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Previous thread here! What the hell is a MUD? MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon (not the sexy kind of dungeon, usually). They're sort of a descendant of text adventure games and a precursor to the modern MMO; for example, Everquest owes a lot to one of the old MUD codebases called DikuMUD. There's a lot of other variants on MUDs out there to this day, like MUSHes and MUXes and MOOs but they're all basically the same thing, a text-based multi-user game. There's still a lot of different kinds of MUDs out there, for all that it's an aging style of game with dwindling playerbases across the board. Some are pretty much just chatrooms, and some are solely player-versus-player arenas. Some are 24/7 orgies but no one wants to hear about your six-titted ERP cow fursona in this thread. Some of them, though, are much like a multi-player persistent tabletop game. You've got your setting, and your GM staff to facilitate you doing cool things, and your people pretending to be an elf. There's still a lot of people out there who play these things, and with playerbases being what they are, it can be kind of hard to find some cool people to play with, which is why this thread exists. How do I play one? MUDs are played via telnet. You can use actual telnet if you're crazy, but most people recommend getting a MUD client. If you have a MUD in mind you want to try, their website will often recommend clients you can try or even have plugins that make playing more convenient, but here's a few to get you started: MUDlet is actively maintained and has cool scripting and mapping features-- not something you'll need right out the gate if you've never played a MUD before, but it's good to have for you to grow into. MUSHclient has a lot of fans too, and has a bunch of different features and plugins you can use. It also has some very powerful scripting support. cMUD isn't free, but is sort of the sequel to one of the most popular MUD clients of old, zMUD. These aren't the only ones, but it's a good start. Basically any good client will do the same things for you, so it's just a question of what user interface you like the best. No graphics? Why would anyone play this poo poo? MUD worlds are frequently more freeform and customizable than graphical games and a lot of people prefer being able to sift through prose and build the world in their own head. Many games at least make a gesture at being roleplay-enforced, though the focus and strictness of this will vary quite a bit from game to game and some drop the pretense entirely. They're also more accessible to people with certain disabilities, in particular the visually impaired, and the nature of the medium makes it ideal if you are, say, loving around at work. Most of them are also free to play and are extremely complex mechanically considering they're coded almost exclusively by volunteers. One of the main appeals is generally going to be to people who enjoy creative writing, improvised roleplay, and interacting with players or scenery through prose, and it's been my favorite hobby since I was a wee babby for those reasons. It is also great for people who like loving with numbers a lot or optimizing poo poo through scripts that play the game for you. The comparison to an always-around tabletop game is really pretty apt. You can go log in any time you want and screw around with stabbing orcs or drinking in taverns or building spaceships with other people with too much free time just about any time you like, and you get to build stories with other characters as you do it. Wait, you said most are free? People sometimes pay for this? Most MUDs are in fact free to pour as much of your sad life as you want into it and are staffed by volunteers, though many of these MUDs at least shill for donations to offset operating costs. Some offer considerable in-game perks for "donating" despite being nominally free-to-play (Achaea is the most famous example of this), and some flat-out have a subscription fee you need to pay to play them at all. The latter are ridiculously popular as MUDs go and have some truly obscene subscription schemes so it's clearly working for some people. How do I find a MUD to play on? There's two main listing sites for MUDs you could look at. The Mud Connector is good mostly for being able to narrow searches insanely specifically. Top MUD Sites looks like a warez and porn aggregator from the 90s but it's been around forever and just about everyone lists their game there. The actual rankings are mostly a function of how many people the admins can badger into clicking a vote button so don't hold it as a quality indicator, but hey, better than nothing, and if nothing else it gives you an idea of what kind of population a MUD has. You could also try one of the cool MUDs listed in this OP or ask in the thread if there's something specific you are looking for. What is this text-based crap? How do I move and stab things? MUDs are generally controlled with caveman-speak commands, though a lot of them have their own little oddities in terms of how they parse commands. Most will start you off in a tutorial area, so it's wise to go through them as completely as possible. In general, though, things that will always work are: You can move by typing a cardinal direction: north, south, east, west, whatever. You can usually abbreviate to n, e, s, w. LOOK will look at things. If you don't tell the game what you're looking at, you'll look at the room you're in. If you see an apple, you could type look apple, or look at apple, depending on the game. i/inv/inventory will tell you what you're carrying. INFO, EXP, and/or STATS should tell you useful things about your character and their progression. HELP typed alone will pretty much always bring up the root help menu, and from there it should guide you into looking up help on specific topics; this is going to be pretty critical if you've never played a MUD before, or if you're playing one that's appreciably different from what you're used to. Also, most MUDs are gonna be hard-up for newbies these days, so it shouldn't be too hard to get help with commands if something is only intuitive to people who've been playing for years. Ask for help frequently and often. People love newbies and will baby you, seriously. How about some recommendations, then? I and a few other goons play and build for Avendar which is a heavy roleplay-enforced PvP-encouraged MUD. Good if you want to ally yourselves with cosmic good or evil and go wail on some people and steal their poo poo. Discworld is based on the book series of the same name by Terry Pratchett and features one of the largest in-game maps of any game I'm personally aware of. A lot of the classes are really robust and there are guilds for things like thieves and assassins to get involved doing stuff with. EmpireMUD is built and run by goon FordPRefectLL. Last I heard it was heavy in development but still receiving updates. Lots of goons are into BatMUD. No roleplay, no PvP, lots of numbers, pretty neat world and a custom client. Icesus is a spinoff that I don't think has a working website right now but a lot of goons play that one too from time to time. StarWars MUD which is exactly what it sounds like. Aardwolf is a very old MUD with a pretty stable playerbase. Armageddon is another really old one. This one has permadeath; if you die once you lose your character. Setting is Dark Sun with the serial numbers filed off. Simutronics and Iron Realms are the two companies still running pay-to-play MUDs. They are both intensely exploitative of both staff and players and employ a lot of pay-to-win stuff, and there is a whole galaxy of issues with the games related to those things. That said they are still super popular and there are plenty of people in this thread that have played at least one of them for the curious. Got a MUD you want to shill? 
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Nov 5, 2019 04:00
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I will second recommendations for Avendar and Discworld MUD. They are a lot of fun. I've also sunk some decent time into Icesus and BatMUD, but I've never really been able to stick with them in any meaningful way. I sunk many and hour and dollar into IRE games, but I can't really recommend them, but they do have some very interesting mechanics. Simu and its greasy tendrils sucked many dollars and many hours from me. I regret more of it than I remember fondly. The nostalgia is strong sometimes, but it is a silly place. But long live Modus Operandi! There are many others I played over the years that have long since gone defunct or become ghostlands. I think maybe MUME might still be a thing? If you're really into Tolkien. Whatever, just play those first two.
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Nov 5, 2019 04:45
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I've been playing Medievia on and off for a couple decades but I can't recommend it at all because the player base has been dead as gently caress for years and the dude who runs it is a delusional weirdo rear end in a top hat that never updates anything. That's my MUD story.
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Nov 5, 2019 04:48
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Isn't that the guy who thinks he's jesus? anyway i'm one of the people who runs avendar. we are slowly dragging this game kicking and screaming into this century.
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Nov 5, 2019 05:11
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neongrey posted:Isn't that the guy who thinks he's jesus? I definitely remember him claiming that if Jesus was around today he would make a MUD. Dude is bizarre.
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Nov 5, 2019 05:13
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I'd also recommend Legends of the Jedi as a MUD that I've dabbled with over the years, until I realize I don't have enough free time to really play it properly. I know a few other goons have played/wizzed there as well. There's also Armageddon which I don't know that I'd recommend per se, but it's probably the most "hardcore" RP server I've ever played on. It's Dark Sun with the serial numbers filed off, and brings with it a lot of the goods and bads of Dark Sun (including that infamous sheen of greasy nerd sexuality that has a habit of creeping its way into games like this... so be forewarned I guess). Again a massive time investment though, and the last time I played there were one or two admins that held... strange opinions. Otherwise I'll second/third SWMud, as it was my first MUD back in my teenage years and still the only one that I occasionally log in to, and the only one where I've bothered to friend up with people I met in-game. It's by far the most relaxed and solo-friendly of the MUDs I've played, with basically no RP whatsoever. Basically just grinding combat, exploring, etc. Sadly the community is way smaller than it was back in its heyday. Drone fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 05:46
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extremely proud that my stupid title suggestion made the cut.
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Nov 5, 2019 05:52
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Reene posted:The Simutronics MUDs are still around. Moving on. I know you have your history with Dragonrealms but you should either be neutral about it or just don't mention it. Anyway, suggest you throw Aardwolf in the list too. It's fairly popular and robust.
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Nov 5, 2019 07:23
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I don't suppose ConQUEST or something like it has ever resurfaced? I loved that most builds became available without a lot of time investment and you could change things up so freely.
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Nov 5, 2019 07:29
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totalnewbie posted:I know you have your history with Dragonrealms but you should either be neutral about it or just don't mention it. Nah. Discouraging people from DR is probably cool and good at this point. I don't think any of the games I used to play except DR are still up. ~20 years ago I played a ton of Wheel of Time MUDs, mostly Broken Seals, but it is long dead and IIRC the primary admin Esyvel ran off with the codebase so nobody could spin up a successor. Shame, because it had some neat mechanics modded into a ROM codebase and a huge 3000+ room map that a number of my buddies in college helped build parts of. Working channeling/blademastery/etc was great at the time. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 11:16
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Why is everyone so salty on Dragonrealms? I have tons of nostalgia for that game and probably played it on and off for decades. Is it one of those things where if you were a super high level character it got boring or something? Despite all my play time, I never got too high level, but exploring the rich world and the rhythm of hunting until your skills mindlocked, then going back and sitting around disarming boxes and talking with people at the empath guild was a good rhythm.
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Nov 5, 2019 14:37
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Because it does have genuine problems like anything else. But simply, MUDs somehow always bring out the crazy in people /shrug totalnewbie fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 14:55
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Reene posted:A Tempest Season is a spiritual successor to an old defunct MUD called Dragon's Gate with a lot of improvements on that gameplay style that is really actively maintained. Roleplay-enforced, PvP acceptable but not really sought out. I also play this and I like it a lot. What level of RP-enforced are we talking? I do well with "PC is expected to have a personality and differentiate between IC and OOC", but PCs with pre-game backstories that anyone is expected to care about absolutely bore the poo poo out of me. The blood shaman class does look interesting, though.
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Nov 5, 2019 15:59
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Simutronics is an intensely exploitative company wrt how it treats their employees, whom are nearly all contractors paid pennies an hour if they're paid at all, and has an incredibly pernicious culture of abuse infusing it which, I'll grant, is not unique to it. That's all I'll really say about it; if you want to play DR or GS or shill them in this thread go hogwild and I hope your experiences with the games are better than mine, but no, I'm not going to stan them myself despite being a decades-long veteran of both. I mentioned them because they're old and big and still making money in tyool 2019. I'll start adding Armageddon et al to the OP later as it is a big pain on mobile to do that but thank you for making those suggestions!
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Nov 5, 2019 16:21
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Reene posted:I would be remiss if I didn't mention Iron Realms which isn't a MUD in itself but rather a whole halo of different styles of games running on their codebase and subscription model. Lusternia lost its producer and creator recently, so I'm not sure what the situation would be there at this stage. Achaea has the largest playerbase and active team, Aetolia is Aetolia, Imperian is completely free at this stage iirc, Starmourn ate glass, and Midkemia Online shut down. Eiderann fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 17:10
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i wish something like wayfar 1444 would come back again. that was a really unique game and i would love to play something like it (or even sci-fi/exploration heavy)
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Nov 5, 2019 17:19
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Reene posted:Simutronics is an intensely exploitative company wrt how it treats their employees, whom are nearly all contractors paid pennies an hour if they're paid at all, and has an incredibly pernicious culture of abuse infusing it which, I'll grant, is not unique to it. That's all I'll really say about it; if you want to play DR or GS or shill them in this thread go hogwild and I hope your experiences with the games are better than mine, but no, I'm not going to stan them myself despite being a decades-long veteran of both. I mentioned them because they're old and big and still making money in tyool 2019. Simu is far from the model company but they're not running sweat shops. The fact that the RP you event you tried to plan didn't lead to the outcome you wanted - but did lead to the outcome that should have happened - shouldn't detract from giving other people a chance to check it out. If you think they deserve money because they're old and big then give them a fair mention. If you think their business practices make them a company that doesn't deserve people's business then don't even mention them. But don't push your salt and bitterness about the fact that RP happened and you didn't like it onto everyone else. Learn to compartmentalize. I'm not saying you need to give them a glowing review. Just give it a basic description and a link like the other MUDs or don't mention it at all. Keep your own personal drama out of it. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 5, 2019 18:12
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I genuinely do not know what RP event you're referring to. None of the events I was party to (which were frankly the highlights of my time playing, especially my last stint) had anything to do with why I left. It was everything to do with the abuse and exploitation inflicted and perpetuated by both the owner and certain staff members. If you want to post your own glowing review of the games be my guest, you clearly have a positive attachment to them. I won't do it myself for reasons I already laid out, and I'm not interested in arguing any more about it honestly. Reene fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 18:38
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Parachute posted:i wish something like wayfar 1444 would come back again. that was a really unique game and i would love to play something like it (or even sci-fi/exploration heavy) rip wayfar On a related note, I really miss the golden days of hellmoo.
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Nov 5, 2019 18:39
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Eiderann posted:Lusternia lost its producer and creator recently, so I'm not sure what the situation would be there at this stage. Achaea has the largest playerbase and active team, Aetolia is Aetolia, Imperian is completely free at this stage iirc, Starmourn ate glass, and Midkemia Online shut down. Honestly "lost" might be strong. Said producer had been causing problems outright and culturally for... ever. Lusternia recently went to a free to play model like Imperian, and the producer leaving is almost certainly part of that change.
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Nov 5, 2019 18:58
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totalnewbie posted:Keep your own personal drama out of it. This has never happened in the history of any MUD
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Nov 5, 2019 19:02
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CaPensiPraxis posted:Honestly "lost" might be strong. Said producer had been causing problems outright and culturally for... ever. Lusternia recently went to a free to play model like Imperian, and the producer leaving is almost certainly part of that change. Ah, really? I had no horse in the Lusternia race, but I thought he was a majority shareholder for the game so I'm not sure how that all went down.
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Nov 5, 2019 19:04
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Eiderann posted:Ah, really? I had no horse in the Lusternia race, but I thought he was a majority shareholder for the game so I'm not sure how that all went down. Yeah, I mean: no one who knows for sure is telling, but the goodbye posts read like corporate speak for "we had some disagreements [about pay] and I 'have to leave', might be back to do some things [if they pay me as contractor]." The game being the producer's personal baby caused a lot of problems with sacred cows, some absolute tantrums when players pointed these out, having the person in charge not really understanding the extant mechanics, etc. With the retirement of the original coder and one of the more caustic player admins a few years back, more control over the day to day was ceded to those paid coders and things got progressively better. Practically the day after the producer left a handful of rear end backwards mechanics and policies were removed.
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Nov 5, 2019 19:25
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Anyone know what's up with UOSSM now besides it being dead? From what I'm reading on the wiki quests are now called missions, and a bunch of the hidden class quests now have new missions? If the qinfo I remember and wrote down (plus the leak) still don't get me the good classes, I'm def not returning. I was thinking about getting back into it...
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Nov 5, 2019 20:32
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18 Character Limit posted:This has never happened in the history of any MUD Hahaha yes, well, totalnewbie posted:But simply, MUDs somehow always bring out the crazy in people /shrug
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Nov 5, 2019 21:49
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totalnewbie posted:Hahaha yes, well, You're trying awfully hard to pretend that you're not importing drama from DR while demanding the suppression of negative opinions about the game's developers, crazy person. Perhaps you could focus on a different line of your red text, like your tattoos or nationality and citizenship. e: vvv - I saw your reply before you removed it. It's hilarious yet sad that you think the company's "non-unique culture of abuse" (your own words) is an argument in support of your position. Hello Sailor fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 22:12
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You know what, sure, fine, whatever.
totalnewbie fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 22:28
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Is it true that rear end in a top hat guy who raised the price of medications and was holding the Wu Tang album hostage played Dragonrealms?
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Nov 5, 2019 23:45
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This thread got me to log into one of my old WoT MUDs last night, Sea of Storms. Sadly, it's unplayable at this point, because getting out of the introductory area requires Imm interaction, and all of them have wandered off and left it running in the dark. It's amazing how fast the old syntax comes back, though.
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Nov 6, 2019 00:25
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A Strange Aeon posted:Is it true that rear end in a top hat guy who raised the price of medications and was holding the Wu Tang album hostage played Dragonrealms? Boy, is it ever. And nobody - and I mean nobody - was sad when he got banned.
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Nov 6, 2019 01:16
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The last MUD I put a lot of time into aside from like Discworld or Unofficial Squaresoft MUD was called Aber Phoenix, which was an insane game. It is apparently not around anymore. It had like 120 quest points worth of coded quests and progression was reincarnation based. In order to reincarnate you had to level your character to level 50 and complete a certain number of available quest points based on how many times you had reincarnated. There were also resets every 12 hours or so which reset the position of every item in the MUD and also reset the completion status of every quest area. There were a decent variety of classes, like Mage, Warrior, Ranger (I think?), thief, necromancer, cleric, druid, and maybe some others I forgot. Each class got unique abilities not available to other classes and when you reincarnated you got to choose a single ability from your class to keep forever along with a trophy item which was usually something that you'd wear that would give you some extra stat points you couldn't get anywhere else. You basically had to learn the quest solutions and the spawn locations of good armor and weapons because one of the highest QP quests required a ton of fighting against really strong enemies - There were quests based on Wheel of Time, Lone Wolf, Heart of Darkness, and a bunch of others. A lot of the quests would give out powerful weapons and armor or consumables as quest rewards as well. You could also sacrifice items for money and exp to level up faster. What was really interesting about AberPhoenix was that you were allowed to play 2 characters at once. Most people who played didn't think this was good for anything but my friend and I thought different. We would both log in all 4 of our characters and I made a bunch of scripts and triggers that allowed us to remote control our own alt characters and each others' via whispers in game. This came in really handy on the postman quest where you had like 15 minutes to deliver random letters to npcs throughout the game world. There were certain spots where you could park an alt who had the ability to summon another character and speed yourself up tenfold. We'd run it on one character at a time and park the other 3 at advantageous spots and just use them as taxis. I think the reward was a ton of exp worth of loot or something so we'd run that quest a lot. Then there was a complete noncombat quest which was 100% rote interactions and rewards a 5000 xp gem and a candle that burned for like 10 minutes and made you unable to fight at all, including aggro monsters not attacking you. I wrote a script to run that quest in about 30 seconds and as long as we sacrificed all the rewards it would reset after 15 minutes. Plus you could use your second character as a body blocker to skip over difficult fights. You just run the alt in to take a few hits and then flee while the other character runs through the room. So much abuse of the multi characters. We had some other tricks I don't remember any longer because it was like 16 years ago. I think I made it to like the 23rd or so reincarnation on both of my characters and I think my friend was similar. Then we both started playing discworld and I guess stopped playing AberPhoenix. totalnewbie posted:Boy, is it ever. And nobody - and I mean nobody - was sad when he got banned. I had some good times playing Dragonrealms. I got super in trouble with the GMs there for unattended scripting. And I once stole a warrior mage's pet talisman after I cast Confuse or Stun on him to make him drop it. Then I ran him and the other war mages tracking me all around 2 provinces playing keep away while mostly hidden by refraction field. With the same Warrior Mage we did some shady PKing where I'd Stun the victim while he'd fire breath them and they'd burn to death and we'd have our other friend "Come along" and promise to watch their stuff while they departed and returned then we'd steal it all. Fun times. Victorkm fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 04:40
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A Strange Aeon posted:Is it true that rear end in a top hat guy who raised the price of medications and was holding the Wu Tang album hostage played Dragonrealms? Yes. I posted about this in the last thread! quote:So turns out that Martin Shkreli guy, the CEO hedgefund bro that raised the price of HIV meds to 300 dollars a pill, actually no poo poo played DragonRealms a few years back as this insufferable rear end in a top hat named Vanmar. He got so many people angry at his wailing entitled bullshit he ended up dropping $6500 on a high level character to kill people with and promptly got permanently locked out for, of all things, sexual harassment. To this day I love telling people IRL this story.
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Nov 6, 2019 08:30
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I just searched for a MUD I used to play back in the day called PKMud and apparently it's still up but inactive. It's like PUBG the MUD, except it was created 20 years before PUBG. All players are max level, you run around the world collecting loot from weak NPCs, then run around and kill other players until there is only one left standing.
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Nov 6, 2019 09:06
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I am Nurel, a feef in Discworld, I am pretty low on skills compared to the whale players but if anyone plays and wants to I'd also love to get into MUME but last I checked its dead, like 0 players dead. That was a few years ago, though. Are there any good and active Tolkien inspired MUDS nowadays, even? PS: HELLMOO Mr. Pickles fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 09:11
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247190693_Hearts_clubs_diamonds_spades_Players_who_suit_MUDs A bit of old school for y'all.
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Nov 6, 2019 09:34
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Liquid Communism posted:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247190693_Hearts_clubs_diamonds_spades_Players_who_suit_MUDs I think I first read that 20 years ago. A classic in the genre.
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Nov 6, 2019 15:50
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Just want to give a shoutout to MUDs for making reading a part of gaming to me, not a chore. But also want to curse the maker of Achaea for basically starting microtransactions in gaming.
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Nov 6, 2019 21:02
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My first mud was Hellmoo and the ease of playing playing it compared to all other muds spoiled all my attempts to get into any others. It's a shame what it became.
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Nov 7, 2019 01:02
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Blacula posted:Just want to give a shoutout to MUDs for making reading a part of gaming to me, not a chore. I think there's probably something to that, same with learning how to type, since back when I started playing Dragonrealms on AOL I was still in elementary school and having to type everything with no knowledge of macros probably helped me learn.
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Nov 7, 2019 01:11
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A Strange Aeon posted:I think there's probably something to that, same with learning how to type, since back when I started playing Dragonrealms on AOL I was still in elementary school and having to type everything with no knowledge of macros probably helped me learn. I played for years just using a regular command-line telnet client. I had to type fast or else incoming messages would interrupt what I was typing and make it more or less impossible to change what I had already typed--it was either commit and finish typing, or hit Ctrl-U to kill the line and give up.
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Nov 7, 2019 01:14
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