Apologies that this is not bard specific, but it is certainly strongly
related to the playing and discussing of EverQuest. Although we are
generally bards here, with bardic concerns, it is my belief that, with a
strong bias toward bardic concerns in bardic terms, this forum is easily
one of the best, if not the best, for considerations of life in Norrath in
general.
Second only to being there, it is certainly my most important and effective
means of understanding how Thrush may most enjoy and profit from his life
in Norrath.
At 09:10 AM 6/29/99 -0700, jay schultze wrote:
>I don't know, for me it's just so much easier to cry out, "proc damn you!!
>proc now or i'll trade you in! Why won't you pro- .. <CRACKLE> THANK YOU!!!"
><mob keels over>
So how is that better than "cast now or I'll trade you in?" In fact,
saying and thinking "cast" seems better to me. I imagine shaking the fool
weapon between blows and thinking, "It's supposed to cast that fool spell,
why won't it do it when I need it most. I need a rune I can touch or a
word I can say to make it cast when *I* want it to."
Imagine that the recalcitrant caster is not a weapon that casts in its own
sweet time and whim but rather a slow, confused, undependable member of
your party. I doubt you'd feel the need for a special word to encourage
the person.
The more I think about it the more clear it is to me that trying to assign
a special word to the special case overall results in more obscurity than
light.
I doubt that I've influenced anyone or even begun to establish a convention
that will stick, but the participants have helped me clarify my own thinking.
In Norrath we have spell-casting beings and spell-casting weapons. They
have varied degrees of reliability. There may be some that will perform on
command and some that have their own sense of when to cast. None need
special names.
Given that, I bet I can explain to a newbie more clearly and quickly than
those who pick up programmer slang.
Verant is classic. To the detriment of useful information floww, the
programmers and people who run the systems are so steeped in the code and
the writers of documentation so weak or nonexistent that instead of
reasonable terminology and documentation we get programmer's notes and
system operator's terminology. The underlying mechanisms impinge far too
much on the virtual reality and we are left grasping for understanding.
Bob