MUD Options

[hunter5150]

Would anyone know of a 4th ed MUD out there.

[D Minor]

I know a mush under construction but no muds


http://forum.newseattle.org/index.php

[Fortune]

What's the difference?

[Eurotroll]

They're mostly differences in approach. MUDs usually feature real-time (tick-based) automated combat systems, which puts an emphasis on twitch skills (enter just this command at just that moment), whereas MUSHes and MUXes emphasize player interaction, making combat turn-based with elaborate "poses" (=action descriptions) by the players, often overseen by a staffer (or, in case of players agreeing to an outcome, entirely without either).

A lot of the differences come down to the well-known dichotomy of "dungeon crawlers" vs "roleplayers", with the former favouring MUDs (which often feature monsters to slay for XP) while the latter congregate on MUSHes. (Of course this is a grossly simplified account, and as a former MUSh admin, I freely admit to my bias in favour of MUSHes.)

[Fortune]

Grossly simplified is highly appreciated. Thanks. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[DocTaotsu]

Yes well...

Yeah basically. MUX's tend to be RP heavy and subject to "Write a novel to get an approved background" school of thought. A school of thought I subscribe to for online RP because your background is pretty much the only way I'll be able to tell if your an asshole or not. If you write a thoughtful history of an emotionally dead street samurai I know you're making the effort. If your background starts "I was raised by dragons..." I know that your style of play and mine are not going to mesh well unless the next sentence is "...at least that's what I thought until the court ordered psych tech upped my dosage." My personally feeling is that MUX/MUSHing SR is inferior to tabletop because it takes so damn long. I think, however, that MU* excel in "slice of life" style RP and creating a more organic Shadowrun experience.

When people inquire about MUD's I usually ask if they've played Everquest or WoW. If they have I say, "Imagine that, without graphics and roughly twice the grind." That usually gives them a clear idea of how /I/ see MUD's. I've heard of SR MUD's but I just can't imagine how they'd work unless you totally rewrote the rules and theme. The idea of driving down, in my epic Eurocar mount, to the Barrens so I can grind Ganger mobs for 1% drops of purple Ares Predator IV's makes me want to destroy the world with my seething hatred of all life.

[Daier Mune]

When people inquire about MUD's I usually ask if they've played Everquest or WoW. If they have I say, "Imagine that, without graphics and roughly twice the grind." That usually gives them a clear idea of how /I/ see MUD's. I've heard of SR MUD's but I just can't imagine how they'd work unless you totally rewrote the rules and theme. The idea of driving down, in my epic Eurocar mount, to the Barrens so I can grind Ganger mobs for 1% drops of purple Ares Predator IV's makes me want to destroy the world with my seething hatred of all life.

you say that with malice, but there is a (very sick) part of me that wants to see that game.

[Abschalten]

Yes well...

Yeah basically. MUX's tend to be RP heavy and subject to "Write a novel to get an approved background" school of thought. A school of thought I subscribe to for online RP because your background is pretty much the only way I'll be able to tell if your an asshole or not. If you write a thoughtful history of an emotionally dead street samurai I know you're making the effort. If your background starts "I was raised by dragons..." I know that your style of play and mine are not going to mesh well unless the next sentence is "...at least that's what I thought until the court ordered psych tech upped my dosage." My personally feeling is that MUX/MUSHing SR is inferior to tabletop because it takes so damn long. I think, however, that MU* excel in "slice of life" style RP and creating a more organic Shadowrun experience.

When people inquire about MUD's I usually ask if they've played Everquest or WoW. If they have I say, "Imagine that, without graphics and roughly twice the grind." That usually gives them a clear idea of how /I/ see MUD's. I've heard of SR MUD's but I just can't imagine how they'd work unless you totally rewrote the rules and theme. The idea of driving down, in my epic Eurocar mount, to the Barrens so I can grind Ganger mobs for 1% drops of purple Ares Predator IV's makes me want to destroy the world with my seething hatred of all life.

A Shadowrun MUD can work if it's done right. I'm an admin over at Awake 2062, which is based on the AwakeMUD codebase. Granted we don't have the best codebase in the world, but we've got a nice bunch of players and it's very roleplay-oriented. You can walk into convenience stores and spend your hard-earned nuyen on toothpaste and shampoo if you want, or even buy (losing) lottery tickets if you're so inclined.

We have an automated Johnson system that you can use to earn karma and nuyen, though the payouts are pretty small -- they're meant to be, as incentives to go on the better paying GM-run events, which are done in a PnP style using the gear and karma-purchased character improvements that you previously earned.

However, I GM PnP SR4 bi-weekly, so I'm in the position to see the pros and cons of a MUD-based Shadowrun experience. The translation is NOT perfect at all... Our policy is that we try to be Shadowrun first and a MUD second, but more often than not it's the other way around to alot of people. Many are of the opinion that if that bottle of shampoo doesn't have some coded purpose that it's totally useless... and that's not a BAD school of thought, but it's just not one that allows an RP-based MUD to thrive.

I tried to get into a couple of the Shadowrun MUSHes, but I found the "write a character thesis" approach to be quite pretentious and needlessly ego-stroking. I don't consider myself a bad role-player whatsoever, but I have better things to do than sit and mash out page after page of backstory just so I can play. I prefer the "hit the grid" approach of a MUD, where I can get through chargen, walk into a club, and start interacting with the players. This approach allows a couple of bad apples into the game, but overall I've noticed that if the admins and the playerbase uphold fairly high standards of roleplay, the game doesn't suffer a complete decline into grind-centric gameplay and mob-slaying.

Also: If anybody DOES get the idea to make a new SR4 MUD codebase, hit me up... I've got tons of good ideas. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[DocTaotsu]

Hehe... I have to admit the appeal of seeing a WoW version of SR, complete with cartoony art and stale gaming style is quiet high. Plus if it made boat loads of money for SR and allowed the writers to pump out more books and source material, I'd be all about it.

I'd never play it, even if my life depended on it, but I'd certainly pimp it for the good of SR in general.

[bibliophile20]

If your background starts "I was raised by dragons..." I know that your style of play and mine are not going to mesh well unless the next sentence is "...at least that's what I thought until the court ordered psych tech upped my dosage."

Pregen PC Concept FTW!

(don't mind me, I'm just harvesting good ideas to use for pregens)

[Sombranox]

Not sure about how new seattle will be when it opens up, but a lot of muxes and mushes these days have switched from the character thesis sort of app to more of a twenty-questions sort of thing. What was your childhood like. What led to your becoming <shadowrunner, vampire, superhero, etc>. That sort of thing. Tends to be a little less painful for most people looking just to get a spark of idea for a character and run with it, while still benefiting from keeping out the sorts looking to create a kamikaze character to go out on the grid immediately and proceed to try and ruin other people's fun before getting killed themselves.

Fifteen years of mu*ing and I can say this much though. The line between muds (Multi-user Dungeons) and muxes/mushes (multi-user experience/shared hallucinations) isn't quite as strong as people like to think. I've seen muds where the largest portion of people on them spend most of their time doing fantastic roleplay that could qualify as a novel if it was cleaned up and I've seen muxes/mushes that had so much automated combat code that they were equivalent to a text-based FPS.

That said, there used to be a great tradition of shadowrun muxes around in the old days. Seattle, Detroit, Germany, Denver, New York. I think Denver's the only one left of the SR3 groups and New Seattle's been in the making for two years now, but hopefully will open up and finally provide an opportunity for SR4 roleplay and interaction outside of tabletop.

[Adarael]

The biggest dividing line between MUSH/MUX and MUD players is - I think - that most MUSH players tend to forget they're playing a game and eventually act like asshats because of it.

And this is coming from someone who's been MUSHing for 15 years as well. I second Sombranox on his "line is thinner than we think sometimes." The biggest line in code comes from the fact that most MUSH wizzes don't want to have code and are lazy about it.

(I woulda liked Shadowrun Detroit more if people had treated it like Shadowrun and less like either Ryan Mercuryrun or Go TS The Elvesrun.)

[16fatal]

I know its not exactly the thread's topic but :

how MUSH/MUX handle games rules ? Are they automaticaly applied by the application or manualy by an admin / GM ?

By the way if anybody needs some help to develop a SR4 MUD/MUSH/MUX i can give some help, i use c++ in my day to day job.

[edit] it was not clear that my help would be for dev, not administrating.

[Velocity219e]

A Shadowrun MUD can work if it's done right. I'm an admin over at Awake 2062, which is based on the AwakeMUD codebase. Granted we don't have the best codebase in the world, but we've got a nice bunch of players and it's very roleplay-oriented. You can walk into convenience stores and spend your hard-earned nuyen on toothpaste and shampoo if you want, or even buy (losing) lottery tickets if you're so inclined.

OMFG I used to Admin / run RP on Awake (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I remember riding a Renraku drone around the barrens honking and beeping at people while one of the other mods did global shouts as a 'raku special ops dude announcing that a valuable albeit dangerous piece of hardware was on the loose and was not to be approached or interacted with.

took about 10 people to take it down in the end (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) but it was quite fun just zooming around hiding in buildings and stuff and having people chase / hunt me

is Dunk / Glass still about?

I know its not exactly the thread's topic but :

how MUSH/MUX handle games rules ? Are they automaticaly applied by the application or manualy by an admin / GM ?

By the way if anybody needs some help for a SR4 MUD/MUSH/MUX i can give some help, i use c++ in my day to day job.

The difference between developing a Mud/Mush and adminning developing FOR one is distinct, you don't need a coding background usually for them once they are running, although some tend towards on the fly development (Discworld springs to mind)

I can't imagine that for example Awake has changed massively codewise since I was there four+ years ago.

[quentra]

I play an SR3 mud, awakenedworlds, pretty often. While is it automated, there really isn't much 'going over to the <blank> and shooting stuff until i get that awesome +4million str monosword' or whatevwer. I never got into Mu* mainly because of the incredibly slow pace those games tend to go, unless the playerbase is huge. Also, while poses are nice and whatnot, during GM or Questor sponsored runs, emotes, the MUD equivalent to poses, are basically used to the exclusion of everything else. In the end, it comes down to your style of play. You wanna play a chara with a twenty page background? Go ahead and play in a MUX or MUSH. Or, if you do just wanna walk into a bar or club and start talking to the other players, play a MUD. You could still write a twenty page background for a MUD, and I think people still do, but it isn't something required in order to play.

[Sombranox]

I know its not exactly the thread's topic but :

how MUSH/MUX handle games rules ? Are they automaticaly applied by the application or manualy by an admin / GM ?

By the way if anybody needs some help to develop a SR4 MUD/MUSH/MUX i can give some help, i use c++ in my day to day job.

[edit] it was not clear that my help would be for dev, not administrating.

MUSH/MUX's tend to have basic dice roller code rather than hard-coded rules or automated things to attack. Karma is gotten either from player-run or staff-run plots and adventures ranging from one-shot runs to convoluted things spanning weeks or months. In those plots the GM tends to have the final word on the rules, though most games have ways of contesting bad rulings by going up the chain of command in staff for rulings. Karma also can be gotten from +votes from other players for good RP, so those just looking towards social interaction (sometimes derided by the more action-oriented people) can still improve their characters purely off that social interaction.

That all aside, the coding for most MU* servers isn't actually in any proper language like C++, it all uses it's own internal structure that is vaguely similar to object-oriented LISP. A lot of nasty in-line jumble that can still be made to do interesting stuff.

If you were serious about it though, you should look to the new Seattle link someone posted above. They've had a hard time keeping ahold of coders, which is one of the reasons the game has taken so long to open.

[DocTaotsu]

True Adarael. I think my problem is that I got into SR Detroit at a sweet spot and had about a year of two of mind blowingly good RP and admin experience. I took a character that was wet behind the ears and developed him into a seasoned shadow player (not exactly a Runner since I think I did like... 3 my whole time there). I also did this when I was 16 or so and almost a decade ago (Good christ has it been that long?). After RL intervened I seem to recall checking back from time to time to see a TSing/idle player base with occasionally abusive admins (I wouldn't know, I was never personally mistreated. I also basically RP'd an NPC when I get down to it). I wasn't all that surprised that SR Detroit basically died from "Nobody cared". I also think I had a very positive experience because I ended interacting with a group of players who shared similar views of Shadowrun and that made it much more enjoyable.
Being honest there was a lot of pretentiousness in SR MU*'s, that's why I never got into SR Seattle because I felt that negative attitude towards newbies and hated it. Like I said, I caught a really fine time in SR Detroit and I hoard those fine memories of great RP like the my first great D&D games.

I recently tried to get back into MU* and I just couldn't. Even with all the time I have to post all over Dumpshock I just couldn't deal with taking 10 hours to run a simple plot. Plus all the time zone coordination drove me insane.

I guess I should have given SR MUDs a shot. My experience was MUD's was that they were Everquest without graphics and well... yeah, they made me want to gouge my eyes out. It sounds like an SR MUD is just a MUX with an in depth code base that might go a long way towards speeding things up (I know that typing "shoot X" is a lot easier than rolling everything out and counting successes).

God I hate TSing.

I hate it so bad.

[quentra]

I guess I should have given SR MUDs a shot. My experience was MUD's was that they were Everquest without graphics and well... yeah, they made me want to gouge my eyes out. It sounds like an SR MUD is just a MUX with an in depth code base that might go a long way towards speeding things up (I know that typing "shoot X" is a lot easier than rolling everything out and counting successes).

It is that, in essence. The code base does try to replicate sr3 rules to a good extent, but coding is hard, so in some areas
playablility>canon. And if you're thinking of trying an SR MUD, I'm gonna plug awakenedworlds.net:4000. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[DocTaotsu]

hehe, already checked it out. Looks pretty cool but with my own game running right now I don't really have time to get into it.

Plus it doesn't look like I get to play my favorite cyberdoctor/combat corpsman. Boo.

[quentra]

Sure you can! Well, you are restricted to runners....but one of the characters on there is actually a chromed combat doctor. Attractive lady, runs a strip club.

[Roadspike]

I tried Awakened Worlds myself. Enjoyable people for the most part, very newbie friendly. They don't play anything approaching Tabletop, however. They have characters with stats in the 30s and such magical abilities that it is impossible to catch up to them. I created a character who would have been relatively effective in TT, and he was just utterly outclassed because a 12 Str wasn't enough to do damage to the /humans/ and /elves/ and a 12 Bod wasn't enough to take their melee damage either. Fun people, some fun RP, interesting system, but it's not tabletop Shadowrun. More like superhero-run.

[Seven-7]

Spellcasting: 4
-Spec: Thread Necromancy +2
Magic: 3

Roll: 2 3 3 2 4 6 5 3 5 >> 3 Hits

Ok, now that I've got that done, I want to cover three things in this thread necro'ing:

1. The descriptions of MU*'s
2. SR Mu*'s
3. Links to other MU* material

Here in the post MUD is defined as a Multi-User Gaming Platform that his heavily Softcoded and limits what you can or can't do.

Softcode differs from Hardcode in the same way Java differs from Linux.

Most of the time you'll see things said, such as, "MUX's are RP Heavy" and "MUD's are heavy on combat" or even "MUX's require novels for backgrounds". All of these are sterotypes and have NOTHING to do with codebase.

So before I continue lets get down what MUD's and MUSHs are.

First:
There are a TON of MUD codebases. Were talking, like 60+. Common ones are LP and Circle.
MUSH's come in MANY flavors:

• TinyMUSH 1.0 -> 3.1
• TinyMUX 1.0 -> 2.8
• PennMUSH
• Rhost
• TinyMUSE
• MOO
• MUF

Italics for those no longer supported.

TinyMUX and Rhost are by far the best, from personal coding experience.

WARNING: Real coders, if you have a weak stomach, stay far away from anything but MUF. The setup for these places may induce vomiting. MUF however, is based on ANSI FORTH or something.

Now, to questions!

Would anyone know of a 4th ed MUD out there.

No, nor will there really ever be a 4ed MUD. The reasoning behind this is that, while MUD's are definitely RPGs they (Mostly) are not specific RPG's.

For instance, you will never find a D&D 3.5 MUD.

MUSH's however, are 99.9% based of real RPG systems.

There are 3 D&D 3.5 MUSH's, 3 SR3 MUSH's, 2 SR4 MUSH's (In dev), 4 nWOD MUSH's, and more than 20 oWOD mush's!

I know a mush under construction but no muds


http://forum.newseattle.org/index.php

Yes, this pllace is under construction, has been for a while. I'm actually building their +sheet code!

What's the difference?

The difference's are listed above, however, in SR world MUD/MUSH things it's really about flavor. Shadowrun: Denver MUSH has over 20-35 people daily, while Awake (Serge and Che) average 10-20.

SR MUSH's also tend to know the rules better in general, and honestly are more intelligent. HOWEVER, with that in mind, a lot of them are more snarky as well.

Eurotroll hits it damn good on the spot.

There are a couple of links I'll supply before supplying my IM and E-mail for anymore questions.

General MUSH forum (Warning, adult in nature and immature in style, but has some great ideas behind the rubbish): http://wora.netlosers.com
TOGR (True Online Gaming Resource), a really nice MUSH that lists other MUSH's and has good chat topics: telnet: fadingisland.org:8080 \

Now, you've got two choices for developing SR4 MUSH's:

Shadowrun: Seattle
Shadowrun: Occulus Ex Cremo

Then, of course, SR3:

Shadowrun: Denver
Shadowrun: Germany

and in dev

Shadowrun: New York

Again, feel free to IM me, PM me, or E-Mail me for questions about this stuff, or questions about MU* code, as I do both.

YIM: bluescreen0101
AIM: bluescreen0101
Meebo: David_Bane
On MUSH's: Jack P.;Jackpoint
E-mail: bluescreen0101@yahoo.com

[Fortune]

That is definitely helpful info. Much obliged. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)