I've been playing MUDs for a WHILE and I've always wondered this. Where is the originality in MUDs? I don't mean in concept, idea, and somesuch. I mean in the character races. I've always noticed that all MUDs seem to have the same people, elves, dwarves, and humans. Sure, they'll have some other races, but there's almost always the same ones. I think the problem lies in most MUDs basing themselves on already established ideas such as LOtR or other works of literature. I'm not saying these make bad MUDs, but I'm saying that at least with me, I want some more race ideas. Maybe basing MUDs on other peoples ideas removes your freedom in the design? Or tones down your creativity? Maybe a fewer amounts of races means that I don't have to familiarize myself with so many every time I pick up a game? Feel free to discuss how right or wrong I am, but please don't turn this into a flame thread. This is not a flaming thread! This is a discussion! Please treat it as such and be courteous to others opinions.

Like you said, it's less time familiarizing yourself with something new. Plug-and-play, as it were. Players are inherantly lazy, and often have favorites coming into a game (I play dwarves, etc). The same often goes for classes.

Personally, I work on games with original races, and that's often the second largest hurdle people have to get over, after learning our theme. But there's a small subset of players that also enjoy unique stuff.

Yeah, that's one reason that I wouldn't want original races is just so I didn't have to familiarize myself with new ones every game I played. Even some familiar race games aren't plug & play. Shadows of Isildur anyone? I'm currently submitting my third resum-I mean, character application, right now.

The problem is, plenty of these races are just modified versions of one another. And most of them are copied from D&D and Tolkien. (and Star Wars? Sullustan?)

Hmm. Odd. That like has several I thought might be unique to my mud, but spells Dunadan differently (if it is even the same one) and somehow missed Kitsune. Though, given the fact that the page you said they came from didn't load for me, I can't check the original list.

Scary to think there are that many We have had several talks about flaws in the existing system on the mud and the possibility that the staff will eliminate some and revamp the others at some point, and we only have 36 races. Of course part of the talk stems from lack of them being truely unique and some being virtually useless, save for a slight increase in the exp you can make initially while using them.

Frankly those are bigger issues than using the same race. Making sure they are not just cookie cutter versions, with nothing truely unique about them, so there is no real advantage or disadvantages picking one. RP places are a lot better at background data, but they also, by definition, are cookie cutter, since there is no 'in-game' trade offs, beyond playing the part, that really demands any care in making a choice. It usually won't have any effect on how, when and why you advance, if you even have such a thing as advancement in the normal sense. Sort of a catch-22. The RP muds emphasize difference, but give no tangible means to enforce it, H&S have very tangible effects, but often apply them in the simplest and most generic way, so that you end up with everyone being almost the same. Of the races where I play, there are maybe 3-4 that break that mold and provide a racial attack or unique bonus that others don't. And at least one of them are likely to be removed if a revamp happens, because it is no longer even 'in theme', given other changes that have been made.

The plan hinted at is to eventually make each race unique, with some ability of quirk and much better descriptions, but right now.. most people pick not based on the race they like, but what works best with a particular guild. An idea that imho, kind of misses the point of having races at all.

Perhaps part of the reason may be that people find it difficult to relate to races they know nothing about - the race becomes little more than a name and a few stat modifiers. For muds which focus on roleplaying this can be quite a large problem. On the other hand, the typical fantasy races are fairly well defined throughout literature and provide a point of reference for new players.

That's also a reason. People typically play fantasy muds because they enjoy that sort of genre - and for the same reason, they're likely to play muds based on a theme that they enjoy. Someone who's just watched LotR might fancy playing a LotR mud, while someone who's read Wheel of Time might want to play a mud based on that theme. But if I connect to a Lord of the Rings mud, the last thing I want to see is a cyborg squirrel-man race, no matter how original it might be.

Every theme will place restrictions on your design, unless you're creating a inconsistent hodgepodge of anything that comes to mind (which is a bad idea). The disadvantage of basing your theme on someone else's work (aside from legal implications) is that the thematic restrictions are defined by them rather than you. The advantage is that you have a well-known theme which is likely to be far more complete and better thought out than something you could put together yourself.

I don't think you can really define the creativity of a mud by its race selection.

An elf by any other name is still just an elf folks. You get these muds with lots of races and classes and no balance. It's bloody POINTLESS.

The only reason to give the race 'elf' a different name is if you're planning on actually making up a history and a culture and the mud has any degree of rp in which that history and culture will make any difference. 90% of muds do not. Therefore if you're looking for names other than elf you might as well program your client to replace the word elf with fingernsatch or any other random string of charectors.

So far as I can tell with massively multiplayer games getting so popular and the technology going the way it is, there are only two reasons for playing text based muds.

The lack of restirctions, words gives more freedom. But if you're only going to play a hack slash without any interest in story, description or rp, you might as well do a graphical one.

The other reason is freedom, text gives lots of freedom for skills, powers, abilities and updates. But if you're playing muds that have no concept of balance, or just call fireball acidflute and it does the exact, or near to exact same thing, once again you might as well just play a graphical one.

So many muds are clones of things that it's a wonder anyone cares what names they use for races and spells.

There's a reason that Tolkein used the races he did. They didn't just sprout from his mind. Tolkein was a mythographer, and the creatures he used were archetypes from European myths. The reason isn't so much familiarity as *resonance*.

On the other hand, most of the 'original' races I've seen just seem contrived. It's a bunch of attributes thrown together or some unusual feature that defines the race, but no thought has been given to where this creature fits in the ecology or why it might have developed. They also lack any kind of resonance or history unless the game creators have created reams of documents for each race.

I don't think there's any way of knowing that unless you had checked out the muds. After all it's just a list of names of races culled from muds who that happened to be listed on the Game Commandos site in 1999. In many cases I'm sure the race was just a hollow collection of stats with a name slapped on it. Perhaps borrowed from something else and maybe all fluff with no fizzle.

Then again go to your public library and start pulling fantasy or sci-fi books off the shelves, and try to separate the original from the borrowed. But even then beware as dwarves, elves, trolls, ogres, gnomes, giants and dragons have had many different and original interpretations in fantasy literatiure under the same name.

Another poster used the word "resonance" and I think they hit the mark. Not only did Tolkein use it, but R.E. Howard did too. He chose names that were so close to ancient historical names that readers immediately felt comfortable reading his books. Even recent authors like Jordan and Rowlings use historical and mythical archetypes heavily.

Rice's interpretation of vampires spawned an entire genre of gothic-fantasy gaming including muds. Borrowed yes, but original definately.

well, i personally play trolls whenever possible, so i like some non-original races. but a some are nice to have. I also think its not so much lack of creativity or fear of losing players, but more... eh... sticking with a classic. Not to say its a good thing to do, but im not saying it isnt.

BTW, i noticed on the race list there was smurf. whoever deicded to put that in a MUD... well... i cant say what i think of them on these forums.

TROLL POWER!

I understand what you're saying man, Tolkien drew much of his ideas from Mythology, Norse Mythology in particular.

Actually, I believe people say they want something different, but when facing new territory they run back to the elves and the dwarves. My theme isn't original (Hyboria, famous for Conan), but I am certain I am the only MUD using the theme online today, and I was surprised that most fantasy fans today seem unfamiliar with the races. What true fantasy fan wouldn't want to play a powerful Stygian Sorcerer, after all? Granted, I made many newbie mistakes with the races at first... not enough information about the races, not enough real depth in the races to keep the player interested (getting them interested is easy... keeping them interested is another matter). I am still working on this. Theres a fine line between boring and exciting in the first 5-15 minutes a player tries your game out. I believe it is probably a sad truth that a stock MUD with Sea-elves and Pixies probably has a better chance of attracting a player than a MUD using unfamiliar races. 20 unfamiliar races is fine for me, personally, as long as there is something interesting about them that catches my attention. As soon as I see Elf, Dwarf, Giant, Orc...I am instantly bored and move on.

What's a Zoog? I saw that on the race list and wondered what that was.

I always get a chuckle when places advertise how many races (or classes) they have. The key thing is really diversity of play experience, and of the games I've played, the ones with 30+ races are the ones where:

1) You can't find examples of that race anywhere. You're probably the only PC of that race on, and there's maybe one area heavily themed around it.

2) You're essentially a human in a funny suit, and not a truly different character.

In 10 years (as a biggish MUD) , we've expanded to only 17 PC races (2 of which are crossbreeds, so really 15 main cultures), and at this point I'm much happier that we've been putting a lot of work into developing the existing ones, instead of worrying about race #18.

So what kind of trolls do you like to play? Are they like Tolkein's cave trolls, D&D green rubbery trolls, Runequest trolls, Warhammer trolls, the enormous Scandanavian ones, the old German trolls often confused with dwarves, or those real small cute trolls with big noses and colorful hair? What's a classic troll?

Just trolling' :-P

Actually, Tolkien invented Orcs, creatures that were not in classic European mythology. He also thought of changing the names of elves in his works to remove the ideas commonly associated with elves from classic mythology(you know the little tiny creatures with pointy ears and boots). Elves as they appear in most muds are original to Tolkien. Hobbits are original to tolkien. Halflings are from D&D where they were originally called Hobbits but changed due to coppyright problems IIRC. Even the word halfling was used to refer to hobbits in Tolkien's works. Tolkien trolls didn't fit mythology completely either. Mythological trolls were supposed to have magical powers. Tolkien trolls were too dumb for that and much bigger. Although I think the turning to stone durring the day was takin from mythology. I think that Ents are new to Tolkien as well. So were barrow-wights (a term that basicly means graveman and now used in D&D as wight which just means man yet in D&D they are still dead), although wights were used in mythology they were not undead gravecreatures until Tolkien. Mythological wights were land spirits and elves(not Tolkien elves). The only races I can think of that Tolkien actually pulled from European Mythology and didn't twist around completely are Dwarves and Dragons.

Here is a nice troll:

what are your opinions on having one race MUDs?

a MUD with only humans or elves or trolls . . .

this is just a general question.

I am considering having very few races, probably three, but basing those races off of mythological "races" that vary to extremes individually. Consider the almost unlimited variation in faerykind, for example. This allows the player to tailor their character the way they want without necessarily changing the character's identity. The key is deciding on such races that could still be distinguished between each other without making the theme seem hodgepodge.

I also want every player to be in appropriate scale with every other player, which means, IMO, I can't have both Lilliputan-sized PCs and human PCs, nor gnome PCs and troll PCs, nor dwarf PCs and giant PCs. Dragon PCs would have to be limited in size to scale well with human PCs, etcetera. But since there are more small creatures than large ones, I will probably favor that extreme in any case. That also has the benefit of making the monsters (whether trolls, giants, or dragons) seem larger by contrast. This relativity also allows players to still get their brutishly strong PCs, if that is what they want; it is simply a matter of comparing them to the typical PC rather than comparing everything to humans.

Avalon, a fairly small but long-lived commercial MUD (been around since 1989) only has one race: human.

--matt

I don't enjoy one race muds myself. Of course, I'm the one that said there was a lack of race originality, so you probably already knew that.

Where I play, there is exactly the symptoms mentioned, where things are little more than a label. Now staffers are working on a) a detailed history, b) possible redesign and expansion of what makes races unique, etc. Unfortunately, these are all things they should have done before the mud ever left beta. In the early days there was no QC, no interest in a real history to tie it all together, etc. The newest areas, under the QC till don't tie into each other clearly and probably won't until we have a real history to work from, but they are a great improvement. I have had ideas and some hopes to eventually become a member of the design team, but frankly, without a history to work from, I can't be sure how or even if I can work 'my' history into it. I can't makes links and connections to other groups or events, I can't design a culture for the area that distinguishes it from the rest of the mud and more specifically give a reason 'why' it differs or be at all sure that it will. I don't even know if the race I wanted to focus on might be irrevocably changed in some way that makes my ideas useless. My hands are tied. The people designing new things though go on as before. Introducing stuff that is generally in theme, but disconnected from the overall reality of the game.

This is also what I suspect has buried the small RP society that was officially added. Some participants just don't get how to do it on the channel, the game world doesn't give much opertunity for it and other than a few conflicts, like the Kitsune vs. everyone that hunts foxes, stuff that was sort of fun for a while, there is almost nothing to drive it. The fact that we might *eventually* get those things that are needed to change this, doesn't matter *now*.

Frankly, I think the idea, as little imput as it got, of having the players provide history to flesh things out was better than waiting for the unpaid and overworked staff to do it. Many hands could do what one person (and sadly it is only one of the staff on it) can achieve. Unfortunately, the idea got derailed when the wizard who offered the contest found out someone else was already writing it. Races and how unique or well they tie into things all depends on the history and details behind them. You can't build consistently without that, you can't make races more than cardboard cutouts without it and obviously, any attempt to RP without it will collapse.

Even H&S can't survive without at least some limited dedication to the 'idea' of the character and his background, not just how many exp points they have. The prior staff didn't really get that, so they gobbled together ideas, areas and pieces of things, without ever truely connecting any of them. Now 90% of the time spent by the current staff involves not making the 'basic' adjustments needed to tie things together and make the world consistant, but fixing all the balance issues, bugs, etc. that resulted from not taking design seriously in the first place. I suspect that this is invariably what would happen with most H&S muds at some point, if they take the story behind there world at all seriously. Races that don't look like they where simply xeroxed from someplace else require that such things be taken seriously.

Probably me, when I said "I don't think you can really define the creativity of a mud by its race selection".

The original poster implied that following a theme tones down your creativity, and that's something I disagree with. It might restrict you when it comes designing races (and other parts of the theme), but I don't see that as a lack of creativity - and it can often require more creativity to make a race faithful to the theme while keeping it fun to play and retaining game balance.

If you see a mud with stock races and classes, then that can imply a lack of creativity in the game in general. But the selection alone isn't really much to go by - it's possible to have a mud with all original-sounding races that are nothing more than labels, or a mud with human, elf, dwarf and halfling which has provided each of those races with numerous background story and unique game options.

Wights from classic mythology and Barrow Wights from Tolkien have nothing in common except part oftheir name. D&D Wights are taken from Tolkien where Barrow Wight(grave man) has been shortened to Wight.

Orcs? Original completely to Tolkien. Ents, wargs, Nazgul...

All ideas come from somewhere but that doesn't mean that having something completely different will automatically fail. Tolkien's works are still being read today and much is based of them or something else that is based of them...

What about Lord Dunsany's "", which was first published in 1924 (13 years before The Hobbit)?

Let's just put it this way... The elves in stories that are tall and have pointy ears aren't the pinnacle of creativity they're cracked up to be. Anyone can slap some pointy ears on a person and give him some superpowers...

And also, I love Tolkien's books, but he didn't just come up with these races from nowhere. Tree-people (Ents), Grim Reapers (Nazghul), and Wolves (Wargs) are not that hard to come by.

Ilkidarios, why don't you give us some examples of what you consider original/creative races?

Also worth noting is that Tolkien adapted the word 'orc' from the Old English word 'orc' (meaning 'demon').  Tolkien also said that orcs "owe a good deal to the goblin tradition, especially as it appears in George MacDonald" (author of "The Princess and the Goblin", first published in 1872).

Some more interesting reading here:



The above article also includes a rather appropriate quote from fantasy critic Terence Casey, in which he says:  "Someone who's familiar with fantasy isn't generally going to have a problem with "orcs" being in a novel or game - they know what an orc is and are used to it.  If you start making up your own monsters instead of drawing from "generic fantasy", however, the mere newness of them can make it harder for people to suspend their disbelief."

I believe Casey is on to something there. Like I said in the first post, you are more comfortable with less new races and less to get used to. But is it really worth the sacrifice of potentially brilliant new ideas to stick to what has been proven to work?

An excellent question.

From a business perspective (or from the perspective of a mud which wants to be popular), there are obvious benefits to sticking with what has been proven to work.

On the other hand, in a community where thousands of almost identical muds are struggling to distinguish themselves from each other, anything that makes you stand out from the competition is going to give you an advantage.

And that brings us neatly back to your original post, where you pointed out that most muds have the standard races as well as some extra ones. This would seem to imply that most muds have chosen a compromise between the tried-and-true races and 'original' races.

Of course 'original' is relative - every fictional race, be they from books, movies, muds, or other computer games, are all influenced or inspired to some extent by something else.

Methinks the brilliant new idea is the realm of sci-fi. Fantasy is retrospective romanticism. New interpretations of old stuff. It's seems best when grounded in the vaguely familiar. And as time moves on new fantasy is born. I'd suggest that the newer novels and games revolving around the steam era and wild west era are essentially fantasy.

I think race is too misleading a word, not from the viewpoint that it's really species, but that what one really means are new and interesting cultures to play. That's why it doesn't matter to me if the only species available to play is human, as long as there are multiple cultures to play. And frankly the differences between cowboys and indians, spanish conquistadors and pilgrims, stygians and cimmerians, are probably as interesting and fun as trolls and orcs, or artichokes and pineapples.

Of course the best games have dozens of different elf cultures. :-P

When I say race, I actually mean species and different types of humans. There are plenty of MUDs that have variety simply in the large numbers of different humans.

There's also another view that a race on a mud is essentially equivalent to a piece of equipment. It has capabilities, adders, subtractors, special skills, strengths, weaknesses, powers, etc. That's a view coming from a pure game players or game designers view and nothing wrong with that.

In that context, I think you might see a lot of originality and variation too. As in...

"On our mud orcs have metalworking skill, and can repair equipment in the field and they of course come in three colors - red, purple and pink depending on which of the warring sorcerory factions created them. Orcs are not born but built by powerful sorceror factions using arcane magic, yet are creatures of free will once created. Our elves have bard capabilities and can do increasingly powerful battle songs at various levels. They also have the intrinsic ability to predict the future. This allows them to view one or more opponents moves before selecting their own."

Etcetera...

Dwarves are filthy, lice-infested dirteaters.

That is all.

--matt

That may be.

I bet you knew that hobbits eat 2-3 times more food than your average human? Of course you did. But one thing that's not well publicized, probably for political reasons, is that they also produce 2-3 times as much flatulance. That's why noone in their right mind, not even a Nazgul, would willingly enter a hobbit hole. So the One Ring was quite safe at BagEnd. The breaking of the Fellowship had much less to do with Boromir wanting the ring than having to bunk up night after night with four wind-breaking hobbits. There's a lot about LoTR that just doesn't pass the smell test.

Whether its race or species is really a matter of debate, and depends on the individual race/species in question. In many settings I've seen, humans can breed with elves or orcs, implying that they belong to the same species but different races.

On the other hand, D&D settings like Dark Sun allow humans and dwarves to breed and create a sterile race called a Mul - this would imply that humans and dwarves don't actually belong to the same species. D&D also has a dwelf (half dwarf half elf), which I presume would also be sterile (although I don't recall the details).

I don't know how crossbreeding works with the other races, but I could see some good arguments for the 'short' races (dwarf, gnome, halfling, etc) being a different species to the 'tall' races (human, orc, elf, etc).

However in general I think it's easier just to refer to them all as 'races' - then clarify in the help files that they're not necessarily races of the same species.

I think that race or species depends on what you're talking about.  I mean, elfs could just be people with pointy ears.  Orcs on the other hand, really depend on where you are or what you're doing/reading.  The dwarves/all the small people are pretty much the same things anyways, so I'm not so sure they're different species.  In the end, I think race and species have melded together to form a compound of sorts where they both mean the same thing.  In Tolkiens books, elfs, orcs, and humans were all pretty much the same people.  I mean, if elfs and humans could interbreed, that probably meant orcs and elfs, and humans and orcs.  So it really depends on what the environment is, be it D&D, Tolkien-pure, or any other manner of things.

Actually, there's one more massively important reason to play a text-based game over a graphical one. Price. :> Though I have actually bought optional items in games before, the vast majority (though not all) of text-based games are free to play, payed for by people who like the idea enough to maintain the servers or to donate to their maintenance. Not having a monthly fee is *the* primary reason I've never gotten into the massively multiplayer games.

I agree with the price issue, but I forsee a time when it is less of a problem. Just not anytime soon. There is currectly a high dependence on polygon based systems right now. While this is expected, since designing a graphics card to do that is fairly easy, it limits what you can do. Why? For one thing it means you can't do anything without a modeller. No sane person is going to try to work out how to make something by hand using triangles. Second is size. The 'basic' info for a sphere might be a few hundred triangles, but also a 1-2MB file with the 'texture' to be put on it, especially if is requires fake reflections. Want ripples in the water at the bottom of the well? You can fake it with an big image you have to download (or install before hand), or you can tripple the number of triangle OPenGL or DirectX uses to draw it. Either way, you take up more space in the HD. And forget changing the color, shape, size or any details of the scene on the fly, even broadband users won't be happy with a 20MB update downloading to 'fix' the room.

And all of that overlooks the fact that it takes far more artistic skill and ability to use the modeller and other software to make all those objects in the scene and paint all the needed patterns and details on them. A scene with a simple well in a patch of dirt with some grass might take 10MB by itself. And that is about 9.5MB more than it needs to if you could work with good procedural textures and simple CSG objects based on sphere, cubes, toruses, etc. Worse, CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) isn't even possible in OpenGL and DirectX on the fly. For OpenGL and DirectX you end up having to pre-determine what parts are visible, then delete any triangles that you don't need (and modify others). True CSG doesn't even use triangles and figure out what parts to show as it draws. The result? A sphere with a square hole in it for CSG would take (assuming the sphere was 100 triangle objects and each 'object' took one line of text), maybe 90 lines (the 'box' would only be about 8 lines at 3 triangles per surface), while the CSG version would be three lines:

difference{
sphere {< 0,0,0>, 2}
box {<-3, -1,-1>, <3,1,1>}}

It won't, as I said, be fast enough in the near future to compete with the speed of OpenGL and DirectX. You won't be using it to make rooms you can wander around in or building a first person shooter. Truely complex ones may take 2-3 seconds to generate, especially on slow machines. But.... as a transition step between pure text-based muds and expensive graphical ones, it goes way beyond MXP or other ones that rely on pre-made and static pictures. (or at best, lots of different ones.)

Want people to be amazed by the pirate ship? Why make a 1k image that is 200x100 to show it. Why not a client that uses a simplified POVRay type engine to produce a 2048x1024 image from a 1k gzipped text file?

Point is, text muds are free because you don't need nayting more than basic writing skills to use them. No expensive graphics modellers, no expensive photoshop like programs, etc. No atistic talent either and sadly not even the need to know how to write well, though you are not going to become top of any list with something badly written. But what about a simplified and more limited graphics engine like POVRay uses, which makes designing your images almost as easy as building a castle using Legos and which you can update in real time, just like a text based room on a mud?

There seems to be some hostility towards even trying. And the arguement is usually, yeah, but you can do more with text. The other being, I like to imagine what things look like, not be shown them. To the first - Yes, we it will be a long time before monsters can be created as easy in graphics as text, but that's is not a valid excuse imho for not trying the rest. IT may be a lot more possible than you expect, just not using all the nice OpenGL/DirectX tools everyone babbles about. To the second? Some people don't like color on muds. Last I checked you can turn that off. Why not just turn off the pictures? lol

Maybe the lack of free systems is due to people looking 'too far' forward with respect to what they want for a free graphics based system? Or maybe there just hasn't been anyone with both a good idea and the skill to try to make it work. Of which, I unfortunately currently lack the later.

In regards to the race originality, who's to say what's original? Think of any fantasy creature you know. Just about all of them are simply combinations of existing animals (unicorn, chimera, hippogriff) or existing animals beefed up with cool powers (nightmare, blink dog, cranium rat.)

In just the same way, races are either going to be humans of varied sizes/shapes/stereotypical personalities (elves, dwarves, halflings), or human/animal combinations (catfolk, tiefling, aarakocra, etc.)

Are we lamenting the lack of race originality? Or are we lamenting the fact that there is no originality in roleplaying? I don't think the variety of races is relevant so much as you know WHO and WHAT you're playing, and can do it well.

Besides race originality, another point designers ought to look at is how to encourage racial roleplaying.

In Lusternia, we designed both original races--at least, we thought they were original!--and archetypical races (humans, dwarves, elves). It was my philosophy that while we wanted originality in races, we also didn’t want to disappoint those players who identified their ‘alter egos’ as a particular archetypical race (i.e., I have a friend who always insists on being a dwarf). In any event, from my past experience, I noticed that race wasn’t taken as an important roleplaying feature; rather, players chose a race because they wanted the stats or special powers and roleplaying their race was almost non-existent. To help encourage a little bit of racial roleplaying, we made some of the races transform to different stats for some guilds (i.e., classes) attached to cities. In other words, our ‘elfen’ race players get their stats adjusted when becoming druids--making elfen druids desirable (and their race transforms from ‘elfen’ to ‘high elfen’), though you can certainly be elfen and a member of any other class (I’m not a fan of class-restricted races). Also, our history of the cities and races were written based on this racial feature.

Honestly, I hadn’t held out much hope on this design encouraging racial roleplaying, thinking that ultimately players will continue to just choose race as an afterthought (as nothing more than 'a piece of equipment' as someone else suggested). Much to my pleasant surprise, however, I’ve seen extremely strong racial roleplaying, to the point where some races are actively discriminated against (i.e., certain races have become ‘second-class citizens’ in the evil city) to serious discussions on which races should be leaders of major player organizations (i.e., only someone of the aquatic merian race should be a candidate to become the prince of the city founded by merians). Mind you, all of this roleplaying of races has been generated by players on their own.

Tieflings are humans with a bit of fiend blood (at least in D&D, maybe your mud took the name without the rest of it). Not a human/animal combination.