Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs
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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.
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@Roz said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused
Largely agreed. My experience with most RPI focused players is that many (not all, but a WHOLE bunch) essentially trend towards wanting what amounts to a simulation sandbox game where they can go grind things and progress between fun little RP sessions.
I think the hard-line division likely comes from some form of elitism (RPI-ers going “well mine is more SERIOUS”, and “normal MUDders” trending towards “RPIs are full of toxic drama”), coupled with the human desire to generally put things into distinct categories.
Because even across the spectrum of RPIs, they don’t all agree with what makes a game an RPI. Ask the people who only or mainly played Armageddon, and you’d get a wildly different answer to the people who played only or mainly Atonement, or whatever.
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@NotSanni said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
@Roz said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused
Largely agreed. My experience with most RPI focused players is that many (not all, but a WHOLE bunch) essentially trend towards wanting what amounts to a simulation sandbox game where they can go grind things and progress between fun little RP sessions.
I think the hard-line division likely comes from some form of elitism (RPI-ers going “well mine is more SERIOUS”, and “normal MUDders” trending towards “RPIs are full of toxic drama”), coupled with the human desire to generally put things into distinct categories.
Because even across the spectrum of RPIs, they don’t all agree with what makes a game an RPI. Ask the people who only or mainly played Armageddon, and you’d get a wildly different answer to the people who played only or mainly Atonement, or whatever.
The issue is further compounded by people having different definitions for what counts as “serious” or “heavy” RP.
From the perspective of an average RPIer, being completely immersed in your character, never communicating with anyone OOC, finding everything out IC, and following the edict of “it’s what my character would do” to the letter is what counts as the highest and most serious form of RP.
Whereas a MUSHer might look at what they’re doing and go “Wait, so it’s just bar RP? No plots? Hey why don’t we run an event, I’ll set one up — let’s all of us meet at the dojo for a training montage.”
To which some RPIers might be horrified at the prospect of prearranging RP and insist that no, they cannot just show up at the dojo, because they would be doing so using meta information, and you haven’t told their character in a scene that there is an event going on at a dojo. So they have to stay at the bar, since their character is a drunk, unless another character can organically convince them to attend the dojo. But they won’t tell you that they want you to do this, since again, that would be metagaming.
On a IRE MUD I once got chewed out by the game’s top PvPer who doesn’t really do any emoting, because he found out that a friend had encouraged me to log on for a scene in our guildhall that had no real impact on anyone else, it was just 2 people writing together for fun. From his perspective, that was not really RP, since our characters didn’t randomly bump into each other; it was basically cheating, despite no mechanical benefits.
So it’s like a bunch of elitists elitising at each other that each one’s RP is of the less serious variety. There isn’t really a hierarchy of elitism, it’s more like a spiderweb. (And I don’t claim to be innocent of any of it, I totally judge people whose RP style I think sucks.)
My point is, imho, to rank RPI as a more serious type of RP MUD is not really accurate, it’s a different type of RP MUD, but sure, RPIers would probably insist that it’s more serious (and I would disagree). I prefer therefore to define RPI by its familiar systems and policies; games like The Inquisition: Legacy, Armageddon, Shadows of Isildur, After Earth, Star Conquest.
@Faraday I wouldn’t consider your game an RPI because AFAIK it’s a MUSH, and a RPI is a type of MUD.
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@Faraday said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
@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
Brazil at one point had basically all of oWOD Revised coded
(Also I have no clue what RPI is.)
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With everyone’s responses, and to my surprise, I guess that makes Silent Heaven a MUSH, haha. Strange that I didn’t think of it as one.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare
I wouldn’t have, either, but there’s seemingly no other place to define it. My instinct would’ve been to call it an RPI but people who are familiar with RPIs make it clear it’s not so idk. -
I discovered the MU world like “only” 10 years ago.
I still don’t know the difference between MUSH, MUX, etc.
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I missed the survey. I was on vacation, then real life got hectic, so I wasn’t checking on here. It’s interesting data, though.
As for the differences between MU*s and RPIs, most people answered the question. I like to think of RPIs as just more code heavy MUXs. My dream server would be a combination RPI-MUSH. I love the fact that when your character enters a room, you don’t get the actual name of the other characters. I’m not sure how you square the circle of characters with vague identities and players with set identities, but I’d love to see it.
