Quite a few MUD admins try and make their game as realistic as possible. The sign of a great admin staff, to me, is one that can balance out realism with gameplay.
Lets face it, most of us generally play MUDs to have fun. Realism is often overlooked in the pursuit of fun, otherwise we'd only ever have humans as playable races. The trick is to create as believable a realm as possible without killing out that fun element.
One good example, in my mind, is how a game deals with death. Most ROM-based MUDs use the standard death system, where you lose your equipment and gold, get re-incarnated at a temple somewhere, and have to go get it back. Is this realistic? Of course not. But the very few games I've played that enforced a "one death and you're dead" policy were definately not fun for me. Generally a compromise is reached where you can die repeatedly, but only for a certain number of times.
Another common "realism" argument is the standard tell system. Being able to speak to someone regardless of where they are in the world is certainly not realistic. However, if you have a large game and not so many players, they may run into other people very rarely. If you want players to interact with each other a lot, this isn't a good thing. Besides, as I've always stated when this argument comes up, who's to say that telepathic communication ISN'T the normal in your world? It doesn't happen in the real world (although some people claim to be able to do it to a limited extent, twins for example) but neither do Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings!
The balance between realism and gameplay can often be a fine line, one that has to be walked with care. Too much realism over gameplay, and a game stops being fun (to most people). Too much gameplay over realism, and people wont really believe in your world. If it's an RP required game, this is a bad thing.
This is of course my own personal opinion, and I'm sure many people will disagree with me. However it is the opinion I build my own MUD on, and I hope I'll be able to strike enough of a balance so that realism fans can play and believe in our world while still having fun.
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