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Old 03-31-2008, 12:28 AM   #1
Ide
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Join Date: Feb 2006
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forum RP + mud RP game

I'm looking for some ideas on how to structure a mud where you include forum RP as part of the game. Think of this as a cross between forum RP (PBP for play-by-post), a mud, and possibly a persistant browser-based game (PBBG). Or, you could call it a PBPPBBGRPI . Bear with me -- it's just that I've never seen this done so that the forum/web game and the mud were each first-class citizens within the game. Hence my vocabulary is a little incoherent.

Anyway, at first glance it seems like for the forum RP to mechanically affect the mud you need some kind of tokens or points earned within the forum RP. Furthermore, unless you want the administrative overhead of a judge for every forum RP thread, you would need some automated process to reward points and/or effect mechanical changes in the game state. That seems like a pretty big problem at first. I don't want to judge the quality of RP itself, just somehow judge the mechanical effect of that RP on the game state. Are there any examples or ideas out there for that?

For a PBBG it would be more straightforward -- you would code a game that could directly affect the mud game state.

Some more issues -- how do you deal with the flow of time between an asynchronous game (the forum RP) and a synchronous game (the mud). Do you somehow structure the forum RP into weekly or daily turns and integrate that with the mud?

Now, the interface. While I would want browser-based access to the mud, I think it also would be cool if a player could play the mud with essentially no knowledge or interest in the forum RP. But then you would want a two-way flow of game state between the mud and the forum RP, otherwise you lose a lot of potential dynamic play between the two forms. How do you flow game state from the mud to the forum RP? For example, if I defeat a boss in the mud, do you need some judge to manually write a forum post? Do you post some generated story with a bot (sounds too spammy, no?).

Lastly, if anyone is interested in developing this 'for realz', please contact me. I think this could be pretty damn cool. Furthermore there is a very large portion of 'text game' players who are RPing in forums and have never looked at (or will look at) a mud. If muds and forum RP could be set up to play off each other in a shared world I think that would kick some serious a#*.
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Old 03-31-2008, 05:07 AM   #2
nass
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Re: forum RP + mud RP game

Definitely worth investigating, and if you do it well who knows what you can do with it . That said, my experience is that it's a tough call to replicate the versatility of forums in a MU*, although that probably depends on the flexibility of your MU*. And, it's definitely an appeal to the roleplaying end of the spectrum, ie one type of mud player.

We get a lot of crossover from various wheel of time roleplaying forums to the wheel of time mud, but whilst some folk do get into the MUD, it's a bit of a stretch, because in our you have to actually prove yourself using in-game quests and achievements to be worthy of certain roleplaying positions (for examples fades have to be good pkillers), whereas in the roleplaying forums I see it's often a case of signing up on the dotted line and then pretending to be whoever you want to pretend to be. Some of the forum roleplayers get a bit ****y about that whole idea of having to be competent rather than just signing on the line .

But, in terms of community, some of those roleplaying forums are huge, and my (profoundly unscientific) guess would be that there are many more people roleplaying on wheel of time forums than on wheel of time MU*s. Not too surprising - for your average Net user forums are much more familiar territory and don't seem so old-hat. Though, roleplaying forums, certainly within the wheel of time sphere, come and go like crazy, there's a new one almost every month, I guess this maybe reflects the ease of setting these up?
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