Describing streets

[Kyle]

I am wondering if any experienced builders out there have any advice on how to make reappearing concept stay interesting after multiple room descriptions.

For example, for a long road through town, which will pretty much look uniform for most part, I often find myself frustrated trying not to repeat myself. I am religiously against cloning a room description in any part. As a result, I find myself saying the same thing over and over again, but in different words, which I feel is corny. Anyone else run into this?

What I've been trying to do is keep the descriptions shorter, and decorating the rooms more with props and mobs, (i.e. A broken carriage, or a wandering hobo)

But sometimes I have difficulty even getting in a full three lines of unique writing for each room. Any thoughts?
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The Augmented dimension : mud.themudhost.net port 5000
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[welcor]

Draw it on a piece of paper.
Add (draw on the map) some nearby (on the road) features.
Add some mid-distance features (trees, large rocks, shorelines, etc.).
Add some long-distance features (hills, forests, fields).

Now, slice the road in as many pieces as you want rooms.

In each room, see which items are close-by, mid-distance in this or next-door-neighboring room and long-distance in this room, and two rooms out, either side.

This should give you a good selection of objects to put in each room.

For instance:

[Jamdog]

I have seen a MUD where the 'wasteland' randomly chose room descriptions, using a 'bank' of possible phrases, allowing the wasteland to be almost any size, not limited to 100 rooms like most zones.

The system simply had a 'wasteland co-ordinate' added to the player's data structure, and there were a list of wasteland exits (for example, "north of 0, 200 is room 3000").

When the player entered the wasteland, the room description is randomly created, and if a player left those co-ordinates, and then went back to the same room, they got a different room description.

I guess this system could be tweaked to allow a 'RANDOM_DESC' flag for rooms, that would generate a room description based on sector type and other room flags.
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[Fizban]

You can create this effect as well by having ten rooms total for a zone. When they head north they enter a random room but a script that forces the exits that should be there to be in the right place no matter what room they actually go to and save a variable to the player saving their relative position in the zone. (Yes, that would be complex to implement, me one of the biggest fans of DG would be wary to attempt it even.)