So we've found our way to whatever online roleplaying havens we now call "home," but where did it start for you? How did you *first* get interested in playing characters that weren't *you*? Did it stem from an RL interest in acting or writing or just a desire to escape reality for a little while?

In my case: I've been writing stories that caught up real people I knew since I was a kid in high school. It's actually how I avoided getting beaten up much of the time, given that back then I was small and easy pickings for bullies. Bullies aren't quite as daunting to me now, but I still have fun weaving stories around other people.

So, how'd you catch the bug?

I'm not sure where the first roots took hold, perhaps it was "Choose Your Own Adventure" Books, perhaps D&D, perhaps it was always wanting to be a superhero. In any event, I now am an IMP of the only MUD I've ever called home: Aabahran, the Forsaken Lands or "FL" to those who love her.



And, damn it, I still want to be a superhero.

I got started in MUDs when I was showed one by a neighbor in college. I didn't really take too much interest as the one he showed me wasn't that good. For a few years, I tried to find one that was interesting (and to remember how to log back into them...*grin*...I wasn't the most technologically-adept back then).

Started playing a H&S about two years later, but after a couple years of that, I grew tired of dealing with the immature and childishly-petty people on it and quit. By that time, I was seeking something more substantial than just typing "kill" and had for a year or so been playing an RPI MUD. I enjoyed the depth of designing and role-playing a character instead of just running around killing stuff.

I've always been a creative person with a pretty good imagination. I used to write (and may take it up again) and have probably designed anywhere between 500-600 worlds for use in stories as well as just for the fun of designing everything that composes a unique and original culture. Some of them were designed to be MUD worlds, some were designed for stories. Either way, most of the time, I didn't finish them completely, though about three or four dozen of them are probably designed with more detail than 99% of the MUD worlds out there. Until I started my recent MUD project, I've never before taken the time to actually turn one of them into a MUD. It's not a 100% original world as it has a very close real-life parallel, but it is rather comprehensive in total design of every aspect I can think of. Hopefully, it will be something that appeals to players, at least the player-type I'm trying to target.

Take care,

Jason

It probally all started with a childhood friend who was older than me. I remember clearly running around in a field with him and a few others, and I'd be the princess! or the princess captured by aliens! or the villian aliens capturing the princess!! And it was the grandest time.

This morphed as I got older into plays, first high school plays and then college plays. And then I had a degree and started getting acting jobs with it. AND THEN I married a wonderful man, had an angel child and the walls of my house proceeded to close in on me.

So I turned to my trusty computer, remembering my brief stint with D&D. I did a search for 'roleplaying sprite' and found Turning Point Mud. An RP Mud! I thought to myself, how fascinating! I had had a short affair in the past with H&S, but it was brief and I'm not the witty type to chitty chat on channels. Well, anyhow I was hooked and when TP went down I floated over to another mud and am now doing the RP two-step.

I think there were a number of things that started it for me, anything from the Choose your own adventure books, to Myst, and then several fantasy authors. I was interested in other worlds, and wished that I could be a part of that. Myst particularly appealed to me, the idea that someone could create an entire world within one book (if anyone has read the novels, this concept is further developed and explained).

To be honest, I used to make fun of the kids who would sit in the computer lab in high school and type away at their text based games, but through a series of events, I realized that this was the kind of thing I'd wanted all along.

I think part of Brody's original question was how did we get interested in playing characters that differed from ourselves... I think it might be a dislike of my own flaws (as long as we're being honest here), it could be that I just like the distraction, or it might be that I always wanted to play a character that started on paper, but sprang to life in a world that could be very real. The stories I used to write are now possible, within a set of boundaries (the kind of game I'm playing). For me, that makes all the difference.

Forgive the cliché but for myself it all began with the Hobbit. As a young child my speech developed somewhat slowly so a teacher suggested to my family to increase my amount of free reading. My sister gave me a copy of the Hobbit the dreams of wizards, dragons, dwarves, and an appreciation for the art of storytelling developed soon after. From that point on I have become obsessed with the telling of a good tale. Be it tragedy, comedy, drama, or suspense I love it all.

I think it all started with Greek mythology for me and then spread to other world mythologies. I was very, very, very intrigued by what could have inspired people to invent these great stories and what these great stories represented. In addition, I've always wondered how these stories managed to last for thousands of years as compared to the ones that must surely have been lost.

Then, I got involved in text computer gaming. (Zork and other Infocom games, anyone?) What an innovative way to tell a story! I have to admit that "Plundered Hearts" was my favorite Infocom game. I was really interested in what the heroine (the person you played) was up to and what motivated her. Then came King's Quests and Might and Magic!

Then I started writing fictional stories in school and reading eveyrthing I could get my hands on. Next came college with a Bio and English major and IRC! Then, finally, in law school, I found MUDs via some of my real life friends. and I logged onto Threshold. So, my first (and current) mud was an RP enforced mud with a crazy admin. I jumped straight into RPing, and learned to mud around that concept. It was a pretty nice relief to be able to roleplay without someone saying, "Hold on. I gotta go get some Cheetohs." which is what I experienced commonly with my DnD group or my IRC group. (Not that I don't still love table-top gaming.)

The end!

I was playing Threshold. Where i got this name from, when I found the body of "ack" So I "Sac ack," thought it sounded fun, so I entered it into another website and mispelled it to "sacac." Anyways, watching some of the players Rp really got me into it. Morrowind just wasn't doing it for me and so I I tried threshold, played it for a month or so and decided to move on. Been addicted to Crackageddon ever since, but Threshold will still be in my thoughts.

*bump to get more answers*

I got a GEnie account back in '86. Played a space colonization/battle game called "Stellar Emperor" published by Kesmai (it was a better version of Maga Wars III). The game withered and died, so I started playing Simutronics' latest offering, a game called "Orb Wars," which was the best online multiplayer game ever made. I gave Gemstone III a try when it went live, and it hooked me. But it never really left beta, and that, coupled with a 24-level ceiling, Sim's split with ICE and the influx of AOL snerts, drove me to a great little game called "Legends of Futures Past" developed by Novalink. Nova emphasized roleplay and maintained a great atmosphere for it, the place where I learned how.

Pretty weird. I guess it started with reading Jaws. That because Jaws was my first novel.

No, it goes back to the first book I remember ever reading that had no pictures - "The Biggest Bear on Earth". And I'll tell you why. The Biggest Bear was a story told without any sort of conversational intercourse at all of the inner life of an Alaskan brown bear, or Kodiak (They apparently didn't call them that back then). It was more or less my first experience in really losing myself in a story and taking on another role, even if only by virtue of being led through it by someone else. I wish I could find that book.

From there, predictably, Tolkien, D&D. Then GURPS, and then sort of in a parallel fashion, SPI hex based war simulations and Avalon Hills "Diplomacy" plust rpg's dragging me inexorably towards miniatures, which culminated in a great deal of time and money spent on the now largely defunct "Warhammer Epic" or something like that, which was Warhammer's answer to mechs and which I found supremely more fun to play because of the elegance of the system making a lot of the paperwork unecessary.

I got out of the Navy in '93 and immediately tracked down the 'internet' I had been hearing about. MOO's were my first distraction, and coding a few objects on BayMOO made me think for ages that sooner or later I would get into a mud or MOO and code a lot of stuff, but alas, so far I have never done so.

I played Ancient Anguish, which is still alive and kicking if not any longer truly at the cutting edge as I percieved them to be back then. Due to a spate of mass mud-mail advertising invasions perpetrated by the admin, I too fell into the Threshold trap, and played there off and on for years, but there's something more than a bit off there, and what with it being pay to.. keep the admin off your back or whatever, well... Let's not get off topic. I've tried dozens of muds now. I discovered MUSH'ing just in the last three or so years, and enjoyed it a lot more than I would have anticipated, but I do prefer to have the game to play along with my rp.

Coffeemud has been promising, and I should probably check back in there more often than I do, but right now I am addicted to Accursed Lands, a sort of spinoff of Dartmud (which still exists and is as abominably hard to wedge yourself into as ever, it seems). I love it, but the complexity of what they are trying to achieve seems to keep it in perpetual Beta. Still, as an online community, it is my favorite to date.

Yeah, I also enjoyed drama in high school, was in several plays and a couple of musicals. I like writing, but lack the discipline to crank out lots of stories and even so much as save them. I have a collection of my least embarassing poems that I have transferred faithfully from hard drive to hard drive for over a decade now. =) Muds are my outlet for my daydreamy, creative side I guess.

My friend introduced me to mudding when I was a sophomore in highschool. At the time I diddnt have the internet so I only got to play for brief times when I did labs or was in typing.

Finally I did get the internet and played the hell out of a different mud, one with a decent balance of rp and just killing stuff.

Now I play rp muds pretty much exclusively, I love being able to create a character in a believeable world and just be them, anytime I am enjoying the game I an enjoying that world and the person I have created. It usually completely takes me out of this world.

Muding, like most gaming, is easy to just do. I just went sailing today and it takes hours to rig the sails, get the car, drive to the lake, get out in the lake, hope the winds are blowing right. Then when you are done you have to haul it all back.

In a good mud I can make a character with a story I like, play them, and if I get bored with the character or mud I can just make a new one\find a new one. Mudding is also the best extraction from life I have ever found.

My mom says I was born with an overactive imagination. I had an invisible best friend when I was three, and kept her around til I was maybe seven? Eight? Something like that. I never got into the Barbie thing, and always found reading stories more entertaining. I have always been a horrible liar, because I'd make up huge complex stories around my lies, unbelievable stories that were just so far-fetched that it was -obviously- more of a "if I had my druthers" than a "this is what really happened."

Even when we were doing the Dick and Jane stories in elementary school, I would wonder what Dick and Jane were like, outside the books. I'd make up things in my mind about their dog Spot, how he'd run away on adventures with Dick and Jane chasing after him (see Dick and Jane run after Spot. See Spot fall in a hole, and end up in China. See Jane wear her pretty new silk kimono.).

In Junior High, I had this fantasy in my head that the woods behind the local playground was a secret lair for lovers to hang out in. Sometimes I'd skip school and climb up into the playground's ENORMOUS weeping willow tree, stare out into the woods, and allow the stories to just come to me about knights and damsels in distress and dragons chasing each other through the wild strawberry bushes.

So in answer to the question - when did I get my start on roleplay, the answer is: I've been doing it for as long as I've had cognitive thought.

Bumped for more responses.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Me Too!

I got into RP playing Dungeons and Dragons. But interestingly (at least I find it interesting), I never really "got" the whole RP thing until I became the game master and decided I wanted to tell en epic story. Then I started creating characters (as opposed to just rolling dice) to help me tell it and move the plot along, and it forced the players to develop personalities of their own too.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

My story is sort of bland I guess. I started roleplaying at 12 when I was getting into Harry Potter, I liked the idea of playing a magical student for some reason. XD I had other sisters so we usually got into everything at the same time, so first we would do "live action" rp like pretending to fly on brooms and cast fake spells on each other and then we progressed into playing rp games online. The first rpg I play was Hogwartsmoo which was actually pretty fun and got you into the whole rp atmosphere really quick (since all there was to do on the game was to roleplay). So yeah, that's my story. Since then I've moved on from harrypotter and such and moved towards fantasy, but it's still pretty much all the same. ^_^

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

They Harry Potter world is extremely inspiring, imo, and I actually love it much better than I love the stories or the characters. It seems like an excellent place to start.

I know one of the books that really got me into worlds is Island of the Blue Dolphin, a story that I read when I was really young about a girl who gets stranded. Dragonsinger, by Anne McCaffrey, kind of follows the same theme. I've always been obsessed with thoughts of surviving, and I love apocalyptic scenarios. What would people do to survive? What adaptations happen? How would I survive? What would the struggle to survive be like?

Books are definitely a great inspiration for RP, and RPing lets us explore some of the struggles and hardships that we imagine. We get a more difinitive conclusion in a game than we do in real life. I know that I wondered how well I would do at Hogsworth when I was reading the book. I'd probably fail at Quidditch. :D

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

This story (and I didn't want to quote the whole thing, read it above) is a very interesting autobiography that I think would make an incredibly endearing movie (Disney or the like). If you ever get the time or inclination I encourage you to write a script. Just in reading the short paragraphs I could envision this wildly active imaginative child with her vivid stories in her own mind. Great stuff.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Lots of thread necromancy going on lately... Years of dead threads, interesting.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Well, while it's resurrected and walking the Earth, let's make use of it.:p

Gotta say I started off with graphic games, I was told about some text based things, didn't like it. Went back to graphic games, my computer got too old for graphics so I started playing Achaea. I was really confused about RP. I felt I was supposed to be myself except be a lizard... which didn't make sense. I eventually started understanding how to roleplay, and I find the more different my character is from myself, (within reason) the more I enjoy playing a character. In Achaea, the more I knew in game the more I wanted to play, however, the more I knew from the forums, the more held back I felt my RP was. I was listening to a Ustream with Jeremy Saunders (President of IRE) and he suggested to the Gods or the staff of IRE games not to read the forums, as it seems to be a place to rant about much they hated something. I'm currently in between games I guess you could say. I'm still trying to build Roleplay as I also build a slight mould for a character in IRE's Upcoming game Tears of Polaris. Already it has a quite in depth history and I enjoy posting there even though there's not much hype to try and interact with the staff for a bit of moral and a little excitement without too much pressure (though sometimes I may get a bit too excited.:rolleyes:)

So I have a bit of a question: for those who Play a MUD with a forum as most do. Do you feel your roleplay experience is better when you do post/lurk or when you you stay completely away from anything that could cross over the IC OOC line (Forums, Metagaming IRC, OOC channel)s?

Edit: Tried to clarify a couple of things.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

My thoughts on this are written in a help file on New Worlds - Ateraan which is called help gaor or Golden Rules of Roleplaying. Most of our best players follow this:

Help on the Golden Advice of Roleplay (GAOR)
--------------------------------------------

Many have asked me during times of frustration and even times of enjoyment, how to find a better niche in the art of roleplaying.

My answer is the answer I've found both for myself and from watching some of the best roleplayers and some of the players that have the most fun with the least amount of frustration.

1) Get rid of IM, ICQ, or any other IRC (Internet Relay Chat) during gameplay

2) Tune chat out 95% of the time you play, but always when you are in a roleplay situation or event.

3) Refrain as best as you can from ever going to Customs, except briefly and only for very important reasons.

4) KEEP it IC no matter what.

5) Never talk ooc in tells, ever.

6) And probably most important: Remember that it is just a GAME.

Follow these suggestions and you will enter into a whole new world of roleplay. A fantastic world.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Wow! I haven't gotten that much of an RP immersion rush since... ever! Thank you.:D

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Know what you mean about Achaea, its RP has been gone for years. Now even demanding RP will get you punished and the gods will do nothing about it. If you want RP stay away from Achaea, lots of other really good ones out there though and some of the IRE games have decent RP but not Achaea.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

For graphical games, I completely stay away from forums. They really are nothing more than cries for nerfs or buffing and flame wars.

I feel that it is a bit different for MUDs. Forums are excellent ways for people to share RP ideas, suggest events, ponder new characters, and find like-minded roleplayers. Let's face it, roleplayers were not created equally. There are some roleplayers who simply are not as good at it as others, but they try really, really hard. Then, there are roleplayers who simply come by it naturally. They shine in every event, scripted or spontaneous, and they engage other characters in multiple plots and storylines. Encouraging and allowing both to mingle and help each other can result in very beautiful things.

I had been sucked into the mindset that "good" RP comes only from spontaneous RP without scripts or plans. Having played MUSHes and discussed excellent MUSHes with some of our players, I find myself more drawn to cooperative and staged RP where whole scenes are planned in advance, coding is done in advanced to support these events, and they are basically run by a combination of players and administrators. Forums can aid greatly in planning things like this, and many players will actually plan negative consequences to their own characters in order to further the RP. While it is staged for some, players who weren't part of the planning always get involved, and then change whatever was planned into something more spontaneous. The storyline is cohesive because it was planned, but then it is also organic because it evolves as more and more people get involved.

Because of the nature of the type of games we make, there will always be a bit of meta-gaming and OOC chatter. People play multiplayer games to socialize in addition to playing a game. I think it's very important to make it clear to players that they go OOC at their own risk, and that going OOC with IC information in an RP enforced environment can and will likely ruin their fun in the long run.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

In my case I'd say that it was R. A. Salvatore's "The Crystal Shard" that first really brought me into "fantasy worlds". I read the book in what must have been my Freshman or Sophomore year in High School, then several others in the series. As I did, I began to recall bits and pieces of other fantasy stuff I'd been exposed to subtly growing up, Tolkien mostly.

While still in High School I began creating my own fantasy games and dabbling in Dungeons and Dragons source books to learn what was needed to make something complete enough to really be usable. That turned into a D&D group that soon disbanded, however I was inducted into a new group led by a friend's older brother, and soon found myself gaming weekly with guys ten years older than myself who had been playing since the days of monochrome source books and chits rather than dice.

My first MUD experience was through a friend of a friend's horrid attempt at starting a MUD (no clue what codebase it even was, but it sucked). I was then shown "A Good MUD" for Role-Playing. Harshlands. The game was in its first year when I came aboard. Those who know my MUD background know that I became the second director of HL, later founded Forever's End, and was involved in a few nowhere projects before founding the RPIMUD.com website.

I began writing again around that time, and have since acquired a literary agent to represent my work and am waiting for the manuscript to sell. (It's an industry that truly crawls along at a glacial pace).

Since then I had the fortune of meeting Matt Adcock and together we founded the Binary Forge and began work on our first project, Maiden Desmodus.

I remain a big supporter of text-based role-playing games and am always trying to bring new people over from graphicals.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

While I don't disagree entirely with this, I think pre-planned roleplay can become too scripted and in the end lose some lustre if too many are involved. What I mean is that planning out an event where everyone knows exactly what is going to happen can be less than exciting. However, if the staff (or a group of players) creates and event that suprises the other players in an innovative and exciting fashion that is seemingly spontaneous roleplay, I think this can work.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

I made a forum account here just to answer this thread!
Since I was a little kid, I've liked reading. I read books much higher than my 'age-level', and some teachers and such were a bit concerned about that. I've always loved fantasy novels, having had a fascination with medieval times since I was a baby.
Also since I was little, I have loved video games. Pretty much since my hands were large enough to grasp the controls of an Amstrad Pc or PS1, I have been gaming.
So, a few years ago, I was trying to find games to play on the computer, (A very dodgy, outdated computer) and after I crashed my brother's computer several times, I stopped trying to download flashy 3d things, and turned to browser-based games. No graphical MMos really worked, so I had a long period of time suffering at the hands of identical bland, clicking text-based games, like those ones on facebook, only worse.
Then eventually, I found MUDS! I think my first MUD was vampire wars, which wasn't really a RP mud, but I had great fun, even though I was terrible at it. None of my friends seemed to appreciate text-based gaming, which annoyed me terribly.(It still does!)
Then eventually, I found IRE's Lusternia, and was instantly hooked.
At first I was a bit hopeless at RPing (Yay, let's run around attacking fairies, and molesting high-level players because it's FUNNY!), but I was willing to learn, and I've been playing RP muds since, pretty much.
Lately I've been playing Midkemia Online. I love goblins!

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

I've always read a lot and once I found fantasy I was hooked. I started reading books in English instead of in translation in 6th or 7th grade because I couldn't wait for the translations to come out. I always wanted more of the books I really loved, and I probably started spinning "what ifs" in my head pretty early on. Never actually wrote anything down since it frustrated me that I could think up things a lot faster than I could type them down. ;)

In 95 I read the first Internet magazine in Sweden and read an article about MUDs. The idea of being able to play a MUD based on a favourite book, to step into that world, that seemed amazing. I was already a fan of adventure games, both the purely text-based and the early graphical ones, and MUDs sounded like they'd be even better. So, I sorted out a dialup connection and found myself a few MUDs. But, I've never had much patience for repetitive games of improvement, so while I had fun for a month or two, I soon started looking around for options that were more to my taste. And that's when I found MUSHes.

Over the years, I have played only book-themed MUSHes because the desire to step into a world I know and love is still the driving force behind my interest in creating characters and roleplaying them. Now I run one myself and have little time for other games, but I still get the "oh, I want to roleplay in this world" urge when I read a book I really like.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Back in the day, when I was in high school, I was big into theater and acting. I loved playing someone else. Shortly afterward, I went to college and met a girl who was a big MUDder.

She finally convinced me to log onto the MUD she played and create a character. She stood over my shoulder and watched me to make sure I did it right. When it requested a name for my new character, I typed in...

..."RabbitSlayer."

She promptly whacked me in the back of the head.

So I chose a more appropriate name, made a necromancer (hey, I loved Type O Negative) and was fooling around with it.

But what hooked me?

I went to the graveyard. Cast "Raise Dead," and an f'n skeleton came out of the ground.

Let me repeat that: A SKELETON came out of the ground and protected me!

I was hooked. I now found a new place to play a character...and I never looked back.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

*ponder*

What brought me to Muds was "Choose Your Own Adventure" and the "Hardy Boys". Yes. That.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Hardy Boys. Heh. Is that "choose your own adventure" the one that was D&D style that you had to pick the direction the adventure would go, like a magazine and you'd turn to the right page and paragraph?

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

I say the same for castle marrach, which is now a hive of cyberbullies, their cronies and a staff that simply does not care that the whole place is stagnate and dying.

And they called me delusional when I complained about it.


Darren Brimhall

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

I always had a keen imagintation, but my 'role playing' experiences started at a very early age with 'Warlock of Firetop mountain' the fighting fantasy books, then Lone Wolf. My fighting fantasy collection was quite impressive. I sold one of the rarest books (one of the Fabled Lands series) for £170 in the year 2000. Soon after it was Sphinx Adventure on the BBC Micro. I wrote my first text adventure game at the wee age of 12 on that very same bbc micro.

I digress, then it was 'Keep on the Borderlands' for basic Dungeons and Dragons, and that was pretty much my hobby sorted.

I wrote a complete uber-highlevel D&D campaign with maps and everything for my English GCSe and got top marks. My English teacher said he didnt understand any of it, but the writing was superb. 37/40 scored, and a great evening sorted when we finally played it!

Then it was Champions of Krynn on the Amiga, and so on and so forth, ultimate leading to me playing Threshold on my Apple Max 280c (the original netbook)

ON the subject of Lonewolf, I recommend anyone who has never emersed themselves in that world to look at where all the books have been converted to online (with a nice online character sheet)

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

Um, Darren. This is exactly the opposite of what Jason had mentioned.

He complained that Achaea used to have strong RP, which is now no longer enforced to the extent that asking for RP is punishable.

Your main complaint with Castle Marrach appears to be that they enforce RP so strongly that you feel it cuts into the fun of the players, and feel that they are bullying you in the way they enforce RP and consequences for that RP.

Both games may (or may not) have these problems, but you're complaining about problems from the opposite ends of the spectrum.

All your posts seem to be negative, either finding a complaint about another game, with you replying saying "Castle Marrach also has this problem!" or original posts about how terrible Castle Marrach is. There is very little to be gained from that, Castle Marrach isn't actively advertised on this site, so it's unlikely you are warning away any potential players - all you're really achieving is to help promote their brand awareness, and maybe send some interested players their way. As I've suggested before, instead of taking the negative attitude and talking about what you don't like in Castle Marrach, why not instead talk about what the problem is, why it's bad, and suggest ways that it can be avoided - that way your posts can be useful for other MUD-builders too. Try to keep your comments general, both to avoid looking like an anti-castle-marrach troll, and also because more general comments are useful for a wider range of MUD-builders. You can also give good examples of games that bypass those problems.

... and, to avoid derailing this thread, here's how I came across MUDs...

I was reading Sluggy Freelance, an online comic, and it had a banner advert for Skotos (the company that hosts Castle Marrach) - I ignored the banner for a few weeks, until one day I did click on it. I can't remember the wording on the banner, it was something like "help write our adventure" - I visited the site, logged into the Castle Marrach game and... had fun, for about an hour, but didn't really "get" it. I was playing a character, great. I was interacting with this new world. Great. But what was I meant to DO? There was nothing to achieve. So I played this character for another day or two, and then stopped logging in. In that time, however, I did notice their articles on world building, which caught my imagination. So, a few weeks later, I remembered this whole "MUD thing" and did a bit more research, found a mud client that had a list of muds, and started going through the list trying them out.

I discovered that most of them were empty, and the ones that I did come across were basically just D&D combat simulations. I could be a fighter or a ranger or a rogue, but the only real difference between those characters was the way in which I try to kill the upcoming orc. That's not a character, that's a combat strategy. So I ended up back at Skotos, which had the best roleplay I'd come across, and was just chance that it was the first game I'd tried. (I'm not saying other games don't have roleplay, just that Castle Marrach was the only one with any real roleplay that I'd come across over my first few weeks of trying them out) - I played longer that time, for about a week, and once again got frustrated by my inability to achieve anything. (Yes, I'm hard to satisfy, aren't I? I want achievement AND roleplay both in the same game.)

So, imagination still on fire from the world building articles, I wrote to the person in charge of Skotos, asking if I could help out with their upcoming games as a volunteer programmer. I got told yes, got assigned to a game which had a designer but no coder, and started working. That game failed, partly because I didn't really know what I was doing, partly because the designer wasn't around in contact so we couldn't refine the game design to dovetail smoothly with the code I was writing, and partly because it was designed as a tabletop game, not as a MUD. So when we decided that wasn't going to work out, I got moved to another game, which worked much better. There was a small team there, which meant I had support - most significantly, someone showed me how to turn on the chat lines. Suddenly what was an abandoned world with me as the only inhabitant lit up, and I could see the many worlds, with many builders, all chatting away. With access to that larger community, we worked on our games, sharing ideas and helping with code and building. Some of those games went live, others fell by the wayside. My game's lead left, putting someone else in charge. That happened a number of times over the development, but each time the remaining team pulled together, until we launched the game.

In the process of building (and later, designing) the game, I got a better understanding of what muds & mushes were really about, and how to go about playing them. I got a better understanding of my own personal tastes. And I got an understanding of how achievement in CM works, and how to "play the game" - which is what I was missing my first few attempts. Even when we launched the game, my understanding was still incomplete, and some of the designed systems have since been rewritten to better suit the player's style.

Almost a decade later, I'm still much more interested in sitting on the staff side than the player side - I love to play these games we build, I truly do. But I love to program them even more! I love to design a new system, predict how the players will react, and how we'll need to modify the system to encourage the players to react in ways that are positive to the game. And then I love to implement the system and see how accurate I was, and what needs to be changed, added, or removed.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

That was a long post *whew* but fun to read. Your story I think is more common than not from roleplay seekers.

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

woops...

Serves me right for reading so early in the morning, my appologies to the Thread starter

But my opinion of Marrach stands; it used to be good, now its terrible.

Darren Brimhall

Re: Breeding grounds for RP?
 

For me it was an action addiction. Well fight scene addiction. I live a good fight scene however when watching movies good ones were so rare, choreography lacking. With just a few gems. Tried Anime as I heard it had better action scenes and although it had faster and more lengthy action scenes the cherograghy was generally even worst and more simplified. Video games rarely satisfied me but then when playing Holy Wars I tried my hand at writing up a battle in story form. And.. I enjoyed it. Then I went to forum RPing and learned I also enjoyed complex characte rdevelopment. However as I enjoyed keeping things orgabized I was eventually recommended to D&D tabletop i loved it, butt had trouble finding a game, then I heard of MUDs so I started shopping around, had tytrouble learning them at first but found one that was pretty good and easy to learn and found I could imagine some pretty entertaining action. But that one was P2P so I continued shopping around until I found a MUD I liked.

And thats how I got into RPing.