I've been thinking about making my own mud for quite a while, and I do have a general idea of what kind of mud it should be/the story/the races....blahblahblahblah. Anyone mind telling me how to exactly put all of that together, and so on. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

It depends on how you plan to go about creating your mud and what your goals are. A design document should be written to cater to who is going to read it.

In a large budget production that has deadlines to hit, it's crucial to completely design the game beforehand, and establish change control procedures that document exactly how the design doc can be changed once you're into production, and exactly who has to approve any changes.

On the other end of the spectrum is probably your typical hobbyist mud. You have no deadlines to be met, don't have cost overruns to worry about, and so on.

Assuming you're closer to the latter than the former, I'd suggest that your design document lay out the backstory, the world, the major areas within the world, all your major game systems, and an outline of any tools you'll need created.

Having said all this, Achaea, Imperian, and Aetolia have never had complete design documents. The upside of design and developing iteratively like this is that you can react to what the players want or need. The downside is that you often have to try to shoehorn new systems into older ones because the older ones don't take into account the new systems. Of course, no matter how detailed your design doc is, it's only a starting point. I've never heard of a game of any scope that managed to do a design doc in pre-production and not change it significantly by the end.

As a practical example, our upcoming mud, Lusternia, started with a design doc that was about 100 pages or so and gave overviews of what I listed, but wasn't particularly detailed. The planned skills and abilities were there, for instance, but with only brief descriptions. No formulas, no numbers.

Anyway, just ask yourself what you're going to use the design doc for. You may decide that all you really want to include is the backstory and general overview of the world, and then design and develop things as and when you have the time/energy/motivation.

--matt