[Erisine]

I agree with Ide.

It would appear that many of the potential contributors in your thread are not even familiar with what a MU* even is: it's important to remember that in this decade, a lot of people don't even have a frame of reference for them, unless they distinctly remember the old BBS days and AOL chat-room role-play.

I think it would be important to decide WHAT you want to build, rather than HOW you're going to build it, first. Grabbing some code and slapping some features together and then later trying to fill in the blanks has spelled disaster for many a MU*. So, I definitely support Ide's suggestion of getting folks to try out different games, to see what they like.

Try and think of answers to direct questions. Things like,


Do we want a casual "gamer" environment, something like WoW, or do we want a story-telling/realistic/involved environment? (If the latter, check out "RPI" type games, along with casual roleplaying games.)

Do you want a distinctly D&D feel? Or something unique or completely different?

Do you want "dice play", or do you want systems to be automated / game-controlled?

Do you want people who connect to the game to create their own objects (through programming, not general crafting), areas, etc, or do you want these privileges to belong solely to staff members?



The answers to these questions are really going to narrow down what sort of system you should start off using.

Understanding what kind of features you want will narrow it down some more. There are lots of codebases out there, not all are created equal. If you want something totally unique, you may be better off getting yourself a fancy programmer and starting with scratch or a light codebase -- if you want a game "out of the box", you might want to look into one of the matured ones out there.