Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@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.)
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NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused
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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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@Faraday said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
@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
Brazil at one point had basically all of oWOD Revised coded
(Also I have no clue what RPI is.)
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With everyone’s responses, and to my surprise, I guess that makes Silent Heaven a MUSH, haha. Strange that I didn’t think of it as one.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare
I wouldn’t have, either, but there’s seemingly no other place to define it. My instinct would’ve been to call it an RPI but people who are familiar with RPIs make it clear it’s not so idk. -
I discovered the MU world like “only” 10 years ago.
I still don’t know the difference between MUSH, MUX, etc.
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I missed the survey. I was on vacation, then real life got hectic, so I wasn’t checking on here. It’s interesting data, though.
As for the differences between MU*s and RPIs, most people answered the question. I like to think of RPIs as just more code heavy MUXs. My dream server would be a combination RPI-MUSH. I love the fact that when your character enters a room, you don’t get the actual name of the other characters. I’m not sure how you square the circle of characters with vague identities and players with set identities, but I’d love to see it.
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@Ominous said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
My dream server would be a combination RPI-MUSH. I love the fact that when your character enters a room, you don’t get the actual name of the other characters. I’m not sure how you square the circle of characters with vague identities and players with set identities, but I’d love to see it.
I may be biased, but take a peek at how it’s done in Silent Heaven! Characters appear as their shortdesc until they type GREET. You can also introduce other characters by typing GREET (name).
There are in-game photographs, too. You can identify people in a photo to other characters, based on who your character knows. You can even look at the details of photos, allowing you to read a specific character’s description at the time the photo was taken.
The players, without any prompting, designated a spot in town where their characters leave behind mementos and photographs of past characters who have left Silent Heaven in one way or another. It’s really sweet.
If you, as a new character, looked at one of those photos, you’d just see a bunch of shortdescs in the photos. But if someone were to tell your character a story about them and identify them by name, the shortdescs would be replaced with characters’ names. In that way, the departed characters can still have their names remembered by characters who have never (and will never) meet them.
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@Jumpscare said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:
With everyone’s responses, and to my surprise, I guess that makes Silent Heaven a MUSH, haha. Strange that I didn’t think of it as one.
I mean, Silent Heaven call themselves:
RPI-lite: MUSH-style RP + coded support for supplementary skills.
So it seems that they’re trying to straddle the line a bit. Nothing wrong with that.
There’s a very clear distinction between minimal-RP, code-heavy MUDs and code-light, RP-heavy MUSHes, but there are also varying shades of gray in-between. And the MUX distinction, which is usually just MUSH but with a different codebase. I have no idea where MUCK falls. Is it just MUD with a different codebase?
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@Faraday It’s codebases, but those codebases supported different styles, so they became shorthand for a particular style.
To add to that, I think MUCK is derived from MOO which I think is MUX-ish, maybe a touch lighter in crunch/code, but I think the style for MUCK is “must have furries.”
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@Jumpscare The short-desc stuff is what I was meaning. I forgot to elaborate my thought in the previous post, but that’s exactly how it worked in a few of the RPIs I played.
