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.end

Now for his NIMH Mouse Colony outfit, with the name /desc/nmc:

lsedit me=/desc/nmc
.del 1 999
     He has on a dark blue short-sleeved polo-shirt with a pair of grayish 
pants that are very similar to his natural fur color. Around his waist is a 
black belt with a silver buckle and a sheath for his knife, which he almost 
always carries with him.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.end

Again, if you want to do more descs, just use the same pattern as above for as many times as you want.

Applying Your Description

As you may have noticed, you still get the same desc you had before you started when doing look me, despite all of this work. That's because we haven't told the muck about where to find our new descs, yet. To do this, we use a little bit of MPI code on our description that tells the muck where to look. For instance, if I just want to display my default description, I'd use:

@desc me={list:/desc/desc}

If I want both my default desc and my Thorn Valley clothing, I'd use:

@desc me={list:/desc/desc}{list:/desc/valley}

Or for my NMC outfit, I'd use:

@desc me={list:/desc/desc}{list:/desc/nmc}

Both of these print out my default desc first, and then my clothing right after that. To test out my desc, I'd just use look me, which would output:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Timothy is a smallish, thin mouse, with a slight build that could best 
be described as wiry. Though once sickly and weak, one can tell that this is 
no longer the case now that he is grown; in fact, he seems very agile and 
energetic. 
     One can easily see the features he inherits from his parents. His fur, 
for instance, is a rather non-descript grayish-beige somewhat reminiscent of 
his father's, though he lacks his father's distinctive dark-gray markings. 
Through a pair of round-rimmed glasses, his eyes shine bright blue with 
intelligence and thoughtfulness, much like his mother's. Other features are 
apparent as well, like his impish grin and mischievouseyes from his father, 
tempered by a kind smile from his mother.
     His clothing is simple, to match the wearer's tastes: usually a dark-green 
or blue short-sleeved tunic with a breast pocket for a pen or pencil and a 
simple brown belt. Recently, he's also taken to wearing a (small knife) which 
he carries in a sheath attached to his belt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Look Notification

If you'd like to know when someone looks at you, just add {look-notify} to the end of your description, like so:

@desc me=[rest of description/mpi here]{look-notify}

Then, every time someone looks at you, you'll see something like:

[!] [Player] looked at you

Player Information (PINFO)

Your PINFO is where you can let others know about both your real-life and IC personas. While you don't have to put in any information in your pinfo, it is recommended that you put in as much as you feel comfortable, particularly in the IC information. To set your PINFO, use the following command and follow the on-screen instructions.

pinfo #set

Here's an example of a filled-out PINFO, which can be seen by typing pinfo Timothy:

*****************************Timothy's Pinfo Status****************************
--------------------------------------------------
OOC: Out-Of-Character Information
--------------------------------------------------
Real Life Gender: Male
Handle: Simon
Marital Status: Single
Home Page: http://www.thornvalley.com
--------------------------------------------------
IC: In-Character Information
--------------------------------------------------
Character's Name: Timothy Brisby
Character's Gender: Male
Character's Species: Mouse
Character Alignment: Good
Character's Profession: Student, Apprentice Scientist.
Character's Hangout: The Brisby apartment
Character's Age: Teenagerish.
Character's Marital Status: Single
Character's Weight: A tad thin for a mouse.
Character's Height: A tad short for a mouse
Character's Parents: Jonathan and Elizabeth Brisby
Character's Siblings: Teresa, Martin, Cynthia
Character's Generation: Second
NickName: Don't call me Timmy. :)
--------------------------------------------------
Last Updated: 11/01/05--05:34:34 PM
*******************************************************************************

Optional Stuff

Setting Your Scent

A player's or object's scent can be accessed by using the smell command. To smell a player, use smell [player]. More information about smell can be found through smell #help.

To set your own character's scent, use the following command:

@set me=/_Smell:[Your scent here]

Setting Your Title

When using where, there is a 'Title' section that you can set using the command

settitle [your title]

Setting Your @doing

If you'd like to let people know what you're doing when they use the WHO command, use the command:

@doing [doing message]