This has bothered me for a few years, now.

Why must character descriptions be to the pattern of ' is and'? As a Mugwump, why must my description begin 'He is a glistening mugwump and'?

Sex and race are clearly visible from honors. What gain in having them lead off the description? A well written description contains no doubt as to these things, which leaves quickly displaying your gender and race to other people the only remaining reason. To which, I would argue, honors is already used to garner in the overwhelming majority of cases. So, what point, then?

There should be no mandatory format to character descriptions.

Does anyone else have an opinion on the matter?

I would like them to be a bit more freeform. (Although maybe something could be done about the retarded ones.)

I personally feel the same way about these as with custom emotes. Having to put the space before the ' if I want to do something like, "Shiri's eyes flash angrily" or what have you is a niggling annoyance to me. That's just picky though.

That's a good point. I've always felt that a bad description was its own punishment, though.

It IS its own punishment, but it also randomly annoys perfectly innocent people who just happen to be wandering around and looking at people's descriptions. Which SHOULD be irritation-free.

I like seeing what race they are. If you didn't, you'd have a tae'dae with the description He is very small and thin, and has green, oily skin and one eye.

I just really hate it when descriptions don't follow these guidelines:
* Well punctuated and grammatically correct. Not, "He is he is a human. and he has blond hare."
* Describing physical things, nothing else. Not, "He is a human and is pure evil. His best friend is David. Whenever they want to go somewhere, David will fly upon his shoulder and off they go."
* You actually look like what you are. Not, "He is an elfen but is actually a ta'edae because he likes the elfen stats"

The start line is handy. Especially with such a varied race as Viscanti about. The descriptive word irks me though - I'm labled a shaggy igasho, yet I've roleplayed a loss of bodyhair due to taint induced mutation. I'm bald, curse it, bald! Maybe letting people chose from two or three words to put there would be nice. Like
Towering
shaggy
bulky

For igasho, with variations for every race.

Very good idea.

EDIT: Maybe, when the Fates are weaving you.

"Excellent, excellent. So you remember you're an igasho. Tell me vaguely what you are like, and I shall weave from there. Are you primarily shaggy, towering, or bulky?"

You say, "Towering."

"Good, ok. So you're a towering igasho."

I don't have a problem with saying what race you are in your description, just the fact that I can't say it how I want to say it. One of my biggest issues with it is having the description start with 'He' or 'She'. That starts you off on soft footing where you could have been forceful and dynamic from the get go.

He is a noble aslaran and has brilliant orange fur...blah

Brilliant orange fur ripples like fire across the body of this noble aslaran...blah

That would be useful, but SOUND really retarded. "Are you hairy, or tall, or fat?" "Uh, all 3?" "Sorry, no can do." However, you'd need to be able to change it without much of a problem, and it...well, it would just suck not to be able to customise it a little more than those 3. More customisation, like Melanchthon says, is probably the way to go.

Just make the wording...
Do you like to be known as.. or
Your most distinguising charatersitic was...


Its a great idea... someone go code that.

I had a problem with the say some of the descriptions start off because of the verbs.

Such as the growling loboshigaru.

If people were allowed to make their descriptions more free-form, there need to be pictures of each race on the site, to have something to base them on. Eh, perhaps there should be pictures anyway. I think it'd help make better descriptions.

Yes! Random, but I'm dying for official-like pictures of the races.

Well, you can make them free-form...just not in the beginning. There is a trend in all the IRE games to make the racial descriptions vague and open to interpretation for at least the details...I don't think we will ever see anything more specific than the helpfile descs.

I played a game once where the graphic for their catfolk race just totally killed any desire to play one for me, although I loved the rest of their concept. I think that's what IRE is trying to avoid.

I've never had any problem with describing, other than the stupid "and." I have always, always, wanted to just end that first sentence of what race I am,a nd then go on with a regular description. That "and" pisses me off to no end. I can never think of anything else that really fits what the race part was saying, and so teh rest of my first sentance always seems dumb to me.

Hrrm. It's not ideal, but I would even be happy with that as well. The 'and' does throw things off.

I know exactly what you mean. I sat there for close to half an hour trying to get past the and part of my description, and after I wrote it, the first line sounded lame. So now I'm descriptionless until I find some way to get past that godamn and.

I prefer the "and" to Imperians "and is"

*shudder*

I could see idiots doing bad stuff with complete freeform. All mugwumps do have shiny skin. Without that, some moron could claim he has blue poladotted fur covering his mugwump body, which violates what a mugwump is. Granted, someone could still do that, but this helps discourage it.

What if the mugwumps been inhaling taint, or left out in the sun? Or sprinkled with salt... I'll just assume the slime is very, very resilient.