What drew you to MU*?
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After reading the Pern books I was online and stumbled across PBEM. Thought hey, this is cool.
PBEM was weird for me and slow AF. I didn't really jive with it. But then I found a MU. Tried it out. Really, really enjoyed it.
Been stuck since.
Made a lot of friends over the years. A few have stuck. A few no longer play and are still friends. A few are no longer friends. I stick with the hobby because to me, it's part social and part writing exercise. I can try out character ideas. I can try out writing methods, styles, etc. I can get instant feedback on things. What works. What doesn't. I can see myself evolve in real time.
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For me it's the intersection of real-time, online, collaborative RP/writing.
Other formats have various combinations of the above, but MUSHing is the only one that hits all the buttons.
The "real-time" thing is, I think, the big one that's unique to MUSHing. I've tried PBP and Storium games and the pacing there is just excruciatingly slow. And I think because of that slow, disjointed pacing you don't seem to have a lot of the same community aspects.
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@faraday I completely agree. Pacing is super important for me as well. I tried to run a Storium game for a little while, but sometimes the time between posts was so long, I'd start loose idea/story momentum until people would just sort of fizzle out.
No trees were destroyed in the sending of this message, however, a significant number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
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Initially, it was the ability to play a character in a world that I loved, while interacting with others who did the same, whilst writing. I had tabletopped for years but felt most creative when writing interactive offline stories with friends-- we'd literally pass the notebook back and forth, a lot like MUSH posing back and forth.
A high school friend of mine showed me MU*s after his family needed a house-sitter for two weeks and I had been kicked out by my family and needed a place to crash. He figured it'd keep me busy, since it was the very early 90s and all I'd do otherwise was watch tv.
I was immediately hooked. There's nothing as immersive as MUSHing, though some MMO RP has gotten very close, as it's very similar in format. Roleplaying was always my jam before I'd gotten onto the internet, but I, like previous posters, did not like the meat market aspect of 90s fandom. I was also more introverted at the time, and felt better able to articulate things through text.
Nowadays I'm much more extroverted, but I still prefer text-based RP to tabletops.
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Him. This guy. I come from RPing in WoW. I met him and he, who could sell me ice if I were an eskimo, talked me into trying a nWoD MU. This was in 2010/'11. So. Thanks, bro.
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@kumakun said in What drew you to MU*?:
@faraday I completely agree. Pacing is super important for me as well. I tried to run a Storium game for a little while, but sometimes the time between posts was so long, I'd start loose idea/story momentum until people would just sort of fizzle out.
I'm trying rolegate after someone posted it here because woo! finally getting to play D&D!
And our ST just sort of faded out. He'd reply often at first! Then once a day.. then every few days... I've considered finding another game to join on it, but. Oi.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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Part of me will always be a big kid that loves playing 'make believe'.
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Free helps. A lot.
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Creative people are awesome, and this hobby has an abundance of very smart creative people in it. Many with kickass interesting ideas.
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An interactive story to think about is my brain's equivalent of a fidget spinner or other tinker object for my hands when I'm not playing.
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Brainstorming is fun. It doesn't even need to necessarily go anywhere; just the process of brainstorming or 'what if'-ing things that either never come to pass or are just background is fun to me.
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Persistent world is a huge one. Free? That too. Also the anonymity. I cannot suspend my disbelief in a LARP, also I cant just be chilling alone at home in my underwear while I pretend to be a victim of faerie.
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A lot of us MUSHers are disabled or struggle to get out of the house in general; and it's also nice to be able to portray things without struggling with the outside appearance, either (which can be an issue in TT and LARP).
I was homebound (and then fully bedbound) for years because of a broken back and lupus, and RP (and then MMOs) saved me from losing it. Being able to set goals and achieve them, being able to interact with others, and getting to play someone who wasn't me and didn't deal with my real life problems and limits, was literally life-saving.
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What drew me? All hours availability, the stylistic focus on more characterization. I am not an actor, or even a good storyteller, but I do enjoy getting to present nuances down to clothing, expressions and gesture, word choice and so on.
That and it allowed me to be a player.
I've since realized I don't want to be a player usually.
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For me it's a mater of escapism, adult interaction, and creative outlet. I'm not a crafter, and I'm too high strung for video games. (Literally, I scream when the music turns bad and the monsters jump out. Just not for me.)
Escapism: Role play is not my real life. Ansible was where I could pretend to be smart and no one batted an eye. (PRETEND, okay?!) HT brought me into a world with //dragons//, and flight, and everything else. Arx just has everything else that I love about fantasy. When I'm RPing I lose track of the rest of the world. (This is why I hate ooc getting in the way so much, and why it upsets me so badly. It is taking away from my escape.)
Adult Interaction: I worked as an elementary school teacher for 2 years before I went back to role play. I LOVE my students and I ADORE my job, but I really don't talk to people above the age of 10 very much. Especially those first few years because I worked at an outside school with zero windows so I literally didn't have to interact with another adult for almost whole days at a time if I spun it right. At home I had my husband, but he worked the graveyard shift so only saw one another in passing. Getting back into RP gave me the chance to interact with adults regularly. I noticed an abrupt upshift in my energy level and I was finding that I could obsess about my students a little less. (Let's be real, I still wake up in the middle of the night going "BUT I COULD DO X" or "I KNOW HOW TO HELP Y" or "I seriously hope Z has heat tonight..." It's just less now.)
Creative Outlet: I'm not really a creative person with crafts and such, but I do enjoy a good story. RP lets me pretend I am building a story without having the whole load of actually writing it for myself.
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I am a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot.
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@auspice said in What drew you to MU*?:
I'm trying rolegate after someone posted it here because woo! finally getting to play D&D!
And our ST just sort of faded out. He'd reply often at first! Then once a day.. then every few days... I've considered finding another game to join on it, but. Oi.
Another problem with the PBEM model, if one important person goes missing the whole story crumbles. I love how MU*s can continue and even thrive as individuals are active or not. The possibilities for storylines are endless!
No trees were destroyed in the sending of this message, however, a significant number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
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A nice lady on the Internet. We met on a Java game, she kept trying to convince me to give the MU format a chance. It was overwhelming at first, all the commands and grid navigation. It stuck though. Ended up married and scored some pretty neat friends to boot.
Ten years and I still agonize over character names... some things don't change.
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I learned about talkers in a 'how to use/things to do on the internet' book, and hung out on one of those for about a year before my high school got internet access and I noticed an interesting-looking connection someone had when I did a w. So I telnetted to that address and discovered MU*.
Initially I tried it out because it reminded me of what I already liked, but it was Star Trek based rather than being just sort of a random hang-out, and the differences between it and what I was used to were interesting. And in all honesty, two of the things that drew me in were the same things that had with the talkers: 1) despite a fair bit of social anxiety, I like being around people, and these let me do it under my own terms -- whenever I wanted, easy to leave, not necessarily with physical proximity, and 2) people liked me. I'd never been a particularly popular kid, and in middle school I was practically a pariah, so it was kind of mind-blowing to suddenly be someone people thought was cool and funny and appealing to hang out with.
But I switched over because I liked RP, which was new to me then (beyond playing make-believe as a younger kid, which I had loved). I liked the idea that you could come up with your own character to do things in this fictional world, and also still talk to and hang out with people as yourself. I was a theatre kid, and I liked the sort of on-stage/off-stage effect.
Having a place where people liked me when I was being myself is probably what kept me in at the beginning, because the RP itself wasn't really that good for a while. But I liked writing, and I always particularly liked dialogue and characterization, and once I got to a place where things, as @Arkandel said, click, that was probably it. My own character surprising me with a reaction is definitely one of those feelings, and relatedly, when I can't figure out why s/he did it until days or weeks later when suddenly it's entirely clear and makes complete sense. Actually, all three of his examples, definitely.
I like the persistence in changes in characters and world, and I like the ongoing nature. I like the lack of graphics -- I've tried RPing on MMOs and SL, but if you pose throwing Bob down the bar and I can see both of you just standing there, I have no immersion. In text, that's not an issue. And I love words. Oh, and speaking of immersion, I like being able to feel for my characters, and other characters, and I've never really found that anywhere else.
Also, the real-time, online, collaborative creativity aspect is fascinating enough I made it my focus in grad school, so there's that.
...these days I'm also appreciating the fact that it doesn't have to be as ephemeral as something like TT or LARP. I have logs that are old enough to vote, now, that I can still go back and read and really get into the stories again. That's kind of awesome. I wish I'd logged everything from the start.
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@royal said in What drew you to MU*?:
We met on a Java game
Now I'm trying to picture you playing Runescape.
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@kumakun said in What drew you to MU*?:
Another problem with the PBEM model, if one important person goes missing the whole story crumbles. I love how MU*s can continue and even thrive as individuals are active or not. The possibilities for storylines are endless!
Yep. The scale works in favor of MUSHes. If one person drops or is on vacation that week it's (generally) not the end of the world. The on-demand access to entertainment 24/7 is part of what sets it apart from other forms of online RPGs. It's also why MUs pretty much need a critical mass of players to function. Without that it becomes more like PBP where you're constantly trying to catch up with a few specific people.
@paris said in What drew you to MU*?:
A lot of us MUSHers are disabled or struggle to get out of the house in general
This. It's a social activity that you can do from home. You can get a similar experience in MMOs with guilds, but MMOs are grindy and guilds are more hit-or-miss than MUSH communities. Also, if I AFK for a few minutes to take care of my kid during a MU scene, people pose around me. If I do that in a WoW raid, everyone dies. (LoL my char was never important enough for that. But the analogy still holds.)
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@faraday said in What drew you to MU*?:
The on-demand access to entertainment 24/7 is part of what sets it apart from other forms of online RPGs.
I've noticed, of late (ie the last... five or so years?), that the demand part of 'on-demand' seems to be more and more at the forefront of considerations for both players and game-runner-designers. Especially in the form of 'this game has to last forever because I want to keep doing this specific thing forever.' Is this sort of open-ended-sandboxy-thing something we should be encouraging, or working away from?
He/Him
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@faraday said in What drew you to MU*?:
You can get a similar experience in MMOs with guilds, but MMOs are grindy and guilds are more hit-or-miss than MUSH communities.
I have an AMAZING guild right now, and they're all solid MUSH-quality fantastic roleplayers; I wish I could get them to MUSH, but they like the graphics even if there's a disconnect between the pose and the visual on-screen. They're also incredibly patient with my health woes and inactivity. I still hang out in the discord even when I'm not up to RP and sometimes do small scenes in Discord to stay current.
It's an offshoot of a guild I used to run and that split after I stepped down, so it's been in some form or another for about five years now.
I really wish the MMO and the MUSH community overlapped more, though I know some people feel otherwise. But it would bring so many new, enthusiastic roleplayers into our hobby, especially since MMOs are descended from MUSHes to begin with.
