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MUDs, motherfuckers, do you play them?!

4 years ago
Mizal asked me to create a thread back on Tuesday, so I of course obeyed immediately. Fortunately, she didn't specify it had to have a good title, else I'd fail at that too. Beware, lots of scary text ahead.


MUDs, or multi-user dungeons/dimensions/domains/dialogs (yup, there's a fuckload of definitions) are similar to interactive fiction. You progress by using text commands, like east, give soul to EndMaster, backstab noob and so on. But unlike interactive fiction, they're online, real-time, have a bunch of RPG elements like quests, battles ... I guess they're not so similar to IF after all.


The most popular genre is of course fantasy, but you can also find MUDs that are set in a science fiction modern, historical, steampunk, or other setting. They also differ quite a lot in what the main focus is; hack and slash, exploration, crafting, room creation, player interaction, roll play, so on.


My favorite MUD is Alter Aeon. It's set in a fantasy setting, so of course during character creation you get to pick from the standard classes: warrior, thief, mage, cleric, necromancer, druid. No races unfortunately, you can only be a boring human. What's interesting about its class system is that you don't just pick one class and stick with it. Every 5 levels you get to pick another class, so eventually you'll have levels in all of them. It might seem confusing at first, but when you understand the game enough, you'll be able to make some pretty powerful combos.


It's a pretty active MUD, with a friendly playerbase and almost daily updates. The focus is primarily on solving quests by killing mobs and finding items, but it tries to be welcoming for everyone. The world is large, and rooms have decently detailed descriptions, so it's fun to explore. A lot of crafting skills have been added recently, and while many aren't worth the effort, some can produce very strong equipment if you're patient enough. And if you hate playing solo, you could participate in the arena, or join a group to make getting exp easier; some high level areas are even specifically beatable only in groups.


If you want to learn more, check out their website. There's a guide or help file for everything you ever needed to know, and many things you didn't. But if that's not enough and you're still confused, just ask! :)


How about you? Does anyone here play a MUD anymore? I have a feeling this won't be a very active thread ...

MUDs, motherfuckers, do you play them?!

4 years ago

Woof

MUDs, motherfuckers, do you play them?!

4 years ago
It sounds like a pretty cool concept and something I would have really enjoyed a lot had I known of it and had a computer a few years ago.

MUDs, motherfuckers, do you play them?!

4 years ago
Nice thread. I miss playing MUDs, that was my time wasting activity of choice in junior high and for a lot of it in highschool. You know, back when I had friends. We would take over the library computers before and after school. The easiest way to describe them is as what they were; the text based precursors to MMOs. In some of the earlier MMOs like Everquest, they actually ripped off sections the code from the DIKUMUD codebase directly. There were thousands of them at The Mud Connector and most of the telnet clients came with a list of addresses and descriptions, so it was always fun just to pick one at random and drop into the world. You could find one with a default code base and map by a mostly incompetent person, or all sorts of custom combat and skills and cool things like player run guilds and player owned space ships or cities. Some had been around for years and the drama was deep and multilayered. (Although admin abuse and drama was rampant and killed a lot of good worlds. But that can't really be avoided when it was usually something like two nerds in the same class and a girlfriend...) The RP Enforced MUDs were the only ones to be avoided, that was the home of creepy sex havers and smug elitists and all of the above were basically the Simpson's Comic Book Guy IRL even when (especially when) they were playing female characters. Although many still exist, the difficult thing now is finding one with an active playerbase. The last time I briefly got into them it was a very lonely experience. It's better to join one of the more popular ones at this point even if it doesn't have Cool Neat Feature I miss from what I used to play. It'd be cool if we could compile a small list of active and fun ones, maybe even establish a little CYS presence on one and start a guild. Although there are probably safeguards in most of them now to stop the kind of trolling and griefing everybody got up to back in the day. e: Wow, TMC has had a major face lift since the last time I saw it. Less than 700 listed there now, although I'm not surprised there was a major die off. At this point I'm willing to best most remaining players are Maya's fellow cave dwelling blindies.

MUDs, motherfuckers, do you play them?!

4 years ago
Oh hey, you finally noticed the thread! You shouldn't keep me suffering so long, you know how weak and impatient we teenagers are. :)

It's always interesting to read a post from you about how cool the past was. It's a shame there aren't as many MUDs around anymore. And it's likely there'll be even less of them in the future, because text is just too boring for most people.

A CYS guild might be fun, but let's not be too optimistic about the abilities of CYStians. And yup, no trolling. The mods are pretty good at enforcing the rules on there. But we'd have fun regardless.

Yup, AA is definitely full of blindies. There are less of them on other MUDs, though. Even though they're text, not all of them are completely accessible. Some have ascii maps, extremely verbose combat, etc. And of course, blindies are just as awful as the sighted, and often won't play MUDs because they don't have sounds.