Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs

[Andruid]

@Muse Thank you!

[Jihgfed]

@Andruid I filled it out, I did my part! Thank you for organizing this, I’m very curious to see the results.

[Andruid]

For those who are interested, the results have just been published here:
https://writing-games.org/2026-state-of-the-niche-report/

So many thoughtful responses from the MUSH/RP community - wish I’d had room to highlight more of them in the report.

[Tez]

Thank you for doing this! It was fascinating.

I’m curious: you highlighted some areas the MUSH / RPI / MUD community varied. How strongly did you feel that difference in the data?

Also noted that you aligned MUSH and RPI results more than I expected. I’ve tend to think of RPI as a type of MUD. Do you find that RPI aligns more with MUSH or is it very much its own thing?

[Tez]

Now, questions for us:

The largest sentiment gap is by preferred game style – MUD fans average 3.53 while MUSH fans average 2.85 (49.2% vs 19.5% happy) (Table 10, Figure 10).

Why so unhappy, fam?

[Pavel]

@Tez said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

Now, questions for us:

The largest sentiment gap is by preferred game style – MUD fans average 3.53 while MUSH fans average 2.85 (49.2% vs 19.5% happy) (Table 10, Figure 10).

Why so unhappy, fam?

We have WoD. MUDders don’t. >_>

[MisterBoring]

@Pavel said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

We have WoD. MUDders don’t. >_>

Haven of the Embraced is / was a thing.

[Jennkryst]

@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

@Pavel said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

We have WoD. MUDders don’t. >_>

Haven of the Embraced is / was a thing.

And yet it was not called Haven: the Embraced? Fake fans.

[NotSanni]

@Tez said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

Now, questions for us:

The largest sentiment gap is by preferred game style – MUD fans average 3.53 while MUSH fans average 2.85 (49.2% vs 19.5% happy) (Table 10, Figure 10).

Why so unhappy, fam?

I imagine it’s just easier to make people who want to play an MMO happier than it is to make people who are primarily after narrative/story happen, lol. No hate on either genre or game style one way or the other, but I suspect that’s a big part of it.

[Andruid]

@Tez Great question! I felt a lot of overlap. Some of the people who chose MUSH as their preferred style mentioned RPIs in their responses, and some of the people who chose RPI mentioned MUSHes. I’ve played both, and I know people who play both, so that didn’t come as too much of a surprise.

Individuals in both groups mentioned the culture/community getting healthier/more mature (MUD fans said this too), and individuals in both groups suggested there is still room for improvement in dealing with issues like favoritism and toxic behavior. The idea that MU*s offer a unique collaborative writing experience was shared by people in both groups, too.

[hellfrog]

@Tez said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

Now, questions for us:

The largest sentiment gap is by preferred game style – MUD fans average 3.53 while MUSH fans average 2.85 (49.2% vs 19.5% happy) (Table 10, Figure 10).

Why so unhappy, fam?

friendship is bad and people shouldn’t have it

[MisterBoring]

I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique. That’s what I learned from taking and reading the results of this survey.

[Kestrel]

@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique. That’s what I learned from taking and reading the results of this survey.

I don’t remember whether I checked RPI as my favourite in the end. If I could, I would’ve checked all three (MUD, MUSH, RPI) because I like all of them for different reasons, and my ideal pie-in-the-sky type of game would be a mixture of all 3.

I think I might’ve picked MUD, but not because I’m less into storytelling/RP. I just consider RPI to be a very specific category with a very specific codebase and player culture; i.e., typically rules surrounding no OOC, non-consent permadeath, skills rise by grinding them out. And I actually tend to avoid classic RPIs because IME, they compromise RP/storytelling a lot in favour of gamification, grinding, and encourage behaviour that doesn’t make sense for the character.

Like I remember rolling into a post-apocalyptic RPI that was supposed to be a very gritty setting, and on the radio someone was asking who needed rubies/sapphires to train their jewelcrafting up. Took me right out of the setting lol. Why are people communicating “need” for precious jewels on the survivors radio for a supposedly dangerous wasteland?

Oh, and my character was a middle-aged doctor, but I was a newbie. I asked on the newbie channel how to use my stitches skill. People told me “find out IC :)” and then someone offered to show me IC. I later realised the reason they offered is that by doing it for me, they could get the skillup at my expense.

So, based on my experiences, I’m just not sure that RPIs really do deserve the self-proclaimed mantle of “RP intensive”. It’s more just that you have to communicate everything solely in-character, which leads people to communicate blatantly OOC nonsense through a thin veneer of IC, instead of hashing out the technical stuff separately so they can concentrate on only stuff that makes sense for the character in-scene.

[Faraday]

@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique

We don’t really have good categories for any of it. There’s a technology side based on which server you use, but the rest is really just vibes.

[Jumpscare]

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.

[Faraday]

@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.)

[Roz]

NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused

[Pavel]

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.

[NotSanni]

@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.

[Kestrel]

@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.