Glance - like 'look', but just basics
When you only need the gist

Something I've encountered a few times in the game are a few RP problems caused by the huge gulf of information between someone's shortdesc and someone's full description. It's often difficult to get a quick mental image of someone you've just met, or to quickly scan over someone's appearance to get a sense of what outfit they're wearing today, or what have you; if you're just meeting someone, you're going to want to be able to focus on the RP from the get-go, which can be difficult if you're also trying to balance that with reading and absorbing their full description, but if you ignore the description you might be missing out on the opportunity to properly react to their appearance.

Without giving away anything ICly, I can say that I've had an RP experience that involved another character having an extreme reaction to my character's outfit - but only after having interacted with my character for quite a while before that.

To remedy this, I thought it might be nice to have a command that gives you a kind of 'mid-desc', a medium length description generated by your character's appearance settings and outfit, like so:

---

You glance over [name of character.]

You see a [shortdesc word pair, I.E. 'average woman', etc.] of [heritage] descent. %S is [height] in height and [weight] in build, and has [hair length], [hairstyle] [hair color] hair and [eye color] eyes.

%S is wearing [list of visible worn clothing items, by name].

---

This would give you a short-ish, easily digestible version of that character's description that you can use until a lull in RP lets you properly digest that character's full description, or if you just want to see what someone's wearing if you've already read through their description enough times to have it memorized. The command could be something like 'glance' - getting a quick assessment of someone's appearance without fully absorbing the details.

I can see an argument being made that the presence of a 'glance' command would keep people from reading full descriptions - but I'd wager that anyone who would stop reading full descriptions if a shorter one was available probably isn't reading them at all right now.

I've taken to doing as you suggest with new people (using the 'tease' command on clothing), but the 'glance' command is also something I'd find myself using a lot for other reasons!

@describe me is not meant to contain clothing nor should it really contain anything that cannot be seen if you're completely covered in clothes. @describe me is supposed to be (to me) a quick overall summary of build and stature that you could notice about someone even if they're cloaked in fifteen layers of clothing and you run around with without changing daily depending on what you are or are not wearing.

You can 'glance' without a command. Skim over the description line by line, if anything looks interesting, go into more detail. I personally can read very quickly thus I go through a description and clothing and pick out anything I need to to react properly. Also, IC, you may not be paying too much attention to someone and thus fifteen minutes down the road when you finally -DO- give them a good look over you're like holy crap they have cat eyes! Or something like that.

I've also had people use local OOC to say "Give me a moment, I'm reading over your desc" which I find perfectly acceptable.

As stryder put::

Also, IC, you may not be paying too much attention to someone and thus fifteen minutes down the road when you finally -DO- give them a good look over you're like holy crap they have cat eyes! Or something like that.

I've done that myself before. :)

Then do what I mentioned I've had happen before, tell the person in local OOC you need a minute to go through their eight paragraphs of description before you can properly roleplay.

I like the idea of a glance as well. A few situations that I would find it the most useful is:

1.) In combat: you may be attacked unaware, you will need to be focused on what is happening to defend yourself or escape. Reading an entire description to figure out who is attacking you, you'll be dead before your done(or the other person will be). You may need to run off a SIC as you are being beaten to death (Help! This short guy with yellow eyes that looks Hispanic, wearing Du-Wear is trying to kill me)

2.)You may be a witness to something, or someone may have left the room quick, where you wouldn't get the chance ICly to take in their full description, so a glance is more approriate.

3.)You walk into a crowded room, You aren't going to study what every person looks like head to toe, you are just gonna briefly notice people, not getting all the head to toe info and it would be -FAR- less spam on your screen than looking at 4 people's long description.

4.) Charactes with the same name: Though it is rare, there are characters(PC/NPC whatever) Who have the same name. A glance could tell you which is which, without once again being flooded by information.

Just my thoughts on the matter, in order of importance.

Another reason that I think a 'glance' command would be good is that not everyone actually even mentions certain details in their descriptions, even if they would be obvious.

I also think that having access to a concise, consistent readout of a character's coded appearance attributes would be useful, and easier than trying to get every player of the game to try and handle the balance between their @describe and their @nakeds more similarly. While 'look' descriptions depend entirely on player-written passages, which could result in wildly different levels of detail and formatting between different characters, all the information for a 'glance' description is already coded in the game, so you could always count on getting an easily digestible passage of consistent length and format - perfect for if you forgot minor details of a character's appearance, like their eye color, and just need a quick refresher.

For the record, I have to agree with BattleJenkins on this one. The formula she suggested way in the beginning makes perfect sense and seems easy to implement, seeing as all that information is already codes, if I'm not mistaken. Add one sentence modifiable by the player (tattoos of dinosaurs everywhere or heavily scarred or missing an eye) and bam, you've got a glance. I would use this all the time.

Short descriptions don't take disguises into account though, so something you may see at a glance normally won't be seen with some disguises. But I think it would be cool to have a 'glance command'. Not everyone can police themselves so well all the time. Which isn't really a fault. But I'd vote for a coded read out that is an automated emote, like so-and-so glances discreetly at so-and-so. My rare two cents thrown in.

Hooray!!