Speech in emotes

[Rithiel]

It has recently come to my attention that there are a number of players who include speech in emotes.

For a number of different reasons, please try to keep actions to emotes, and speech to say. There are various game mechanics using speech that are in the say command, and putting speech in emotes would accidentally circumvent them. I'm not going to outline all of them, but the main one is characters knowing or not knowing languages.

[Lysse]

Out of curiosity, have the GMs ever considered trying to code in speech and languages into emotes?

I'm sure if you have, it's very far down the priority list, but one of the few things I dislike about the actual code for Clok is that the RP sometimes doesn't flow as pleasantly when you have to separate actions and speech.

[Kiyaani]

The command is "emote" or "act" not speak with flourish. I find Rithiel's post helpful. Also, not sure how you would code speech into emotes.

[Avedri]

What about acting when you say something?

Like when I whisper to Kiyaani and then break up my statement to give her a wet-willy and then finish it with HA-HA.

[TwistedAkai]

I've seen it done before, though rarely, that speech would be automatically detected in emotes. The problem is everyone would have to use the same format, and you'd have to figure out how to handle the language barrier effectively.

[faylen]

I have to completely agree with Lysse here. I'm one that likes to use emote to make my character seem more realistic and make the rp flow more in a style similar to reading a story. Being restricted from combining speech and action makes that a lot more awkward. In real life, many use body language in combination with speech and I like to try to simulate that.

I do understand how speech features can be bypassed using this method, though. I've seen ways to allow both, but not sure if the devs here would be open to coding such things or not.

I suppose in the meantime to get the same affect I'll break up what I'd normally do into separate lines, as spammy and awkward as that might become. Either that or try to cut back on emoting, but that makes me a bit sad...

In the meantime, please try to forgive any slip ups. Habits are hard to break, heh.

[Lysse]

I've seen it happen in a few MUDs. I don't know about the coding portion of it, but from the player's perspective, it usually goes like this.

speak Faewyr
emote nods a little bit, offering a smile to Faylen. "Yes. That is why we must travel to the cold North."
(Lysse nods a little bit, offering a smile to Faylen. She says something in a strange language.)
(Lysse nods a little bit, offering a smile to Faylen. "Yes. That iis why we must travel to the cold North.")


And, another implementation I've seen is by being able to include actions in says and directed says, as follows.

say to Evelyn (nodding and grinning) Yes, I have heard of your exploits. You are a brave warrior.
Lysse says to Evelyn, nodding and grinning, " Yes, I have heard of your exploits. You are a brave warrior."

or

say (crouching down to examine tracks) Yes, looks like a caravan passed here. Hour ago.

Lysse says, crouching down to examine tracks, "Yes, looks like a caravan passed here. Hour ago.




Essentially, the inclusion of double quotes ["] or brackets [()] can be used, as far as I can tell, to make speech to codely work in a MUD, or to include actions in says.

[Jaster]

nod evelyn
Jaster nods to Evelyn

grin evelyn
Jaster grins at Evelyn.

say ::evelyn You're such a badass.
Jaster says to Evelyn, "You're such a badass."

or

Emote crouches down to examine some tracks.
Jaster crouches down to examine some tracks.

Say i don't know what the hell this is.
Jaster says, "I don't know what the hell this is."

[TwistedAkai]

Personally, I like the latter because there is significantly less room for immersion breaking errors of language.

To use the same example with a small change:

emote nods a little bit, offering a smile to Faylen as she says, "Yes. That is why we must travel to the cold North."
(Lysse nods a little bit, offering a smile to Faylen as she says, She says something in a strange language.)
(Lysse nods a little bit, offering a smile to Faylen as she says, "Yes. That is why we must travel to the cold North.")

[libandil]

Ok, without trying to do this topic to death, I hav to say that I agree completely with Faylen and Lysse and whoever else likes speech nd emotes together. I can totally appreciate and understand why this could not work well, especially withthe different languages. Which, by the way, I love the idea of different languages, and Liendur makes use of this feature every so often. However, I also lke the idea of putting speech and an emote in the same line. What if, for instance, I say something, then want to use a sightly moreinvolved emote, which I have to type out separately, and the one to whom I am emoting interrupts tha with something oftheir own whch breaks the flow of what I was ying/doing? I'm glad someone made me aware several weeks ago about this issue, and I'm certainly not going to disobey a do something I'm not supposed to. Im just puttingin my 2 riln worth, incidentally, the first 2 riln of, what I hope will be many many more. this game rocks my world!

[Jirato]

Bumping this for our new players and also adding official DEV commentary, as Rithiel is awesome sauce, but she was a GM at the time of this original posting:

use SAY for speech use EMOTE for actions, period.

Speech in emotes bypasses several crucial systems such as language comprehension, drunkenness, the string formatting and color highlighting thay goes into speech, client triggers of the official CLOKgear plugin, and one or two behind the curtain systems.

With the support of TONE and SPEECH, there is no reason to add speech inside of an emote. Yes, it might look cool to you. You might feel it's more immersive or better RP. However, you're still bypassing systems by using it. I know there was some argument when this topic was originally created, but unfortunately going to have to make this a firm no.