FW: Re[6]: [MUD-Dev] (no subject)

[Koster]

I think Travis meant this for the list...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Travis Casey [mailto:efindel at io.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 1999 8:30 PM
> To: Koster at kanga.nu; Raph
> Subject: Re[6]: [MUD-Dev] (no subject)
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, November 23, 1999, Koster, Raph wrote:
> 
> > Hate to disagree with ya, Travis, but... I disagree with ya. ;)
> 
> >> All this was within 6 years of D&D's publication.  It's now been 25
> >> years -- and the RPG "state of the art" has advanced such 
> that someone
> >> who introduced an RPG like the original D&D today would be 
> laughed at
> >> by most paper RPG gamers.
> 
> > It's worth noting that all of those other ones were, with 
> the exception of
> > the White Wolf stuff, comemrcial failures and are now dead 
> and gone except
> > in an extreme niche. To this day, the majority of gamers 
> who have tried a
> > paper RPG, play D&D or AD&D. Worth arguing about why (eg, 
> marketing had a
> > lot to do with it?), but to my mind, you have to 
> acknowledge this fact
> > before bemoaning the lack of variety in muds.
> 
> [Cutting almost everything because I think Raph missed what I was
> trying to do.]
> 
> I'm not "bemoaning" anything.  And I agree with you that most paper
> RPGs were commercial failures outside of a small niche.  And I also
> agree that other analogies can be drawn to muds which would indicate
> that they would not branch out in variety.  However, none of these
> have anything to do with what I was trying to do.
> 
> Quite simply, I didn't agree with Marian's reasoning as to *why* a
> wider variety of mud game designs haven't proliferated.  I agree that
> they haven't, and that they most likely won't, and gave a list of
> things that I believe are likely factors in the post I sent out today.
> 
> >> What's the difference here?  Why did paper RPGs explode in 
> different
> >> directions so much faster than muds?  Well.... I have a 
> few thoughts,
> >> but the clock is ringing midnight here, and I have to go to work in
> >> the morning.  More later.
> >
> > IMHO, paper RPGing IMploded. What got mainstreamed was only 
> D&D, and later
> > on, the Storyteller system. To think otherwise betrays, to 
> my mind, someone
> > who is too close to the papergaming world to think otherwise.
> 
> In market share for non-D&D RPGs, it imploded, yes -- but that's not
> what I was talking about.  The RPG world *exploded* in variety of game
> designs and genres tried, compared to the way muds have developed.
> I'm not saying that that's bad, or that mud developers are uncreative
> -- only that I think that's true because of the different
> circumstances in which muds exist, not because people wouldn't
> recognize a mud with a different underlying game system as being a
> mud.
> 
> > The mud world is *fortunate* that there are as many viable 
> paradigms as
> > there are. Talker, full-immersion roleacting MUSH, user-crafted MOO,
> > academic MOO, goal-oriented PvEnvironment mud, player-vs-player mud,
> > quest-driven adventure game mud, full-on virtual world. 
> That's a nice array.
> > Certainly there are more types remaining to be developed 
> more fully, but
> > let's not be dismissive of what we have.
> 
> I'll note that these are more analogous to paper RPG campaign types
> than game systems -- which is in keeping with my comparison of
> individual muds to gaming groups rather than games in the second half
> of my post.
> 
> --
>        |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
>  ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
>       |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
>      '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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