MUD as a medium

[holly]

has anyone ever played on a MUD? I'm sort of interested in building one on a local server just to have a weird interactive zone for my friends to roleplay and keep up to date in a unique and thematic way. I feel like alot of the historical contexts of MUDs are way past my time and i've never experienced them really at all. I'm really interested in hearing if any of you guys have played on a MUD and met friends through it. I've never really interacted with a platform that seems to encourage roleplay so much, i am so intrigued on what kinds of stories occurred in this medium that i could've never known abt, and the ppl ive seen in games are REALLY good at using it to roleplay, like i do not know how they type so fast with such precision.

[candycanearter07]

What, exactly, is a MUD?

[holly]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon

its these things, theres a bunch of them out there, i do not know actually how popular they are.

[candycanearter07]

Does Spess Station 13/14 count? Thats the only game I can think of that would fall under that category.

[holly]

no... its like a server you telnet onto, like the game is literally just sending text back and forth between a server. human social constructs within those bounds then ensue i suppose...

[candycanearter07]

That sounds really cool! I want to do one, but probably there aren't any servers still running.. Maybe we could do a Melonland event for it!

[Gloogo]

I'm happy I stumbled upon your post! I actually am building a small one of these myself for exactly the same reason! I never really interacted with MUDs back when they were more prevalent, but I've recently checked out a few of them. I wanted to build something like this for a small group of friends that I play TTRPGs with.

There actually are quite a few of these servers still running! You can find a list of some of them here. I've found that a lot of these are very RPG-focused and play more like text-adventure games than open roleplaying environments, but they all have RP elements to them, some more than others.

If you're looking to build something like this, might I recommend Evennia. It's a Python framework for building text-based multiplayer spaces and does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. I've been extremely impressed at how quickly I've been able to pick it up and start building things in it. I'm not an expert, as I've only started playing around with it recently, but they have a thriving community of developers and the documentation is great.

You can access these very easily with a client like Mudlet. This comes preloaded with a few connections to some of the bigger MUDs that are still running, and I've found that a lot of these communities are quite friendly.

If you end up playing around with building something like this I would love to hear more about it!

[holly]

I'm happy I stumbled upon your post! I actually am building a small one of these myself for exactly the same reason! I never really interacted with MUDs back when they were more prevalent, but I've recently checked out a few of them. I wanted to build something like this for a small group of friends that I play TTRPGs with.

There actually are quite a few of these servers still running! You can find a list of some of them here. I've found that a lot of these are very RPG-focused and play more like text-adventure games than open roleplaying environments, but they all have RP elements to them, some more than others.

If you're looking to build something like this, might I recommend Evennia. It's a Python framework for building text-based multiplayer spaces and does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. I've been extremely impressed at how quickly I've been able to pick it up and start building things in it. I'm not an expert, as I've only started playing around with it recently, but they have a thriving community of developers and the documentation is great.

You can access these very easily with a client like Mudlet. This comes preloaded with a few connections to some of the bigger MUDs that are still running, and I've found that a lot of these communities are quite friendly.

If you end up playing around with building something like this I would love to hear more about it!

Woawww im suprised anyone knew what i was talking abt, thanks man! I spent like all day trying to setup tintin++ on my freaking linux pc. Its just so cool imo, i got introduced to it thru someone offhanddedly mentioning smtn abt furryMUCK, and i got on it and was blasted to heaven with such an interesting community with an interesting medium, i can only imagine the amount of virtual lives literally lived out here, just because of the sheer amount of like i guess emotional depth to how ppl do some serious ass furry roleplay. I learned recently how to setup a server manually becuz of a college course and now i really really want to make some kind of unique private chat with some of my friends, and this is like perfect in a really really weird way. just like a pretty weird setup to those i introduce to the server lol, especially since im dealing with non-technical ppl. not much to do about intuitive UX design.