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What is a MUSH?
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I’m studying the use of Evennia as the basis of a MUSH-like World of Darkness game†. One of the first things I need to do for a task like that is to write a specification. What is a WoD MUSH, and what features do I need to write to deliver on expectations?
- Rooms, exits, and travel
- The ability to build rooms and exits in game
- The five main ways to communicate
– Emits/poses
– Pages
– Mail
– Boards
– Channels - Character sheets and rolls
- Experience Point accumulation and spending
- Player character generation of said sheets
- Player notes and inventory
- PC groups with their own communications and rosters
- Finger/Profile
- Descriptions with colors and formatting
- Personal coding for descriptions and personal commands
- Telnet interface to all of the above
Is that really it? What am I missing here?
† Yes, an Old West/Victorian Mage game, leaning toward setting it in Los Angeles or San Francisco around 1880. Nothing set in stone, no rush or timeline on this project since I have a perfectly good Mage game to play on already.
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This looks like what you’d need from a player-facing perspective.
You would need some way to log and communicate player requests as staff, so a jobs/requests system. This would also be useful to catalog PrPs if that’s a route you plan to go.
I am not too sure if you need an inventory system if you have player notes, but Evennia’s built-in inventory system doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to convert to WoD.
Depending on the size of your grid, you will also probably want some form of “fast travel,” like the typical +join or +hangouts commands. You could also just build it into the game. San Francisco had just grown large enough by the 1870s to incorporate the cable car into municipal life, Los Angeles followed shortly afterwards.
Trying to think of anything else but coming up short.
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What is a MUSH
A miserable pile of secrets.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Polk said in What is a MUSH?:
- Personal coding for descriptions and personal commands
This one doesn’t seem like a necessary factor. Especially because Evennia is very much not designed to support softcode, from what I understand.
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I think focusing on “What is A MUSH” is the wrong question, because no two MUs are exactly alike.
Ask instead what you need for your MUSH.
For instance, there are loads of statless MUSHes that don’t have chargen, dice, XP, etc. There are even WoD MUSHes that are entirely done with off-game character sheets, some of which may use offline GM-rolled dice and manually-tracked XP.
Games with personal softcode are a dwindling minority these days, especially with Ares and Evennia not even supporting it. Player-driven building has also diminished in popularity. There have even been MUSHes without a traditional grid at all (with everything happening in temp rooms).
We could opine for days (years?) on the philosophical qualities that differentiate MUSH from other forms of online RP, but if you focus on what you need for your vision, you’ll do just fine.
For other system ideas, maybe check out the help topics list on any Ares game. (or the demo game: https://mush.aresmush.com/help)
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To me the difference has always been how much things are automated.
IMO MUSH is more equivalent to a group of friends around the table. I think especially in combat situations. How you behave isn’t scripted out. It’s more open to input from the user. I just don’t do ‘attack mob x’ and the system starts doing the randomness to find out what happens.
MUSH seem to me more traditional Role-playing style.
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Why is a MUSH?
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- Reality levels (could be done a couple ways)
- Since Victorian/Old West is before the Resurgence, some weird blend of Dark Ages Fae and Changeling.
Also: Mummy.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Testament Does that game have ravens in it?
Heh. Thanks all for the help. Really appreciated. Great questions, great things I missed, Plenty to think about.
A project this deep I do have to take carefully and methodically or just get overwhelmed.
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@Roz I’m a weird stickler about this. I think softcoding in SOME form is very important.
It seems like Evennia has a LOT of functionality toward this, including parser functions I’m told. And I think I can slip something more involved in using those.
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@Jennkryst Honestly after the Liberation experience I think the way to do reality levels is just to have different grids. 1-1 mappings of places across reality levels get weird to impossible, I think. Asking people to desc 2 or 3 reality levels for every room gets overwhelming.
And you can DO more as an ST with a bespoke grid for a reality level.
As for Mummy? You can probably build one with the Gods & Monsters rule set. Perhaps tied to House Shaea.
And I know el zilcho about Changeling. I’m opening this Mage-only, but if it works out I will probably break down and throw in Werewolf. There is that Old West Werewolf book whose name I forget.
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@Polk said in What is a MUSH?:
@Roz I’m a weird stickler about this. I think softcoding in SOME form is very important.
It seems like Evennia has a LOT of functionality toward this, including parser functions I’m told. And I think I can slip something more involved in using those.
AFAIK, Evennia does not have softcode support. Coding is done in off-game python files. See their article on softcode. Admittedly that is from version 0.9.5 so something could have changed since then, but I don’t see anything in their latest version to contradict that.
To further clarify though - softcode just means a particular MU-specific scripting language that can be changed from within the game while the game is running. You can still have custom commands like +who and +sheet and whatnot even without softcode.
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@Polk said in What is a MUSH?:
And I know el zilcho about Changeling. I’m opening this Mage-only, but if it works out I will probably break down and throw in Werewolf. There is that Old West Werewolf book whose name I forget.
Werewolf: The Wild West! I had a physical copy which had a big hole through the top like a bullet hole, but ended up causing a lot of page tears. It was a fun setting, though.
Honestly after the Liberation experience I think the way to do reality levels is just to have different grids. 1-1 mappings of places across reality levels get weird to impossible, I think. Asking people to desc 2 or 3 reality levels for every room gets overwhelming.
While the reality levels can be a cool feature, I agree that it often is better to just have different grids. What follows is some WoD lore bullshit that I internalized instead of, like, mathematics.
Also, while the Umbra can be detailed in a very granular way in certain places (e.g., you have Nodes or a place affected by a great deal of emotion), it’s largely the same for large swathes of area. A suburban neighborhood will likely have the same Gauntlet strength, connection to the Weaver, etc. with maybe one or two exceptions. It is difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to make a notable change on the Umbra unless they are supernatural in some way (or some kind of H. H. Holmes style serial killer with a murder castle). This supports the separate grids idea, as you can create more conceptual Umbral locations. East Pacifica, North Daly City, etc. if you’re using San Francisco.Something else to keep in mind with this as well is that Umbral travel is always kind of a niche thing for Mages, but especially in that setting (no Digital Web – arguably Jebel Qaf exists, but you need to have a good reason for being there if you’re not Batini). The Gauntlet strength will be lower, and there’s no Avatar Storm, but there’s also IMO less incentive to go to the Spirit Wilds for most Mages, as the Technocratic Union is about to be born (1880 or 90 or something? Whenever the Difference Engineers became a thing).
It might even be a better option to have a command that spawns a generic Umbra room that allows people to describe what they need rather than dedicate resources to a separate smaller grid that will rarely see use.
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@Faraday You are correct. Evennia does not support softcode and likely never will.
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@Darren That’s a really old post.
Now there’s this:
https://www.evennia.com/docs/latest/Components/FuncParser.html?highlight=parse
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@Polk You could certainly do that (with a lot of work) but the end result would be more like MUCK’s MPI language than MUSH softcode. Do you really want to tackle server development on top of game development though?
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@Darren You are asking the guy who shoehorned lua into Rhost, mind you.
But yes at this point I’m honestly considering developing this in the form of an Evennia (WoD) MUSH in a Box.
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@Polk I honestly thought that you would be the last person to go that route (since you dislike DJANGO) but yeah it’s certainly doable. It wouldn’t even be the first such attempt.
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@Darren I’ve been convinced to give Django another shot given that it’s been over a decade since my nightmare experience with it.
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Current plan, with a nod to @Jennkryst
https://github.com/stevensmedia/EtherBox/blob/master/PLAN.md
