Any MUDders here?

[Chovexani]

MUD/MUSH/whatever. My first MUD was Perilous Realms, then I played Mozart (both of these were tiny MUDs based on Diku/Circle code). The one I call home now is Aardwolf, which is a huge, heavily modified ROM-based mud based out of Florida. I was a hardcore mudder for years, I even met my SO of 6 years on Mozart, but nowadays I'm not into it as much as I used to be. I find myself mostly just popping into Aardwolf every once in a while to say hi and chat with friends and clannies.

Unfortunately I think the rise of MMORPGs has somewhat hurt MUDs, but I don't think they will ever really die out...they're free and they don't require fancy hardware, but more importantly they are labors of love by geeks for geeks.

[DireStrike]

1. Guilty Pleasure

I always feel bad when I start MUDding again. I do it for a while, then I say to myself, "My god! What are you doing with your life/time?"

I like it quite a bit, but the hardest part is finding a good MUD. I've NEVER found one where I can RP an opportunistic thief. The RP MUDs usually have a small following, in my experience, so they need to discourage stealing, fighting, etc among players as it might drive some people away. Once I even got yelled at by an admin for dying too much while fighting to level (?). He said "there are other ways to level here" (which was true, but I don't want to spend all day in some obscure corner failing to pick a lock over and over again!)

The MUDS where fighting is openly allowed, however, just break down into a free-for-all very quickly. You get the dumb children that come in and just kill everyone because "I'm evil", and then retaliation starts, it breaks into factions, power levelling and combat evolves to the point that newbies are heavily discouraged from joining. It turns into flame/clan wars and RP dies.

I think that if all the MUDS were suddenly smashed together into one giant MUD, that would be very amusing. Unfortunately I think it would simply be a giant clan war, as the majority of MUDs are hack-n-slash rather than RP.

[Chovexani]

2. I've never found a decent RP mud

The ones I've always played have been hack-and-slash unfortunately.

I think Aardwolf is probably the best hack-and-slash MUD out there because I think it has by far the best PK system I've seen. Basically PK is legal, but it's only possible to PK if you and the victim are both in a clan (and some clans have NoPK flags), and only then if you're in a room with the PK flag. It's like the antithesis of those Godwars ones and it works much better. People who like to PK all the live long day are able to do so to their heart's content, and those that would rather stay out of it can go about their merry way without being harassed.