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Old 10-03-2009, 02:58 PM   #88
Milawe
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: USA
Home MUD: Threshold RPG
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Re: From MUDs to MUSHes: FAQs, etc for the players

Nice! I didn't even know I could post in another color. This is my favorite color, and I thrust it upon you all.

Anyway, to get back to the topic (though I'm seriously late), we have about 10 players on Threshold that actually move back and forth between Threshold and a Kushiel MUSH rather frequently. They'll usually play one or the other depending on what intertests them most at the moment. All of them started on Threshold first and decided to play the Kushiel based MUSH because of our interests in those books. Though many of the players on the MUSH welcomed them with open arms, they did meet with a lot of disdain from a few players because they came from a MUD. In a MUD, especially an RP-enforced one where politics matter nearly as much as levels, you learn to plan your character's actions in a lot of details because you know there are some "real" consequences to slipping up. (I put real in quotes because losing a level doesn't really give you real life consequences, but it does give your character in-game consequences.) Thus, the players were more than ready to deal with the challenges of a MUSH. Most of the challenge came in simply learning the particular "culture" of the MUSH they chose. This included things like setting up scenes, how to pose, what was an appropriate length for posing, and learning how to wait some time before posing.

On Threshold, everything happens about 10 times faster than it does on a MUSH, even with the people who spend a lot of time writing elaborate poses (or emotes as we call them). You can easily wait 15 minutes between poses on a MUSH while on Threshold, you'd wait at most 3 minutes. Some people don't even wait that long and will cram in as much as they can before their opponent can get anything in edge-wise. That statement alone shows one of the biggest differences between the "play" of many MUDs and MUSHes. In a MUSH, you are playing cooperatively even when you're in opposition. You are agreeing to play the opposition to see what comes out of the story you're both telling. In a MUD, because of its coded elements, you can have a ton of opposition with very little RP, even if the rules demand that you have RP. Both of these are roleplaying, and it's a mistake to believe that people on MUSHes work out every word to every scene and how it's going to play out. They simply agree to come together to play a specific scene. The outcome is not necessarily determined nor is it always scripted.

On Threshold, we've encouraged people to get together to plan large events and even to coordinate with the administration on these events. All players know that they don't get to tell us what the outcome is going to be. They simply tell us their planned event, how they think it is going to turn out, what they hope will happen, and their RP and logic behind it. Sometimes things turn out pretty well, and other times, a tower lands on someone's head. I don't think that getting together to agree to play out a scene on a MUSH is that different.

In the end, the RP on a MUSH and the RP on an RP-enforced MUD is not all that different once it gets going. RP is a tool in which different people get together to tell a story in tandum. How it is accomplished differs greatly and the settings are vastly different. In the end, what players are learning are simply different cultures of the game. (I sit around mocking people who RP on WoW, but in the end, what they're doing is not THAT different than wanting to RP at a table top game, a LARP, a MUD or a MUSH. I should probably shut my piehole.) So, your FAQ needs to deal with basic commands and the basic culture of MUSHes vs. a MUD.

Not sure that really helps. I'm feeling sort of rambly.
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