[Nymeria]

I've always read a lot and once I found fantasy I was hooked. I started reading books in English instead of in translation in 6th or 7th grade because I couldn't wait for the translations to come out. I always wanted more of the books I really loved, and I probably started spinning "what ifs" in my head pretty early on. Never actually wrote anything down since it frustrated me that I could think up things a lot faster than I could type them down.

In 95 I read the first Internet magazine in Sweden and read an article about MUDs. The idea of being able to play a MUD based on a favourite book, to step into that world, that seemed amazing. I was already a fan of adventure games, both the purely text-based and the early graphical ones, and MUDs sounded like they'd be even better. So, I sorted out a dialup connection and found myself a few MUDs. But, I've never had much patience for repetitive games of improvement, so while I had fun for a month or two, I soon started looking around for options that were more to my taste. And that's when I found MUSHes.

Over the years, I have played only book-themed MUSHes because the desire to step into a world I know and love is still the driving force behind my interest in creating characters and roleplaying them. Now I run one myself and have little time for other games, but I still get the "oh, I want to roleplay in this world" urge when I read a book I really like.

[Vesper]

Back in the day, when I was in high school, I was big into theater and acting. I loved playing someone else. Shortly afterward, I went to college and met a girl who was a big MUDder.

She finally convinced me to log onto the MUD she played and create a character. She stood over my shoulder and watched me to make sure I did it right. When it requested a name for my new character, I typed in...

..."RabbitSlayer."

She promptly whacked me in the back of the head.

So I chose a more appropriate name, made a necromancer (hey, I loved Type O Negative) and was fooling around with it.

But what hooked me?

I went to the graveyard. Cast "Raise Dead," and an f'n skeleton came out of the ground.

Let me repeat that: A SKELETON came out of the ground and protected me!

I was hooked. I now found a new place to play a character...and I never looked back.

[Aerick]

*ponder*

What brought me to Muds was "Choose Your Own Adventure" and the "Hardy Boys". Yes. That.

[Newworlds]

Originally Posted by Aerick *ponder* What brought me to Muds was "Choose Your Own Adventure" and the "Hardy Boys". Yes. That.

Hardy Boys. Heh. Is that "choose your own adventure" the one that was D&D style that you had to pick the direction the adventure would go, like a magazine and you'd turn to the right page and paragraph?

[Darren Brimhall]

Originally Posted by JasonCogburn Know what you mean about Achaea, its RP has been gone for years. Now even demanding RP will get you punished and the gods will do nothing about it. If you want RP stay away from Achaea, lots of other really good ones out there though and some of the IRE games have decent RP but not Achaea.

I say the same for castle marrach, which is now a hive of cyberbullies, their cronies and a staff that simply does not care that the whole place is stagnate and dying.

And they called me delusional when I complained about it.


Darren Brimhall

[MudMann]

I always had a keen imagintation, but my 'role playing' experiences started at a very early age with 'Warlock of Firetop mountain' the fighting fantasy books, then Lone Wolf. My fighting fantasy collection was quite impressive. I sold one of the rarest books (one of the Fabled Lands series) for £170 in the year 2000. Soon after it was Sphinx Adventure on the BBC Micro. I wrote my first text adventure game at the wee age of 12 on that very same bbc micro.

I digress, then it was 'Keep on the Borderlands' for basic Dungeons and Dragons, and that was pretty much my hobby sorted.

I wrote a complete uber-highlevel D&D campaign with maps and everything for my English GCSe and got top marks. My English teacher said he didnt understand any of it, but the writing was superb. 37/40 scored, and a great evening sorted when we finally played it!

Then it was Champions of Krynn on the Amiga, and so on and so forth, ultimate leading to me playing Threshold on my Apple Max 280c (the original netbook)

ON the subject of Lonewolf, I recommend anyone who has never emersed themselves in that world to look at Project Aon: Language Selection where all the books have been converted to online (with a nice online character sheet)

[silvarilon]

Originally Posted by Darren Brimhall I say the same for castle marrach, which is now a hive of cyberbullies, their cronies and a staff that simply does not care that the whole place is stagnate and dying. And they called me delusional when I complained about it. Darren Brimhall

Um, Darren. This is exactly the opposite of what Jason had mentioned.

He complained that Achaea used to have strong RP, which is now no longer enforced to the extent that asking for RP is punishable.

Your main complaint with Castle Marrach appears to be that they enforce RP so strongly that you feel it cuts into the fun of the players, and feel that they are bullying you in the way they enforce RP and consequences for that RP.

Both games may (or may not) have these problems, but you're complaining about problems from the opposite ends of the spectrum.

All your posts seem to be negative, either finding a complaint about another game, with you replying saying "Castle Marrach also has this problem!" or original posts about how terrible Castle Marrach is. There is very little to be gained from that, Castle Marrach isn't actively advertised on this site, so it's unlikely you are warning away any potential players - all you're really achieving is to help promote their brand awareness, and maybe send some interested players their way. As I've suggested before, instead of taking the negative attitude and talking about what you don't like in Castle Marrach, why not instead talk about what the problem is, why it's bad, and suggest ways that it can be avoided - that way your posts can be useful for other MUD-builders too. Try to keep your comments general, both to avoid looking like an anti-castle-marrach troll, and also because more general comments are useful for a wider range of MUD-builders. You can also give good examples of games that bypass those problems.

... and, to avoid derailing this thread, here's how I came across MUDs...

I was reading Sluggy Freelance, an online comic, and it had a banner advert for Skotos (the company that hosts Castle Marrach) - I ignored the banner for a few weeks, until one day I did click on it. I can't remember the wording on the banner, it was something like "help write our adventure" - I visited the site, logged into the Castle Marrach game and... had fun, for about an hour, but didn't really "get" it. I was playing a character, great. I was interacting with this new world. Great. But what was I meant to DO? There was nothing to achieve. So I played this character for another day or two, and then stopped logging in. In that time, however, I did notice their articles on world building, which caught my imagination. So, a few weeks later, I remembered this whole "MUD thing" and did a bit more research, found a mud client that had a list of muds, and started going through the list trying them out.

I discovered that most of them were empty, and the ones that I did come across were basically just D&D combat simulations. I could be a fighter or a ranger or a rogue, but the only real difference between those characters was the way in which I try to kill the upcoming orc. That's not a character, that's a combat strategy. So I ended up back at Skotos, which had the best roleplay I'd come across, and was just chance that it was the first game I'd tried. (I'm not saying other games don't have roleplay, just that Castle Marrach was the only one with any real roleplay that I'd come across over my first few weeks of trying them out) - I played longer that time, for about a week, and once again got frustrated by my inability to achieve anything. (Yes, I'm hard to satisfy, aren't I? I want achievement AND roleplay both in the same game.)

So, imagination still on fire from the world building articles, I wrote to the person in charge of Skotos, asking if I could help out with their upcoming games as a volunteer programmer. I got told yes, got assigned to a game which had a designer but no coder, and started working. That game failed, partly because I didn't really know what I was doing, partly because the designer wasn't around in contact so we couldn't refine the game design to dovetail smoothly with the code I was writing, and partly because it was designed as a tabletop game, not as a MUD. So when we decided that wasn't going to work out, I got moved to another game, which worked much better. There was a small team there, which meant I had support - most significantly, someone showed me how to turn on the chat lines. Suddenly what was an abandoned world with me as the only inhabitant lit up, and I could see the many worlds, with many builders, all chatting away. With access to that larger community, we worked on our games, sharing ideas and helping with code and building. Some of those games went live, others fell by the wayside. My game's lead left, putting someone else in charge. That happened a number of times over the development, but each time the remaining team pulled together, until we launched the game.

In the process of building (and later, designing) the game, I got a better understanding of what muds & mushes were really about, and how to go about playing them. I got a better understanding of my own personal tastes. And I got an understanding of how achievement in CM works, and how to "play the game" - which is what I was missing my first few attempts. Even when we launched the game, my understanding was still incomplete, and some of the designed systems have since been rewritten to better suit the player's style.

Almost a decade later, I'm still much more interested in sitting on the staff side than the player side - I love to play these games we build, I truly do. But I love to program them even more! I love to design a new system, predict how the players will react, and how we'll need to modify the system to encourage the players to react in ways that are positive to the game. And then I love to implement the system and see how accurate I was, and what needs to be changed, added, or removed.

[Newworlds]

Originally Posted by silvarilon ...Almost a decade later, I'm still much more interested in sitting on the staff side than the player side - I love to play these games we build, I truly do...

That was a long post *whew* but fun to read. Your story I think is more common than not from roleplay seekers.

[Darren Brimhall]

Originally Posted by silvarilon Um, Darren. This is exactly the opposite of what Jason had mentioned. He complained that Achaea used to have strong RP, which is now no longer enforced to the extent that asking for RP is punishable. Your main complaint with Castle Marrach appears to be that they enforce RP so strongly that you feel it cuts into the fun of the players, and feel that they are bullying you in the way they enforce RP and consequences for that RP. Both games may (or may not) have these problems, but you're complaining about problems from the opposite ends of the spectrum.

woops...

Serves me right for reading so early in the morning, my appologies to the Thread starter

But my opinion of Marrach stands; it used to be good, now its terrible.

Darren Brimhall