[Nymeria]

My experience is almost entirely with MUSHes, though I did play a few MUDs for a couple of months before getting into MUSHes instead, so I can't guarantee that what I write about MUDs is entirely correct. However, based on discussions over the years with players who have been active on both MUDs and MUSHes, I think the following things can generally be said:

* MUD codebases appear to generally be held to be more versatile and able to support complex systems for combat, economy, crafting, etc.

* MUDs generally make use of more coded systems. You get plenty of MUSHes with coded combat of varying levels of complexity (the most fleshed-out combat system on a MUSH that I have encountered is what Elendor MUSH has), and you get some with coded economy and coded crafting. But you also get a lot of MUSHes without any systems at all or with very basic dice-rolling systems to simulate rolls in table-top gaming. I only know of a couple of games that has a fully code-dependent setup with economy, crafting, and all of that.

* Because there are less coded systems on most MUSHes, you don't generally have anything to do on your own. There are no mobs to kill or quests to perform to gain experience, and there are generally no crafting systems for learning new tasks and creating objects to sell and so on. 99% of the time you are dependent on having someone else to play with on a MUSH.

* This is of course a question of degrees, but in my experience roleplay on MUSHes and roleplay on roleplay MUDs tends to be quite different (for some examples of MUSH roleplay, here's a link to our ). One thing I have never seen on a MUSH, for example, is pre-determined emotes. There also tends to be more focus on character development (writing backgrounds, personas, etc) on MUSHes. But that is not true for all MUSHes and probably not for all MUDs either.