HorrorMU* brought me out of the overcrowded old folks' home for dissatisfied text-based roleplayers who have retired from the life and given up on the hope of finding a community that is, or at least strives to be, what they were looking for.
Prior a lengthy stretch of time wherein I'd seldom manage to stomach a game for more than a month, most of my experience had been with the MUD side of things: RPIs and RPEs, and what-have-you. Some of that time was spent on Haven, which whetted my appetite for a horror roleplay experience but rarely satiated; my, and other players', experiences there stirred an awful lot of debate on the difficulties of cultivating a horror experience in a persistent text-based game, on prospective approaches, work-arounds, and solutions to those difficulties, and on a multitude of other issues, some specific to Haven and others nearly universal throughout the larger community.
The initial hook that brought me out of this slump and back out to write was taking a look at the game's wikipedia and seeing how @Botulism had found solutions to so many of the stumbling blocks I'd run into in my experiences with past games. At a glance, I could tell that the game was designed to be the sort of experience I was looking for, and I've been really glad to get involved and take part.
Rotating stories set with a persistent backdrop in the form of the Facility and its Archetypes enables the game to really embrace the horror theme and allow for players to be more free with their actions and worry less about the risk of death without entirely sacrificing the sense of extensive and permanent character development. Moreover, it helps keep the playerbase churning and reengaging through new incarnations of their characters, which remedies the near universal problem of players forming into tight-knit and often exclusive groups which can be impenetrable to newer players. I'm not going to say it completely removes this tendency, but it's certainly impactful in offering substantial mitigation.
The lack of typical progression elements removes much of the "gamist" feel from HorrorMU and allows its community to focus more on roleplaying and story, which is a welcome relief for somebody coming from the more heavily gamist-leaning RP MUD communities where the game often starts to come at the expense of roleplay and story.
This sort of experimentation, at least for me, has certainly paid off and resulted in what I feel to be a fantastic game and a fantastic community. There's certainly still room for growth, though, and I look forward to seeing how HorrorMU evolves going forward. While the game finds solutions to a lot of the issues that have plagued many players' -- or at least my -- experiences, a few things do come to mind besides minor tweaks to the fairly simple gameplay mechanics and updates and streamlining to make things more intuitive for newer players.
At times the story is so reliant on staff storytelling that I feel guilty, and which sometimes results in a dichotomy between overcrowded and highly-impactful scenes and less-crowded low-impact social scenes and infodumps, with little in-between. This might be something that could be solved as a community, by encouraging players to run small- to medium-sized, low- to medium- impact scenes using the gameplay mechanics, which could also help with aiding newer players to get a feel for things and start getting involved before diving into a larger event; they'd just have to be careful to keep things in-theme and avoid stepping on the toes of the larger story.
My experience with HorrorMU has been fantastic, and it's the most inclusive and upbeat -- astonishing when you consider how much time our characters spend in soul-destroying misery or terror and our players spend sobbing over death poses -- community I've been a part of so far; and that's been shaped as largely by the experimental way in which @Botulism has approached things as it has by the excellence of the people that have come to participate.
