@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
@apos said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
What MUs do best as a format is something that is hard to describe to a roleplayers in other formats.
I will nonetheless try:
Real-Time Play By Post
I have used this description to great effect to people who don’t know what a Mu is.
That's a good description but that wasn't what I was getting at. You could say, 'well it's another chat type way of RPing' and that also works, but it doesn't capture why MUs are really, really good at what they do. Like let me give an example.
Say you're trying to run a consistent world like you have in a MU, even ones that might be a sandbox with a ton of characters are running around, and you have a hundred players doing this, and they are all in four different formats: a MU, a PBP forum, a freeform MMO sandbox, and googledocs/discord/some other chat.
Of those four, MUs are the only one that has the ability for players to automatically update the state of play of the game and change it on their own. Like a PBP game might have say, a forum with character sheets, and people edit them, or a MMO sandbox might have an off game forum with some kind of number tracking, or google docs or discord might have someone acting as a GM... but all of those are unbelievably clunky and fall apart incredibly easy as the numbers of players grow. Most of those games have no more uniformity between them than MUs have with each other. People in large PBP forums flat out have no idea what is happening in other parts of the game, and it diverges quickly and there's no attempt to reconcile continuity because it becomes impossible to do so. MMO players won't even try because they can't effect the game environment in a permanent way so its inherently a sandbox and the communities all are fine with handwaving everything and doing spontaneous RP that has no impact past the immediate scene. Google doc, discord, slack, all of that falls apart outside of the immediate group in close coordination with one another.
A MU is the only format that does a large world well, in my opinion. And there's almost no way to tell people about this, because the kind of big world game that's coherent and unified doesn't exist in other formats. So they don't know what's missing, and all it sounds like is more of the same with a different (and worse) interface until they try it. Saying "It's Real-Time Play By Post" would make someone go, "cool, but why should I switch?" And I'd say it's because we have a format that allows for bigger stories, and a real sense of consequence on the game world and meaning in those stories that other formats have trouble duplicating.
