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Reference pictures.. in game!
Make a command that shows a picture/link.

This is for y'all with terrible attention spans like myself. I mentioned this in LOOC and suddenly there's Mench telling me there's an Ideas forum for stuff like this.. so I feel like maybe it's actually worth posting!

Ever felt like, reading through that long wall of a description of a person still doesn't really help with your visual image? Ever wished that maybe, if they had a reference picture somewhere deep in the forums or maybe just on their PC, that you could see it at the tip of a command?

I have. So many times. I've even seen that in some MUD's where you can make a FILE for every character in the game, that you can add to about general knowledge most people would have of that person. Of course, that's optional. And more of a side-idea.. back to the point.

Imagine if I wrote something like 'show (characternamehere)' and it showed me a picture or a link that the player inserted. So there'd be a command to insert this too. It would obviously be an optional thing as not everyone wants to bother with that and some people use screenreaders.

Thoughts?

My only concern would be if something like this started to replace things like nakeds and descriptions. The text. Because I honestly don't want to have to look at the pictures other players picked out as they almost always clash with the style I have in my head.

I am probably one of the few who don't imagine the IC world as an anime for example and HAVING to look at all those anime pics would be jarring to my mental image. And if this was implemented I would have to start telling players that I'm not interested in looking at their pictures of their PC, gear or whatever which might give some bad feels.

I'm against this for similar reasons to Grey0.

It's a text game! I don't want to look at pictures. I have mental images and atmospheres in my head, that I formed from reading the text.

I've seen other RP games that lean heavily on having character reference pictures and profiles for characters. The majority of those photos are inappropriate for the themes of those games, and take me out of the experience.

It would be difficult to set up useful guidelines for images. If unrestricted, players would post images of very popular actors and actresses in normal clothes (they do in other games). And, as Grey0 mentioned, anime pictures. Do we want that to be among the first images new players see as they're introduced to Sindome?

Do we say "cyberpunk images only"? What's a cyberpunk image? When is an actor too famous to include? It gets messy.

No thanks.

This is popular on MUSHes as PBs. I understand the reason, and I know the good feels of getting to use your favorite choice actor as your character's PB.

In Shadowrun: Denver, we even sometimes appended these pictures / artists depictions of our characters into our descriptions.

I don't feel like it meaningfully added to the game, and at times it was distracting. I think there have been other good posts on how to break up the descriptions in this game, but we haven't implemented those yet, so I think it's a no from me dawg.

That's a shame. I would only see it as a shortcut to the character arts thread. And it would immensely help me picture characters. But each to their own.
As an artist I say, "SQUEEEE! Yes please." I might be biased, but I have dreamed about this as a feature so I can show off art.
It's an interesting idea and I think we could have the best of both worlds if there was an option to turn it off. So everyone who doesn't like it can opt out of seeing it. (Or the other way around and you have to opt in.)
@Loreley

I thought about this too, it's not like it has to be forced upon people. However I would really like it as an option. And I don't see how it would make people focus less on writing descriptions. People already write as they like, simple and short or long and detailed.

Descriptions change with the circumstances the character has gone through. Would the picture change each time you got a new visible cyberware, lost a limb, came down with a visible medical condition, etc? It occurs to me that these would forever be out of sync or need constant maintenance.
They're just to help give you a general image. And you can always remove it, is what I think. Like no one forces you to write every @naked. So it can be empty. Or not. If that makes sense?
What about Charisma? We don't allow characters with low Charisma to write descriptions about how beautiful they are.

In every game I've seen use these character pictures, 99% of players choose photos of the most beautiful people in the world. Can you use a photo of shirtless, muscular Ryan Gosling for your average bro with immigrant-level Strength?

I also don't like the idea of GMs need to police these images for a variety of reeasons I can see them needing to be policed.
They're just meant to aid you in getting an image out of a text. Not meant to do anything else. I feel like you're reading into it too much but it was a suggestion is all. I have a hard time picturing things by just reading them, and often I don't get the time to do so when there's lots of players around and big walls hurts my ADHD.
I sympathize with the walls of text. We do want to move tattoos to something that lets the detail of the tattoo be looked at, with a briefer 'short description' of the tattoo left in the full description.

What if you could just look at a persons face/head, torso, etc to break it up manually?

That is interesting. I still think the best way to solve the tattoos is to make them a different color, kind of like makeup. Without overdoing it. So a shade darker or lighter than the skintone, or maybe in a greyish white or something. But that's not related to this thread anyway. P:

It's not just breaking them up, but sometimes it helps visualizing things, and people who make art or pay for art love showing them off, so this would be a sort of quick-access button to it, without it necessarily being 200% accurate or up to date. Just a visual aid for those who want it. And those who want to show it off.

I agree the walls of text are very difficult to process accurately, especially in any scenario where you need to quickly sum up/differentiate people as you would IRL. I know we have shortdesc, but what about something that the user themselves could define as important in their own descs and nakeds? Like putting [brackets] around something under our nakeds that change them to a different color and stand out, like a key word descriptor.

Shortdesc is the automated version of this, but this would allow users to make their long descs easier to skim through to understand important details.

e.g.: "Chummer has [long black hair] that reaches down to his waist. He has a [chicken tattoo on his right bicep], squaking a series of words down his forearm. His [shirt] seems to be made of [red velvet], and he is currently wearing no pants. His feet have been replaced by [two chicken feet], [each toe claw] painted [steel blue]."

It might be cumbersome and be a player-side solution, but would this help?

I've seen other games have something like this and the content ranged from wildly inappropriate to immersion breaking to blatant Instagram theft. There is Second Life or VR Chat for chummers to have their questionable anime avatars, I think the medium should remain text and prose personally. It's the only one that can remain consistent and immersive.
You're onto something there. Something less cluttered than what was suggested maybe. But still might not belong to this thread. Not sure.
@0x1mm Like described above, this is an optional thing you can turn off. And you don't have to see it unless you use a certain command for it.
Narrative description is a skill, and writing an immersive and compelling character is in my mind one of the major elements of playing the game. Essentially all other roleplaying games are visual, I don't see the issue in keeping things text and not ending up like Meridian 59: Lingerie Catgirl Edition.
Well, I'm not here because it is strictly text. I'm here because this is the biggest roleplay community I've found where I can play the sort of character I want to play. There's not a lot of visual roleplay out there on this scale.
Ever felt like, reading through that long wall of a description of a person still doesn't really help with your visual image?

No. What I have[/b] felt like is that reading through the wall isn't something I always want to do.

But, Sindome is and will always be a game for the literate. That's not snobbery, it's just truth.