[SnowTroll]

I accidentally double-posted my LFM post anyway, so I don't mind if one of the two threads devolves into the merits of pay for perk muds. Here's my take on the whole thing, and why I don't want to play a pay for perk mud: I totally get that it costs money to run and host a mud. I have nothing against a mud owner taking donations, publicly praising and listing donors, or offering all kinds of fun tidbits outside of the game. But I believe it totally wrecks a roleplaying world when completely out of character things (like someone in the real world paying money) tangibly affect the game world (by making in game perks appear). The issue for me isn't really about whether mud owners should accept money or whether they deserve it. It's more that I'm something of an RP purist.

Anyway, maybe I've been on the wrong RPIs, and 10 lines was a bit of an exaggeration, but quite a few muds expect a room full of people to take turns, round robin style, typing in 3-4 line emotes. Half the people there aren't even participating in the conversation and just emote staring at a fireplace or something while they listen. I don't mind long emotes if people actually have something to say and do, but most of the time, that much text is 90% fluff, with only a small portion of it actually telling me what another character is saying and doing. Descriptive text has a place, but I hate wasting 5 full minutes of my life waiting for someone else to type it, so that our roleplayed conversation can advance one sentence.

I definitely don't want a mush. When there's nobody around to roleplay with, or I'm too busy to roleplay, I want to be able to walk to a remote area somewhere and kill things, go up levels, gather resources, craft something, spam skills, or whatever makes the mud go 'round. And when there is someone to roleplay with, I want my character to have tangible coded skills that another person might want to benefit from, buy from me, or have with them when they go out to kill things themselves.

I've poked around Isles of Aedin a little bit. There are some things I really like, and some things I don't, but it's a pretty cool system. Aedin's big claim to fame that seems to set it apart from most of the other muds out there is it's skill-based system. There's aren't any levels or experience points. You just use a skill if you want to get better at it. It was fun at first, but once I started needing lots and lots of skill use to get better at anything, it turned into real work to advance. And with this particular skill system, it doesn't seem to matter what I do or where I go. I can practice all of my skills in the newbie town. Unless there are some really good mob drop items out there, or until I really have to start farming money, there's not much incentive to explore or interact with others, except to break up the monotony of spamming skills. But the players definitely roleplay, and it's casual enough about the whole thing that you don't have to be there 20 hours a day for fear of missing out.