Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post - Large vs Small (not in that sense silly!)

Burr · 05-25-2003, 03:00 PM

Here is the way I see it. You should always start small, and with the area that will be the primary focus of the mud throughout the mud's existence, as far as you can perceive. First look to making the existing setting deeper/richer. Sooner or later you will reach a point where deepening the setting will add no value. Only then expand the setting to include new areas of the world. Always deepen those areas fully before expanding more. Finally, you may reach a point where there are no longer significant network effects in terms of areas (that is, the value of each old area no longer increases because of your adding a new area). At this point, I think you should diversify into two different muds; for example, you could RP it as the splitting of alternate realities.

There is still the issue of setting size vs. the number of rooms. For instance, you could choose between a fifteen-thousand-room continent and a fifteen-thousand-room town. As a rule of thumb, I would choose the smallest setting to have an agreeable proportion of high-traffic rooms to low-traffic rooms; that way your RP could realistically tend toward personal relationships. I would then adapt the theme of the mud to that setting, so that the long-term opportunities and risks available would be exciting.

05-25-2003, 03:00 PM	#2
Burr Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 123	Here is the way I see it. You should always start small, and with the area that will be the primary focus of the mud throughout the mud's existence, as far as you can perceive. First look to making the existing setting deeper/richer. Sooner or later you will reach a point where deepening the setting will add no value. Only then expand the setting to include new areas of the world. Always deepen those areas fully before expanding more. Finally, you may reach a point where there are no longer significant network effects in terms of areas (that is, the value of each old area no longer increases because of your adding a new area). At this point, I think you should diversify into two different muds; for example, you could RP it as the splitting of alternate realities. There is still the issue of setting size vs. the number of rooms. For instance, you could choose between a fifteen-thousand-room continent and a fifteen-thousand-room town. As a rule of thumb, I would choose the smallest setting to have an agreeable proportion of high-traffic rooms to low-traffic rooms; that way your RP could realistically tend toward personal relationships. I would then adapt the theme of the mud to that setting, so that the long-term opportunities and risks available would be exciting.