Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs
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@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
@Pavel said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
We have WoD. MUDders don’t. >_>
Haven of the Embraced is / was a thing.
And yet it was not called Haven: the Embraced? Fake fans.
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@Tez said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
Now, questions for us:
The largest sentiment gap is by preferred game style – MUD fans average 3.53 while MUSH fans average 2.85 (49.2% vs 19.5% happy) (Table 10, Figure 10).
Why so unhappy, fam?
I imagine it’s just easier to make people who want to play an MMO happier than it is to make people who are primarily after narrative/story happen, lol. No hate on either genre or game style one way or the other, but I suspect that’s a big part of it.
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@Tez Great question! I felt a lot of overlap. Some of the people who chose MUSH as their preferred style mentioned RPIs in their responses, and some of the people who chose RPI mentioned MUSHes. I’ve played both, and I know people who play both, so that didn’t come as too much of a surprise.
Individuals in both groups mentioned the culture/community getting healthier/more mature (MUD fans said this too), and individuals in both groups suggested there is still room for improvement in dealing with issues like favoritism and toxic behavior. The idea that MU*s offer a unique collaborative writing experience was shared by people in both groups, too.
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@Tez said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
Now, questions for us:
The largest sentiment gap is by preferred game style – MUD fans average 3.53 while MUSH fans average 2.85 (49.2% vs 19.5% happy) (Table 10, Figure 10).
Why so unhappy, fam?
friendship is bad and people shouldn’t have it
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I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique. That’s what I learned from taking and reading the results of this survey.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique. That’s what I learned from taking and reading the results of this survey.
I don’t remember whether I checked RPI as my favourite in the end. If I could, I would’ve checked all three (MUD, MUSH, RPI) because I like all of them for different reasons, and my ideal pie-in-the-sky type of game would be a mixture of all 3.
I think I might’ve picked MUD, but not because I’m less into storytelling/RP. I just consider RPI to be a very specific category with a very specific codebase and player culture; i.e., typically rules surrounding no OOC, non-consent permadeath, skills rise by grinding them out. And I actually tend to avoid classic RPIs because IME, they compromise RP/storytelling a lot in favour of gamification, grinding, and encourage behaviour that doesn’t make sense for the character.
Like I remember rolling into a post-apocalyptic RPI that was supposed to be a very gritty setting, and on the radio someone was asking who needed rubies/sapphires to train their jewelcrafting up. Took me right out of the setting lol. Why are people communicating “need” for precious jewels on the survivors radio for a supposedly dangerous wasteland?
Oh, and my character was a middle-aged doctor, but I was a newbie. I asked on the newbie channel how to use my stitches skill. People told me “find out IC :)” and then someone offered to show me IC. I later realised the reason they offered is that by doing it for me, they could get the skillup at my expense.
So, based on my experiences, I’m just not sure that RPIs really do deserve the self-proclaimed mantle of “RP intensive”. It’s more just that you have to communicate everything solely in-character, which leads people to communicate blatantly OOC nonsense through a thin veneer of IC, instead of hashing out the technical stuff separately so they can concentrate on only stuff that makes sense for the character in-scene.
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@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique
We don’t really have good categories for any of it. There’s a technology side based on which server you use, but the rest is really just vibes.
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For me, I see them as how much of the game is dictated by code.
MUD = The coded mechanics are the draw. Hack & Slash. Light on roleplay, if any.
MUSH = The roleplay is the draw. Purely Roleplay. If there are coded mechanics in RP, they’re often for dice rolls.
RPI = The roleplay is the draw, and it’s supported by coded mechanics. A blend of the two above.
There are additional connotations of RPI games that Kestrel mentioned above, and I don’t like those, so I call Silent Heaven an RPI-lite as a way of distinguishing it from those toxic elements.
I love MUSHes, but I also love a little bit of crunch with my RP, haha. Not too much crunchiness that it veers into MUD territory. But enough that I feel like I have enough autonomy to not need to nudge a Storyteller for the day-to-day things.
Maybe being on the other side of the screen makes me very considerate of other ST’s time, haha. I’m perfectly content to make my own fun on a game and just RP with others and give them the spotlight! I like supporting others’ stories.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
For me, I see them as how much of the game is dictated by code.
I agree that the code plays a part, but I don’t think it’s that simple. There have been plenty of games branded as “MUSH”, running on MUSH platforms (aka TinyMUX / PennMUSH), that had significant amounts of coded mechanics. I never once heard any of them called RPIs.
In fact, I’ve been playing MUSHes since the 1990s and only heard the term RPI for the first time a couple years ago. It seemed like a term that had originated in the MUD community.
Now it’s possible someone from the MUD side might have looked at a game like TGG and said: “Oh, that’s a RPI.” But TGG called itself a MUSH, and I never heard anyone call it a RPI. Nor would it fit the “No OOC commo”, “figure out everything IC” rules that @Kestrel described earlier. (which, as an aside, seem REALLY weird to me. Unless you’re literally playing yourself, your character is always going to have knowledge you don’t have. Any RPG that doesn’t have a mechanism for bridging the gap between IC and OOC knowledge is bizarre IMHO.)
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NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused
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I feel, and this is just as much a vibe-based thing as the rest of our classification journey, that the MUD/MUSH/RPI division is more about the community in and around a game than the game itself. Each different category is more about how one approaches the art of playing a game than anything tangible in terms of code. A MUDder, an RPI afficionado, and a MUSH ruiner would see a game like Arx, for instance, and have three different approaches to playing it that likely all work to some extent while the game itself doesn’t change.
