What is ArmageddonMUD & What is a Roleplaying Intensive MUD?

[mansa]

What actually is ArmageddonMUD?

What is a Roleplaying Intensive MUD?

[mansa]

ArmageddonMUD is a text-based roleplaying game.

What does that mean?

This is the game:

It's text!  In a window.  It looks... borrrrring?




Here's some help with what the game is trying to portray to you:

and



When you type commands into the game, the game responds.

then




That's it?

That's it.


No, seriously.  That's it?

Yes.  The mechanical or coded aspects of this game is 100% based upon typing information into the game, and the game responding.  You don't need a mouse.  You don't need a high-end graphics card.  All you need is the ability to connect to the server, and to be able to type information in.
There are no graphics.

Basically, it's like we took a typical pen and paper gaming session, and put it into a persistent world, with the dice rolls automated.  There are thousands of commands you can type into the game, that the game will respond to.   North, South, Get, Put, Say, Kill, Flee, Emote.  I could go on and on, but if you can think of a verb, it probably has a corresponding action the game is built to handle.

Since a MUD type game is designed around text, people have compared them to living novels.   All the room descriptions, NPC descriptions, and weapon descriptions can be modified by the staff of the game, and the world can reflect changes that players have made in it.   One of the examples in ArmageddonMUD is that a player caused a riot to happen, and eventually one of the popular taverns in the city was burned down.  The next day, when players tried to go to that same tavern, it was STILL BURNED DOWN.  Player action can change the environment and the game world! 


When you make a character, your character have a set of skills and abilities, a certain number of hit points (that regenerate over time if injured), and you the player has the ability to express a line of text that would display to all the players in the same room.  You can write, with the most intricate detail, how your character is looking around a busy tavern.  You can write, with fancy flowing words, how your character visibly expresses pleasure after drinking the finest of wines.  You can write, as your character displaying anguish and pain, the sadness they experience as their mate has been murdered.


There are some logs that players have saved and submitted to the website.  You can read up here:
http://armageddon.org/original/type/Logs
Most of them have been edited to remove a lot of the commands that the players themselves typed into the game.


What is Roleplaying Intensive (RPI) ?

Roleplaying Intensive or RPI is a subgenre of MUDs.  The major characteristics are:
a) the focus on your playable character (PC) being an actor you inhabit inside a playable world, typically with their own goals and characteristics that are different from yourself.
b) the removal of global chat channels and global trade channels to talk with other players, so that you cannot communicate with everyone playing the game.  You can only communicate with the other characters in the same room as your character.
c) the actions and conversations that happen in game are 100% about roleplaying your character within the world. 
d) Out-of-Character communication is limited to the Out-of-Character command (OOC), which is used infrequently but is used when the scene needs to be paused and clarified.
e) There is a group of staff members that help facilitate storylines that are created by the players and these staff members have the ability to inhabit various NPCs to roleplay along with you.



Finally, though it's not a requirement to the Roleplaying Intensive genre, ArmageddonMUD has something called perma-death, or permanent death.   When your character reaches -11 hit points, they die, and they are forever dead.  You cannot make a new character and join up with your old friends, you need to make a new character who lives a new life.  This is by design, and it makes something interesting happen in the game - decisions your characters make have a lasting affect on the storylines created.  Your characters may last a single day, or they may last a full year, but at some point they will die, and you will have a chance to start all over and create a new storyline.