The average guild on a mud I have found are: superhumanly muscled warriors, knights-in-shining-armour, priests or wizards with a library worth of spells in their heads, invisible assassins capable of sneaking up on a fly or thieves with fingers so nimble they must have at least five joints...
What I am interested in knowing, however, is are people interested in role-playing the more mundane types of trades - the tavern owner, or the merchant that sets up shop in the town square every weekend, or the blacksmith that has a special undenting service for all your armour needs?
Does this apeal to anyone, or has anyoe tried this on their mud?

I think it depends a great deal on the atmosphere in the game. Oftentimes these types of characters are hard to find in a level-based game, because the emphasis is on 'power' of various sorts, and these types of characters are rarely powerful.

We'll have this in our mud and I have alot of people looking forward to that kind of trade.  Shop owners, tavern owners, etc. But it will be just as hard as adventuring.

Blacksmith -> mine or buy ore, rent shop, craft items, hire salesman (since you can't watch it yourself 24/7)

Tavern owner -> buy/hunt food, rent tavern, buy/make winem, hire cook, hire bartender, hire wench, Etc.

In a mud where drink and food are required. There will be a business for it.

I've just decided to rip out class selection in character generation and have everyone start off as a peasant.  They can chose to join a "guild/class" or remain a peasont and work thier way up to nobility or riches or the like.

There is a system on the codebase Endless is based on that allows players to create their own shop and utilize their skills to make a profit. Since we are still in development we don't have many players at a level where they would chose to do this. The below is the original help file for this system. If you are interested I will give you a list of mud running the codebase and the website where to download the codbase from.

          -- Astin

Code code code, is that what it's all about?

Mud I'm on has levels, but there've been several people who have set up their own shops, and more who rather than rping the warrior/knight/mage/whathaveyou, have decided to be your basic nobody. As a matter of fact, there's one group of 'kids' from a little backwoods town all between the ages of thirteen and fifteen merely rping being kids. Maybe one day they'll grow up and take over their parent's farm/inn/mill what have you, but none of this is coded. Mind you it's not the vast majority of people on the mud doing things like this, but they are out there. There's a few basic wanderers, picking up odd jobs as they explore the world not as mercenaries but as sightseers. True, you won't make an IC living doing things like this, but it sure adds to the flavor as far as I'm concerned. Rather see three people being nobodies in their own special way than one hundred being the same stereotypical mage/warrior/knight/whathaveyou.

Well, I'll admit, the only people who own shops at this time are people who have the weaponmaster skill group, who get 'mend' and 'engrave' skills, restring items that aren't flagged nonmetal and fix the same. I also seem to remember a few people who made money selling items that were just plain hard to find or get. Money's not a hard thing to come by though, so it's not as if any of these people need to 'make a living' off of it unless they're going crazy with the need to be IC, it's mostly that they've found a little niche to fill and so they do.

That's understandable. I plan to keep money rare for the most part. Will be a semi-hard thing to maintain, but think it'll work. With money rare and food required that should turn into a nice economy.

I would staple my tongue for the opportunity to own a tavern in a MUD.

Seriously. I would staple my tongue AND THEN soak it in lemon juice.

~SS~

Astin, what you are describing is not code, it's a set of rules for how the Admins in your mud allow shops to be run. It's not coded, you just use a simple script or mob_prog to make the assistant appear and leave. This could be done in any mud, in any codebase.

There are several other ways to set up a shop. In my mud we've chosen a somewhat different system, where you buy yourself a crashproof house, set up as a shop. The backroom, where you keep your store of goods to sell,  is crashproof and can only be entered by the owner, the shop room is just an ordinary room that you use for apperances.

With this system you can sell anything that can be found on the mud in your shop, but you need of course to collect the items you sell yourself, which can be both hard and time-consuming.  With the system you describe the extra room doesn't need to be a crash-proof and you can only sell the limited number of items that have been reset on the assistant, but on the other hand there will be a limited supply of those. Both systems have their advantages, neither need any excessive code, they work on what's already in most codebases.

There are other ways too, for instance if your mud has set up a system for crafting, in which case the players that trained these crafts naturally will sell what they produce. The crafts can be anything you decide, like jeweller, weaponsmith, potion-maker, armorer, tailor etc. and the products can be simple or rather valuable, depending on how hard the craft is to learn and perform. This system probably will need some code support, but can also be worked with scripts/mobprogs. You don't even need a shop room for it, although it's always best to have one for the RP appearances.

In 6 months - 1 year. When I open up the RP and farming and stuff. I'll take you up on that, I've always enjoy'd screams of agony.

Tavern owning isn't gonna be easy. Have to get the food (hunting, farming, baking), drink goods (grapes, ale, barley, mead), either by doing it yourself, or having others do it for you.

Then there's also staff, barmaid, bartender, cook. Can't do it ALL yourself.

But in order to do it on my mud, you either have to be there already, hanging out while we develop (to be a starting tavern owner) or make enough gold to build one (will cost a good arm and a foot), when it comes time to open.

This is kinda like what we have in mind. A shop will be 2 rooms (maybe more). 1 shopfront, 1 storage room. But unlike yours ours won't be crashproof. They WILL be robbable. When the owner drops items off in the storage room, he sets the value on it.

Then you can pay for a shopkeeper, and set it on hours like how they kinda work now. Or only work it while you are there, then you can do barters. There'll be a whole lot going into things like this (I guess that's why my mud is taking so long hehe)