which of these mud settings interest you the most (r1)

Steinal, grumble is my nigga

Say something else and I'll deck u

the creativity issue is a problem though. not all players are wildly creative. i would say they are simply a subset of player, an archtype. the prevailing archtype would not be the creator-type, but rather the escapist. of course there is some overlap, but people play games like this not usually to build something and <do work> but rather, to immerse themselves within an established world and simply breath and be apart of an Elsewhere.

if you wanted to foster that creative spirit in players, you'd have to nurture it within the community and create it slowly over time. i'm a strong believer that people will change their attitudes whether knowingly or unknowingly based on their environment. its actually pretty obvious when you say it like that. take these forums for instance, the attitudes here are in stark contrast to the gdb, and i think that is a consequence of people emulating certain attitudes by other people on the board (along with other factors of course). the board has a certain culture, a certain tone. i think establishing a tone is pretty crucial to whatever you want to achieve in your gaming environment whether it be some dnd with the bros or an epic rpi mud.

Option 2 strikes me as similar to Haven And Hearth, besides the no magic setting (H&H has ritualistic magic).

The flaws with H&H are pretty high up there, consisting of twinking being the only way to progress, along with swimming suicide and rolling murderous Russian gank squads.

If you find a good group of people to join in, though, it can be fun. I'd suggest giving it a try if you like option 2.

i want 2 plya ocd cowboy robot. msut shoet some1 ery high nune.

irl grumble is a knighted professor of English at a major university. It simply wouldnt do for him to be seen galavantng around with us types.

is that slang for a proposition or a self-defense technique..?

I almost entirely agree (as you already know). But you also need to have something in place for the uncreative people and the peeps with limitd free times. Or shitty play times. Not stuff that requires staff interventon, but persistant thngs in the game world that dont need staff or player intervention to be accessed.

QFT. i think the escapists tend to get forgotten by staff because they tend to be the least squeaky wheels. It's one of the main reasons i prefer letting people create powerful roles for themselves from the ground up rather than havng staff invent those same roles and let people apply to them. You wind up with people who risk nothing being in a position to threaten the majority without fear of the repercussions. The former took 0 effort for their charactr to become important. And the only thing that can happen is their characater dies and they make a new sponsored replacement. the latter, on the other hand, are characters that are the sum of their makers' efforts and chance.

Where tone comes in is this. if you make a MUD where the only important people are people who made themselves that way, their sense of entitlement will be based in accomplishments/cunning, instead of RL bootlicking. So when those people go bad, they can literally lose everythng to their hubris., pacifism, or treachery. So if someone is threatening you and has several uniformed underlings, odds are it's because they are confident they can get away with it because theyre that good. Unlike the Arm version. Where theyre mouthng off because they have no fear of death due to bootlicking (if you kill them), the staff (who'll sabotage your plans to kill them), and the code (which makes killing them very difficult most of the time if they stay away from lockable rooms).

If Arm lacked anythng you would expect it to have from it's description that thing is "stakes". Knowing that nothing you could do as a leader could have a lasting effect onyour clan really took the sense of risk out of things.

Definitely, BitterFlashback, didn't mean to imply otherwise, really. I think it's definitely necessary to have some sort of system/setting in place to start with, but to also set the rules/guidelines for how players can tackle and conquer X or Y city without staff intervention, topple that GMH/Noble House, etc, is something that should also be built into the framework of the world, too. If that makes sense.