I don't usually object when friends play together. A lot of time that's how we get new players - someone decides to share the addiction and dragoons a sibling, friend, or significant other into the game.

It gets iffy when it's unfair to other players who aren't similarly coordinating. I've seen people abuse this, as when one character logged in to help another character, and headed straight to where they were, without any ingame communication. To me, that's just a step away from "I just died, go get the stuff off my corpse." Things that characters do should be based on IC events and communications, not OOC ones.

But that's on a RP intensive MUD, as Onyxflame points out. On some other muds, it's normal to have this sort of coordination, and honestly, it's more fun to play with friends than solo for most folks.

OnyxFlame and Sanvean,

I see what your saying, and I respect your replies.  Well, I'd like to start off with the rules of the MUD we'll play on are the same as my rules.  If they make a rule about "no ooc knowledge carried into game at all" than that's fine with me, and we will never talk anywhere about in game events except inside the MUD itself, and only in character of course.

Well, this is just a typical scenario about new person going into an RP mud.  Will he have real history with anyone?  Who was his mother?  His father?  Why doesn't he ever talk to his family?  All he wants is revenge?  He'll probably be just the little orphan with no family, no companions, no character motives, no history involving any other PC besides himself.  He'll talk to some strangers for a day, but then they will be forever gone tomorrow.

I don't expect the other members to just throw themselves at anyones feet just because they have a selfish conquest for power.  There's a member who joined the group on the terms that she would play at the same time we played, however she would be the lone thief, and that our history would be only IC.  We also don't have to constantly stick together.  Being together every now and then is enough, if they say "Okay, I'm going on my own today, or doing something else with so and so" then that's good enough for me.  However, it's the idea that we all eventually know some real IC people in the MUD.

I've been trying a lot of MUDs out recently.  A lot of them are RPI, so there's no global channels, descriptive titles in the who list, or even good character interaction.  They look fun on the outside, but can a wandering lone role-player really make a nice home for himself there?  Possibly...  but they probably require a lot of patience and talent.

Basically a lot of people have joined the group.  This group is made up of them, and what they want to do with their characters.  Generally it would be good if we all didn't wander around completely aimless in a huge world, knowing no one.

Well if you guys wanna try the mud I play, we could use some more real RP'ers. Our style is kinda laid back, i.e. most of the time the built-in emotes work fine, you don't hafta RP out every little twitch and sneeze unless you want to. So far, the RP is mostly noticeable as it pertains to politics, and a lot of people don't even bother to create char histories. So it may not be what you're looking for, but I hope it can get more involved as our newbies start figuring out wtf it's all about. (We have a much larger percentage of newbies than we did in the old days.)

However, I've started helping newbies come up with nice char histories, although having another char for a relative has never been all that common. So if you guys decide to play there, I can help you with that and hang out with you sometimes, as long as you realize I have other IC responsibilities taking up a fair amount of my time. If interested, check out dartmud.com port 2525.