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Slanted · 07-20-2005, 08:04 AM

In most RPI's I have played there is a pretty significant breakdown (actually this is pretty much true of every mud):

You seem to have two groups of people, those with little to no actual in game power, and those with immense in game power. Obviously those with more power are usually older players who play for a very significant amount of time compared to everyone else.

I think this is a result of the vast disparity between people's play times. Most MUDs 'reward' you based on time input, so if one person can play for over 8 hours every day and another can only pop on for an hour or two, the person with more playtime will advance exponentially faster. In RPI's these people win positions of personal power within the world of the game as opposed to or in addition to character statistics. Usually they set up some heirarchy where there are positions beneath them that report directly to them and have some amount of in game power.

However

Simply because of the fact that the said player with higher position is seemingly ALWAYS online, he or she gets deferred to in almost every situation. Why bother with the underlings when teh grand poohbah is always around and always 'ready to RP' in almost any situation?

This in turn creates a system where certain people are almost always the star or at least one of the stars of nearly every RP event, nearly every player run plot and consequently are asked to test new things by the IMMs. This leaves everyone else in a sort of catch-22. They obviously want good RP and dynamicism with their character, but why would you pour resources into someone who cannot be around consistently enough to keep a storyline moving? Meanwhile casual players notice that the logs of great storylines they read to entice them into playing a MUD star pretty much the same characters that are doing all the interesting stuff now.

It's a wierd catch-22, but it all makes a sick sort of sense. I'd like to see a MUD that somehow solves this problem of casual players and RP, but I really have no idea what such a MUD would look like.

07-20-2005, 08:04 AM	#3
Slanted New Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 29	In most RPI's I have played there is a pretty significant breakdown (actually this is pretty much true of every mud): You seem to have two groups of people, those with little to no actual in game power, and those with immense in game power. Obviously those with more power are usually older players who play for a very significant amount of time compared to everyone else. I think this is a result of the vast disparity between people's play times. Most MUDs 'reward' you based on time input, so if one person can play for over 8 hours every day and another can only pop on for an hour or two, the person with more playtime will advance exponentially faster. In RPI's these people win positions of personal power within the world of the game as opposed to or in addition to character statistics. Usually they set up some heirarchy where there are positions beneath them that report directly to them and have some amount of in game power. However Simply because of the fact that the said player with higher position is seemingly ALWAYS online, he or she gets deferred to in almost every situation. Why bother with the underlings when teh grand poohbah is always around and always 'ready to RP' in almost any situation? This in turn creates a system where certain people are almost always the star or at least one of the stars of nearly every RP event, nearly every player run plot and consequently are asked to test new things by the IMMs. This leaves everyone else in a sort of catch-22. They obviously want good RP and dynamicism with their character, but why would you pour resources into someone who cannot be around consistently enough to keep a storyline moving? Meanwhile casual players notice that the logs of great storylines they read to entice them into playing a MUD star pretty much the same characters that are doing all the interesting stuff now. It's a wierd catch-22, but it all makes a sick sort of sense. I'd like to see a MUD that somehow solves this problem of casual players and RP, but I really have no idea what such a MUD would look like.