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Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

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Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#61
I often wonder if the MUD and/or the interactive fiction genre is set for a bit of a renaissance now with the arrival of absolutely stellar natural language recognition systems. Some of the chatbots I've interacted with are mind boggling, and tied to a massive shared world of objects in a MUD/MOO-style I can imagine a lot of potential.

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#62
post #11

How many of you rushed home from school to get your daily turns in? One that I played (maybe called Dikumud?) had some turn based aspects that would reset everyday. Would fly to my room after the school bus to fire up the modem and the IBM clone PC to get connected and get my action in!

I'm actually surprised that I don't remember any turn-based elements from any of the many, many M*'s I played given the strong relation to traditional RPGs - the only big time-based event was when servers reset.

Archmage (magewars.com, probably the first really big browser game) was the first game I remember waiting for my next turn to be available on. Apparently there's a "reincarnation" of it running today. https://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/Archmage

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#63
post #56

My MUD of choice was DiscworldMUD ( http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/ ), based on the works of Terry Pratchett and which has been actively developed for nigh on 30 years. The setting is wonderfully flavorful and the world is huge and lovingly detailed. It's such great fun to get lost in one of the giant towns and see what you stumble across. Check out this map of what its biggest city, Ankh-Morpork, looks like: ht…

I used to wake up at 4-5am to play DiscworldMUD before school.

I had at least one character in every guild and each time waking up fresh in the mended drum was like being born again.

Doing "The Run" as an assassin was just the right amount of stress and excitement and when your Wyrm sword finally stops being limp as a warrior.

Having player-character witch friends you could call to fly in on their brooms and drop off healing potions for you was old-school-cool.

I've been a gamer all my life, but nothing will, or has ever compared to the experience of playing the Discworld MUD. It's been 15+ years since I played so I don't know if it's still there, or what it's like now, but I'll never go back.

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#64

I often wonder if the MUD and/or the interactive fiction genre is set for a bit of a renaissance now with the arrival of absolutely stellar natural language recognition systems. Some of the chatbots I've interacted with are mind boggling, and tied to a massive shared world of objects in a MUD/MOO-style I can imagine a lot of potential.

MUDs have always had natural language recognition in the form of other players. The interaction is realistic because it's real.

That said, NLP could widen the already broad possibilities of interactions with NPCs.

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#66

So I have been running a PbP ("Play by Post") Pathfinder game at Paizo.com during the whole lockdown situation. This is basically a D&D-type game played standard forum posts - play episodically (normally, players post once a day and then the GM posts what happens and repeat). I love the approach for the expression it allows. Players and gm can riff off each other's writing, etc. Still, what I'd be curious about I'd b…

There is a cool sort-of PbP-mud hybrid server called AresMush. You would have to code the Pathfinder rules yourself most likely, though it's possible someone has done so. I think Ares is written in Ruby fwiw.

Cool stuff, any hybrid gives me something to think about, thanks a lot.

And PS, I'm not wedded to the complex Pathfinder rule system to any degree really. I mention it primarily for context.

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#67
I'm just young enough to have missed the time where muds or Ultima online were most popular.

In the late nineties, I distinctly remember internet cafes and the rise of Everquest which was inspired by diku mud. You had a bunch of young people playing console games, some mtg players, some pc players, etc.

Good times, it makes me sad for kids these days where mobile games are mostly gacha p2w slot machines.

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#68
I really enjoy MUDs and I have played them off and on for many years. I first got into Achaea when I was in my teens!

The thing that always ends up turning me off from them though is the roleplaying aspect. I know for some people that is the main draw, but I've never had any interest in it. Does anyone know of any active MUDs that don't have any roleplay requirement?

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#69
Another MUD (and MUX) alumni here, used to play a lot of 3 Kingdoms ( still up at http://3k.org/ ) using TinTin ( https://tintin.mudhalla.net/ ) and TinyFugue ( http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/ ) as clients. Also played lots of MUX, specifically BattleTech 3065 ( still up at http://btmux.com/ ).

Once the graphical MMORPG came out and folks started to have broadband and their own computers MUD/MUX usage dropped a ton. The MUD/MUX games were much better setup to play from your shell account on your university lab systems at the time. Even today I'm bummed a MMORPG BattleTech never came out that rivaled the 3065 MUX experience.

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#70

MUDs were great, and they were partially responsible for me being able to work up my knowledge, experience, and confidence to start up a career in software engineering. I learned a lot from trying to make my own MUDs (from using ROM 2.4, some tiny codebase called CVagrant, and from scratch), as well as a little bit about Linux. This is all aside from playing. I somehow convinced many of the right people in middle and…

Genesis, the first LPMUD founded by Lars Pensjö in 89', is still up and has huge Tolkien-based domains and guilds.
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