It's my understanding that MUDding essentially amounts to something like Everquest only with no graphics.

I tend tords more MUSHing and tabletop RPG's online. Is my understanding incorrect?

AG

That's a decent summary. MUSHes and MUDs differ less than you might think, though.

Since I spend pretty much all of my effort writing/coding rather than playing these days, they differ *much* less than you might think from my very specific point of view :-)

I tried MUDding once or twice about 3 years ago, just after SKOTOS bought the golden city or some such. I found it to be difficult and with very little Roleplaying involved. Thats the hook that gets me, the Roleplaying. I'm a geek, I know. I tried one that was set on an island with a spy theme (kinda cool) as well. The problem I found, was the same as with Everquest/WOW, in that it's all hack hack hack and not a whole lot of roleplaying

Are there more roleplay centric muds?

WARNING: Information in this message is severely dated as the last time I played any online MUD seriously was 6+ years ago.

Yes, but you need to avoid anything with "MUD" in the name.

Try to head more to ___MUSH or ___MUCK instead of ___MUD and you'll tend to find stuff that's more roleplay-oriented. Is PernMUSH still around? I know they were pretty heavy into roleplaying-centric gameplay.

There are some roleplay-centered MUDs out there - Inquisition, Blood Dusk. There are also some more interesting MUDs that still involve Hack'n'Slash. CthulhuMUD is among my favorites. But yeah, most MUDs are quite boring that way.

Wow, I remember Cthulhu. I spent more time on Valhalla and Phoenix, though.

I haven't tried Valhalla and Phoenix, but I really liked CthulhuMUD - I'm not normally into hack-and-slash, but their work on tone, setting and atmosphere were just shockingly good. I guess that's a lot of what you get by having a good body of literature behind your theme rather than "everybody go do something random."

This is pretty much the exact reason why I think that MUDs will continue to hold a strong foothold, despite the advent of graphical MMORPGs. You just don't get the depth of roleplay that you can have in a mud when you're dealing with the general public, because they tend to descend to the level of the lowest common denominator.

It's like saying that you can't have real roleplay in a D&D campaign. Sure, lots of twinks use D&D for hack and slash, but that doesn't mean that with a good DM you can't have an excellent roleplay-centric experience.

There are way too many hack and slash muds out there for my taste, but there are also plenty of roleplay enforced ones. I prefer MUDs to (what I've experienced of) MUSHs and so on, because you have the option to play even when there aren't other characters to roleplay with. I recently tried a SKOTOS game, and it drove me nuts because the only thing (I found) to do was to interact with other PCs. I prefer to have quests and exploration as options as well.

The Skotos games vary widely - if you head for Castle Marrach, it's pretty much just other PCs and roleplay. In other words, a lot like a MUSH. If you try The Eternal City, you'll get something much more like a traditional MUD. Grendel's Revenge is also, I'm told, fairly MUDlike. And things like Galactic Empire aren't even vaguely like either one.

I tried Marrach and the Lovecraft one. The Lovecraft one drove me nuts, cause I never did find anyone else on the game! :D

I ended up spending most of my time playing Ticket to Ride, which I liked a lot. I was interested in the Skotos code for my own mud, however. I hear they're releasing a new codebase eventually, and it sounds pretty nifty.

I didn't realize they'd *opened* the Lovecraft one.

Yeah, Skotos 2.0 (which is the name of the free Skotos MUDLib-to-be) is still being worked on. You can play with some of the underpinnings because they're using freely-available stuff for some of it, but their actual code is not yet available.

They run on top of a server called DGD. I know this partially because I write and maintain the only decent documentation web site for DGD. So if you want to have a serious look at the Skotos stuff, I recommend starting by looking at DGD. Let me know if you have any questions I can answer.

I think that the Lovecraft one is in beta mode, which probably explains why I didn't meet anyone. It had a pretty nifty character generation system, as did Marrach, but I'm not the most social of social gamers. I like to have things to do when I don't feel like dealing with people, too.

I'm relieved to hear that the codebase won't be exactly like what I saw in Marrach, because some of it was a little frustrating - though it could also be humorous. Like when I tried to open the drawers on a bureau, and it assumed I meant the drawers I was wearing ;) Who the heck really needs to open underwear, anyway? :D

I'm a wizard on a DGD mud, which is run by my husband and a group of friends. I'm definitely going to be looking into your website, thank you!

Wow! Always happy to meet a fellow user of DGD :-)

What MUD?

It's Geas. :)

I started MUDding about 12 years ago, gave it up for a while, then picked it up again. I've been a wizard on Geas for something like 6 years. It doesn't mean I'm a great coder, though, I'm the queen of descriptions! :D

I prefer MUDs to (what I've experienced of) MUSHs and so on, because you have the option to play even when there aren't other characters to roleplay with.

Exactly.
Back when my bro and I had to time-share our MUD addictions on the same computer, he usually had friends in the same game. whereas I had yet to acquire a sufficient number of geek friends to play with, so I generally flew solo (my main geek bud at the time was more into MUSH, if I remember correctly). Then again, it probably helps that I became addicted to my first MUD (whether due to quality or it being my first, I may never know) and so didn't much try out the alternatives. Ahh, the good ol' days of EOTL.

I hacked on the TinyMUCK source code in my spare time and ended up on the wizard team for a little MUCK for a few years.

I've read your site about working on DGD several times and it looks pretty cool. If only I had the time to work on/look at this some more, but there's so many interesting things to work on and/or play that I never seem to get started.

Glad you got it working! =)
I'm still up for testing if you have a need for me.

ahhh... I miss the (long) days of MOO programming when I was working on the Pueblo project with PARC. Not quite the same, but similar enough... I still think about writing a decent Java client for MOOs :)

If you ever feel like it again, there are some decent Java MUD clients out there that could probably be easily adapted :-)

So you finished that class for telnet over the binary port? You are a glutton for punishment hehe. man you do rule at writting DGD code. Well other than the one bug in your sould class should be == instead of = ;) I have been having some good times recently digging through all of your source and I really appreciate you sharing it man since there is so very little other examples for DGD. Keeps me from having to do my job while I'm at work! :D Anyways, thanks again for all the help Phantasmal has been so far in my hobby. Hope I get to see what you can do with it next.(maybe some more LWO examples even *hint*) ----Josh

Heya. Yeah, the sould is old code that I keep meaning to go back through. I'll have to have another look at it, but I've needed to expand some other stuff before I can do it right. Nearly done - or was three weeks ago, when I started the new job and lost all free time to work on it :-)