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Old 05-02-2008, 11:55 AM   #39
Milawe
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: USA
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Re: Determining the Origin and Meaning of RPI

I still think they should just go with AFS. Drop the Armageddon and just have it be "A Feature Set". As far as I know, no other mud groups really try to categorize themselves so specifically with a list of preferred features, so making it as simple as "A Feature Set" would be clear enough. It'd be at least as clear as "RPI". RPFS? Roleplay feature set? That's probably more clear than all of them.

Yeah, I think I heard about it a few years back with some disgruntled Threshold player made some post about playing a roleplay intensive mud where the roleplay was really intense. Thus, my first impression of the term RPI was always that it stood for "roleplay intense." I didn't really pay attention to it then.

Then it cropped up some in the past three years on TMS when I was reading the site on and off. Again, I actually didn't really pay attention except to think it was not really that different from the terms MUD, MUSH, roleplay enforced, roleplay encouraged, roleplay accepted, etc. It wasn't until this thread happened that I something seemed a bit off to me:



So there was a buzz, but the buzz wasn't really loud and clear for people who weren't really involved in that specific community or for people who didn't keep with every trend that happens in the mudding world. I know now that that the players of this particular feature set want a distinction from other roleplay enforced muds, but I still maintain that it's not quite as clear as its made out to be. Half of the muds listed on RPImud.com don't fit what is posted here as the features required to actually be a part of the group. The standard, before now, just seemed to be "We think this mud's roleplaying is intense, and their code promotes it." Perhaps the people who have spent 300 hours of research on the subject of RPI know better, but most of the world (even the mudding world) probably don't care enough to spend even 1/100th of that time looking into it.

I had kind of thought that it had already gone "generic" since the term's kind of just slung around by tons of the newer muds. I figured they were just trying to say, "Hey, we've got RP here!" and players would be expected to research the individual mud's features themselves.

I have to say that I find it a bit silly that a certain players expect to basically have things dumbed down to three letters for them, and then they are horribly offended when the features on the mud don't meet their expectations. That's just me, though. Most people don't know what the three letters stand for except for the generic terms they represent. They have no idea that it involves things like permadeath or a class-less, skill-based system or whatever else gets tacked onto the feature set. They didn't do it to offend the players of such games. They probably just thought, like I did, that it stood for roleplay intensive, and they probably had such lofty goals as to making the roleplay "intense" on their mud. For a while MURPE was extremely popular for roleplaying games, and a ton of people started tacking that on to their muds. Then people got bored of it and moved on with other acronyms and fancy-pants names for their muds. Seriously, though, most mud admins barely pay attention to what's posted on any of these mudding sites. I know that I didn't for a long time.

You always had a wonderful way with words. This seems like an apt analogy.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter if the term remains as it is, or it changes. People can't just be expected to know that roleplay intensive means something other than the "roleplay is intense". Crying about it and railing at the injustices of the world won't really change that. We could post our little hearts out, but most players and a whole lot of admins don't really give a crap what we post on these sites.

Last edited by Milawe : 05-02-2008 at 12:01 PM. Reason: silly typos
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