| MUD |
| Getting stuck into MUD | In an extract from his forthcoming book, Duncan Howard introduces the Multi-User Dungeon |
MULTI-USER DUNGEON is the most advanced, interactive, computerised adventure game in the world.
Unlike normal adventures where there's no-one around to see you battle against the monsters, score points and carry out deeds of daring, MUD is affected by the people playing at the same time as you. You can chat CB-style to your fellow adventurers, cast spells on them, help them, even attack them making every game of MUD different. You can save your persona on the computer any time you like and later, continue play from where you left off. To play MUD you need a home computer - almost any with an RS-323 port will do - and a modem.
In MUD your score determines your level, which in turn determines your ability to play. For example, while novices are still wandering around the mainland exploring, more advanced players are off on the island hunting dragons!
Eventually your score will get high enough - assuming you're clever enough not to be killed - and you'll take on the rank of wizard. That is the ultimate aim of every MUD player, but becoming a wizard doesn't spell the end of the game.
The aim of MUD is to collect points. There are three ways to do that. The most common way is to get treasure and drop it in the swamp, which effectively puts it out of the game, so points can't be scored for it twice. The second most common way is by killing people. When you top another player, you get one twenty-fourth of their points, in general. The last way is to do some menial task such as making the bed.
You can lose points, too. Points can be lost for doing stupid things like trying to smoke the wolfsbane, but more often than not they go when you're killed. In MUD you die often, how permanent depends upon how it happened. If you're dead, it normally means you did something which killed you, like jump off the cliff without some sort of parachute, or drink poison or whatever. That, in mudspeke is known as being DEAD.
You can come back from being DEAD, but you lose points for it. If you are killed in a fight, however, you end up permanently deceased, or DEAD DEAD. Hence, although fights have good rewards when won, they're soul destroying when you lose!
The only way to be DEAD DEAD for doing something silly is if you carry unranium around with you, ignoring the messages about how tired you feel, until your stamina drops below zero. Resurrection is the only way to recover from being DEAD DEAD and it costs half your points. The only alternative is to start again.
As players with more points tend to be more popular targets for those with an urge to kill, they have better attributes than those with which they started. MUD generates a random set of characteristics for you when you start - your persona which consists of three attributes, those being, strength, stamina and dexterity.
|
The other attributes usually associated with adventure games, such as intelligence and charisma, are provided by the gamer. Those three main attributes affect your gameplay in various ways, most obviously your effectiveness in a fight. Strength determines how much damage you'll do to your opponent, stamina how much damage you can take, and dexterity affects your chances of landing a blow. The average total of a new character's attributes is about a hundred and fifty, but as your score increases so do your attributes. When you go up a level, your attributes go up by 10 points each until you reach a maximum of 100 in each category.
The levels in MUD changed as the game developed, with the score needed to reach wizard increasing approximately seventy thousand when MUD started, to nearly a quarter of a million! That is due to two reasons firstly, the game has expanded in size, and there is more treasure for the taking. Secondly, MUD has been solved by quite a few people, and those who ask enough questions will be well on their way to wizdom. So, as more players solve the game, the level of difficulty required to become a wizard must be preserved.
The reason for the exponential gain in points between levels is that novice players take just as long to gain their first level as the more experienced players take to move from Sorcerer to Necromancer. That allows the better players to get back quickly to their level of play - if they're killed - and go off in search of treasure completely beyond the reach of the newer players. MUD is a huge game, played in an area often described as the Land. Currently, MUD has over a thousand rooms to explore so it's easy to see why you'll be able to spend quite a long time just getting familiar with the game. A room doesn't have to be an enclosed chamber but, as with most adventure games, it's an area with its own description. The eastern pasture is as much a room, for example, as the entrance to the mine.
You move from one room to another by telling MUD to move your persona in a specific direction such as: GO SOUTH. To find out where most of the exits from a room are, type EXITS and a list of possible directions is displayed. Sometimes exits are hidden and it's wise to try out every possibility.
As you explore the Land it's likely that you'll encounter one of the wizards or witches which have mastered the game. Called wizzes, those are players who have finished MUD and are now playing as, the game's referees, helping - or hindering - the mortal players as they see fit. Wizards have powers far beyond those of ordinary players. They can be great allies, but they can also be horrendous enemies if you get on the wrong side of them.
Wizards are usually helpful, but if you pester, them for advice and points it won't go well for you in the long run. A major portion of the game is learning to allow for each wizard's eccentricities.
Most of the objects scattered about the Land are worth points if dropped in the swamp. Some of the treasure is very easy to find, but isn't worth very much. New players are left to go after that, while the more experienced players go in quest of bigger and better things.
Easy to find treasure, called surface T because it's just sitting on the ground at the beginning of each game, doesn't last too long as players snap it up very quickly. The other treasures which lie deep in tin mines or in wrecked galleons off the coast are much more difficult to reach, and the major portion of each game is spent trying to find those. The most valuable of all the treasures is not only hard to find, but protected by all manner of puzzles, riddles and traps!
Players will find that if they play in teams, MUD becomes much easier. Working together, two players can accomplish a lot more in the same amount of time than if they weren't co-operating. Some players take a fiendish delight in double-crossing former allies and making off with the loot, so choose your friends carefully.
On top of that, wizards often intervene, by forcing one member of a team to do something which causes the other to doubt his reliability. Occasionally, gangs will form and terrorize other players, who often develop their own gangs.
Long sessions of play will eventually deplete the Land's supply of treasure, and at that point a wizard will reset the game. A reset forces all players to quit and saves their personas. It then restores the Land to its original state, with all treasure - and monsters - put back. A reset can be upsetting to players who have spent a lot of time getting to a specific area only to get chucked out of the game, so wizards will normally only reset the game if every player agrees to it.
On the other hand, MUD sometimes needs to reset itself in which case you get the message 'Something magical is happening ...'
In that case you will leave the game, and restart in two or three minutes. If you lose many points, a friendly wizard will be happy to help you regain lost points. That doesn't happen too often, but to be safe you should type in SAVE every time you drop some treasure in the swamp or score a lot of points.
If there are no wizards about and the game has run out of treasure, there is a way in MUD to allow mortals to reset the game. It's currently a 'reset button' hidden deep in the mine, which will only work if the majority of the treasures are in the swamp and if no-one else is playing. That prevents mortals, who find the button, from making life a misery for everyone else by resetting the game once a minute.
An extract from An Introduction to MUD Duncan Howard 1985 ISBN 07126 06912, by permission of Century Communications Ltd.