[dentin]

I did manage to create a character on Achaea at one point, though by the time I made it through the half hour mandatory introduction and LPC coding that prevented the use of normal obvious commands in critical places, I was pretty irritated. Once I was logged in, it looked like an ordinary combat mud to me.

To answer your question, I prefer unscripted, because other players are incapable of following even the most rudimentary of scripts. When I run scripted events, I put reasonable safeguards in place and simply accept a moderate level of failure from the people who can't keep up.

Honestly I've never really understood the whole RP attraction, and I'm surprised that RP is such a common recurring theme in muds (given the failure rate of RP muds, you'd think they'd learn.) Most people find proper RP irritating - it's time consuming, with uncertain and/or minimal payout, and constant trips out of immersion to fill in and keep track of gaps in your character.

I've also never been properly 'immersed' in an RP character; quite frankly, I don't understand how one could be without being schizophrenic, spending way more time than is healthy on it, or being professionally trained to do so (acting school/PUA/social engineering.) Properly emulating even just one additional personality is a huge and continuous amount of active effort, and I find it unsurprising that the biggest games on the net don't have any meaningful RP aspects to them.

Immersion on non-RP games is far easier, and far more complete. When I play Diablo II or Starcraft, I'm immersed. I lose track of time, and I don't have to head back to reality to figure out if what I said to the mayor last week conflicts with what I'm about to tell him now.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD