[MudMann]

Originally Posted by misao Right, so this had nothing to do with my post? Wow, you arrived at the exact same number I typed -- the world is full of wonderful coincidences indeed. Still, if you weren't referring to me, all's good then.

pffft cant remember to be honest.. magenta has a wierd affect on me....

[scandum]

I think the biggest challenge for a mudder on a mush is how to deal with all the wankers, and mushers on a mud in turn have to deal with all the morons.

[misao]

Originally Posted by MudMann pffft cant remember to be honest.. magenta has a wierd affect on me....

As horrific as I must admit magenta is, there was none in my quote of you. Only bad spelling. :/

[Mud Dungeoneer]

Since MUD commands are different across games, it might be more confusing to provide resources specifically comparing MUDs to MUSHs. But if you explain your game and its environment well enough in general that will be a great boon to any new player!

I believe the key to enabling any new player to get acclimated to your game (mudder or not) is to structure the game and game website in such a way that new players have quick and intuitive access to whatever help mechanisms you have in place. Their first moment in creation or on the game should point to how they can obtain help on the basic and essential commands they will need to get started. You might need to remind new players in many different spots how to access the help files or web pages you have created to aid them. In my experience, Veteran gamers tend to get easily frustrated with a game if the information they need to play isn't easily accessible.

Looking at the Blood of Dragons website you seem to have a lot of help files and helpful articles there. That is great! I'd find that very useful if I was trying out your game.

[Liosliath]

Excellent post Milawe.
I thought your statement "In a MUSH, you are playing cooperatively even when you're in opposition. You are agreeing to play the opposition to see what comes out of the story you're both telling. In a MUD, because of its coded elements, you can have a ton of opposition with very little RP, even if the rules demand that you have RP." was right on target.
All in all a excellent post.

Obsevations of mine - the MUD part from a long time ago and from reading various posts, I could be wrong
In a MUD one can play for hours without having to interact with another player character.
In a MUSH solo playing is really not feasible.

[Milawe]

Originally Posted by Liosliath Excellent post Milawe.

Thanks, Liosliath. I had my eyes opened when some of our hardcore RPers started playing heavily on a MUX. Thankfully, these players still stayed on our games and let me know what drew them to MUXes and MUSHes even with their 10-year mudding histories. It's something I've never really tried myself except for doing historical research to aid a friend's RP.

Ultimately, it often seems that it's the content that draws them. Most MUSHes that are very successful seem to be centered around the works of authors where the world is fully detailed and known by almost all the players before they even enter the game. I think that's what allows for cooperative play so well. Almost everyone is starting off on the same footing knowledge-wise because everyone has the same access to the lore. The discovery comes in the individual characters that are created rather than exploration of the game world. Setting the scenes become really important to get everyone on the same page, and thus, cooperative play (even in opposition) becomes a necessity.

Originally Posted by Liosliath Obsevations of mine - the MUD part from a long time ago and from reading various posts, I could be wrong In a MUD one can play for hours without having to interact with another player character. In a MUSH solo playing is really not feasible.

With MUDs finding things out about the world is usually a vital part of the game regardless of whether or not there is RP involved. You're discovering where each piece of gear drops, which monsters are hardest to fight, what piece of gear sells the best in the current market, what recipes craft which items, how many seconds you have to wait between this ability and that ability, and the list is endless. So, yes, you could essentially play for hours with the game world itself without ever talking to another player, and part of the thrill of playing is learning about the game and the world itself. Knowledge is power, and you've got an advantage over other players if you know something about the world that they have yet to discover.

In a MUSH, I think the discovery comes when you're playing out a scene to see how specific characters would possibly evolve in a very established world that is usually loved before a player ever gets online. You get a lot of purists who want to uphold the integrity of the world lore, and everyone operates with the same end goal really. Sometimes, you do get the super twinks on a MUSH but not as often as you do on a MUD because in a MUSH, players are 95% of the content of the game. (Obviously, I'm generalizing a bit because there ARE successful MUSHes that are not based on the works of Tolkien, Lucas or some DnD world. They're just not as common as the successul MUSHes that ARE based on someone else's writing.) Alienate enough players, and you really don't have a game to play. Thus, pre-planning a time and scene makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, rambling again. I think for a certain set of players, moving between MUDs and MUSHes can be pretty natural and painless.

[KaVir]

In the hope of getting this conversation back on track, here's a little information on the three main MUD families (TinyMUD, LPMud and DikuMUD) and how they're interconnected:

• 1979: Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), named after the single player game Dungeon (aka Zork).
  
• 1987: Alan Cox wrote AberMUD, inspired by the original MUD. It was the first popular open source MUD.
  
• 1988: Richard Skrenta wrote Monster, pioneering the approach of allowing players to build the game world, creating dungeons for other players to explore and fight.
  
• 1989: Jim Aspnes wrote TinyMUD, inspired by AberMUD and Monster. Designed to be a stripped down version of Monster, but particularly noted for its lack of combat (just a simple 'kill' command), which differentiated it from the hack-and-slash AberMUDs. Derivatives of this family (based on the TinyMUD code) include SMUG, MUCK, MUSH, MUX, etc.
  
• 1989: Lars Pensjö wrote LPMud, inspired by AberMUD and TinyMUD. His goal was to "create a world with the flexibility of TinyMUD and the power of AberMUD". Derivatives of this family (based on the LPMud code) include CDlib, UriMUD, LDMud, MudOS, etc.
  
• 1990: Stephen White wrote MOO, inspired by TinyMUD (and developed in a similar style).
  
• 1990: The Diku team wrote DikuMUD, inspired by AberMUD. Designed to be less messy than AberMUD, less buggy than LPMud, and more D&D-like. Noted for being well organised, easy to set up, and providing a fully playable game that runs out-of-the-box. Derivatives of this family (based on the DikuMUD code) include CircleMUD, Merc, ROM, SMAUG, etc.

Thus you can see the relationship between MUD and MUSH as follows, where each box represents a new codebase and the lines represent inspiration:

                    .---------.
                    |   MUD   |
                    `---------`
                         |  
    .---------.     .----v----.
    | Monster |     | AberMUD |
    `---------`     `---------`
         |             | | |
         `-----. .-----` | `------.
               | |       |        |
           .---v-v---.   |   .----v----.
           | TinyMUD |   |   | DikuMUD |
           |         |   |   |         |
           | SMUG    |   |   | Circle  |
           | MUCK    |   |   | Merc    |
           | MUSH    |   |   | ROM     |
           | MUX     |   |   | SMAUG   |
           `---------`   |   `---------`
               | |       |
         .-----` `-----. |
         |             | |
    .----v----.   .----v-v----.
    |   MOO   |   |   LPMud   |
    `---------`   |           |
                  |   CDlib   |
                  |   UriMUD  |
                  |   LDMud   |
                  |   MudOS   |
                  `-----------`

As I touched on earlier in the thread, I would personally be interested to see comparisons such as:

• MUSH vs MUCK: Similar styles of game, and both derived from the same code.
  
• MUCK vs MOO: Similar styles of game written by the same person, but different code.
  
• MOO vs LPMud: Both inspired by TinyMUD without using its code.
  
• TinyMUD vs DikuMUD: Both inspired by AberMUD, but different code and style.

After that the comparisons could be extended to other codebases, including some of the many MUDs that fall outside of the codebases listed in the above diagram. For example the only other MUD I've encountered with a movement system similar to mine is a MUX, while death in my MUD is similar to the result of the TinyMUD 'kill' command (banishment back to your home) - but my command syntax is more like DikuMUD, with argument parsing a little like LPMud.

I think it'd be really interesting to compare different custom MUDs with each other as well, as no game is designed in a vacuum, and you can often see striking similarities between independantly developed MUDs. It'd also be worth checking out the Morder codebase, which was primarily inspired by Scepter of Goth (developed around the same time as - but independently from - the original MUD).

[Nymeria]

Mud Dungeneer,

I agree, presenting information in an easily accessible way is crucial. What I've struggled with, and continue to struggle with, is selection of information. When you have an information-heavy game, what do you give players first? Ideally, I guess you structure everything from low to high detail. So that when someone starts out, they can get what they need in an overview, and then they can look a little deeper and get the same information in a more comprehensive format.

I am not sure I've quite succeeded with that myself, I think a lot of the time people are confronted with too much information too soon, but it is always a work in progress.

Milawe,

Some interesting points to consider, definitely. Especially given your experience of players that play both MUSHes and MUDs.

KaVir,

Thank you, that's a very nice break down. Though in itself, I guess it doesn't really say much about what you can expect from the different codebases, except possibly that the more closely related are more likely to have things in common than those further apart. But as a basis for further analysis, its very helpful as a reference.

[locke]

Originally Posted by KaVir In the hope of getting this conversation back on track, here's a little information on the three main MUD families (TinyMUD, LPMud and DikuMUD) and how they're interconnected: 1979: Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), named after the single player game Dungeon (aka Zork). 1987: Alan Cox wrote AberMUD, inspired by the original MUD. It was the first popular open source MUD. 1988: Richard Skrenta wrote Monster, pioneering the approach of allowing players to build the game world, creating dungeons for other players to explore and fight. 1989: Jim Aspnes wrote TinyMUD, inspired by AberMUD and Monster. Designed to be a stripped down version of Monster, but particularly noted for its lack of combat (just a simple 'kill' command), which differentiated it from the hack-and-slash AberMUDs. Derivatives of this family (based on the TinyMUD code) include SMUG, MUCK, MUSH, MUX, etc. 1989: Lars Pensjö wrote LPMud, inspired by AberMUD and TinyMUD. His goal was to "create a world with the flexibility of TinyMUD and the power of AberMUD". Derivatives of this family (based on the LPMud code) include CDlib, UriMUD, LDMud, MudOS, etc. 1990: Stephen White wrote MOO, inspired by TinyMUD (and developed in a similar style). 1990: The Diku team wrote DikuMUD, inspired by AberMUD. Designed to be less messy than AberMUD, less buggy than LPMud, and more D&D-like. Noted for being well organised, easy to set up, and providing a fully playable game that runs out-of-the-box. Derivatives of this family (based on the DikuMUD code) include CircleMUD, Merc, NiMUD, ROM, SMAUG, etc. Thus you can see the relationship between MUD and MUSH as follows, where each box represents a new codebase and the lines represent inspiration: .---------. | MUD | `---------` | .---------. .----v----. | Monster | | AberMUD | `---------` `---------` | | | | `-----. .-----` | `------. | | | | .---v-v---. | .----v----. | TinyMUD | | | DikuMUD | | | | | | | SMUG | | | Circle | | MUCK | | | Merc | | MUSH | | | ROM | | MUX | | | SMAUG | | MOO | | | NiMUD | `---------` | `---------` | | | .-----` `-----. | | | | .----v----. .----v-v----. | MOO | | LPMud | `---------` | | | CDlib | | UriMUD | | LDMud | | MudOS | `-----------`

Don't forget NiMUD!

[KaVir]

Locke, MOO doesn't belong in the TinyMUD box, as it's not derived from the same code.

Slightly off-topic - is it true that zMUD is less suited for MUSHes and MOOs than it is for MUDs?

[Delerak]

Originally Posted by Violette Slightly off-topic - is it true that zMUD is less suited for MUSHes and MOOs than it is for MUDs?

Where does that come from? zMUD is suited for just about anything in my opinion.