[crossfire] How to integrate old stories in the game?

[Mark Wedel]

  I was thinking about this some more, and had some other ideas.

  If one thinks about it, even someone not very literate can still read 
something - he isn't going to read a college level physics book, but could read 
a newspaper perhaps.

  If one were to go on this logic,than for any given message, it would be 
reasonable for what the player sees to vary based on literacy.

  For example:

Level 5 (max requirement for this message):
On the far eastern shore of the continent, at the tip of a penisula, there is a 
tower with many diabolical beasts.  At the top of this tower is Solinter, a 
powerful spell casting creature.

Level 4:
On the far eastern shore, at the tip of land, there is a tower with monsters. 
At the top of this tower, there is a nasty monster.

Level 3, 2 ommitted for brevity.

Level 1:
On the far eastern shore of this land is a tower with many monsters

  I suppose in those messages one would have to prefix them with something like 
"You don't understand most/some/a little of the message, but this is what you 
understand from it"

  In this way, even if a character does not have sufficient literacy, they can 
still get some of the message.  I like this also in that it at least gives you 
some idea if the book/scroll/whatever has any information that would be useful 
to you.  One might say "I've already been in that tower and killed everything 
there, so this book isn't useful"

  However, to do this would require extension of the message file (or the msg 
fields) to note the different level requirements.

  I do agree that some way for the player to handle/deal with these messages 
would be nice.  I use to resort to copying information down in another window, 
but that takes things out of the game experience.  One could imagine something 
like a special folio object that holds all these - the issue is still how to 
present them to the user.