I’ve become so jaded with current MMO’s and their stale, repetitive gameplay and lack of things to do, that I’ve gone back to playing a MUD.

I played this MUD many many years ago, and it’s still going pretty strong. There are 600 people on at once in the server and the game is more enjoyable and has more to do than any of the other MMOs out… and I’ve tried about 90% of them.

Anyone interested, I’m talking about Gemstone IV from Simutronics. They also have Dragon Realms.

http://www.gemstone.net

I’m hoping someday we will have an MMO that is more than just grinding mobs and rolling for drops.

@Morgan: Oh yes, that would be very scientific, wouldn’t it? Guessing about where ideas come from… and stuff.

Eolirin>And DUNGEN and the other stuff had a bit to do with the
>development direction of MUD1, right?

It was more ADVENT than DUNGEN – I didn’t get to play DUNGEN/Zork until decades later, and although Roy had been shown it I don’t think he’d actually got to play it. He went for DUNGEN in the name of MUD partly because he got a good acronym out of it, and partly because he thought that, DUNGEN’s being the better game, the genre would come to be known as “Dungeon games”. Since ADVENT came first, though, they were eventually called “Adventure games” instead (and even if they had been named after DUNGEN, they would almost certainly have been called “Zorks”). I called MUDs “MUAs” for a number of years to try to correct this impression (and so that people didn’t that it was me who was boastfully propagating the MUDs name), but it never caught on.

If you look at ADVENT, though, it has very little to do with D&D. Even the role-playing aspect of it is one step removed, as the opening instructions make clear: “I will be your eyes and hands. Direct me with commands of 1 or 2 words. I should warn you that I look at only the first five letters of each word …”.

>Again, the key concept behind D&D is that you can structure roleplaying
>formally.

I agree that D&D does this, but it never made it through the ADVENT membrane. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I’d played single-player RPGs of my own invention before I’d ever heard of D&D – it was one of the reasons I wanted to buy D&D when I first got wind of it. I didn’t have “experience points” – that bit of MUD1′s design I did consciously take out of D&D – but I did have the notion of characters improving through their deeds (becoming a better shot, knowing more about science, not being as fast at running as they used to be – that kind of thing).

>Even if D&D had absolutely zero influence on MUD1 at all, it still
>would’ve been very important if only because of that.

Yes indeed. If you play one of today’s RPGs, you can still tell that it’s the same kind of thing as D&D, and there’s pretty well guaranteed to be a direct audit trail back to D&D. I’m a big fan of D&D, even though I don’t get much time to play it these days; the DMG, MM and PH for version 4 are on the shelf right behind me as I type this (albeit still waiting to be read).

What I am saying is that when it comes to what makes an MMO an MMO, D&D doesn’t play all that large a part. Tolkien plays a bigger one.

>MUD1 may not have had as big of an audience without D&D, though that’s
>of course hard to gauge accurately.

I’m sure there will have been some people who played MUD1 and its descendants because they had played D&D, so they would have had an input into the culture of MUDs (and thence MMOs). However, the number would not have been as great as you appear to believe. Back in 1978 in the UK, D&D wasn’t a widespread phenomenon. If there was a D&D group at Essex University when I was there, I never heard of it. My own copy was bought on 6th May, 1976 (according to the receipt in the box), and it was among the first available in Britain. When I set up my own D&D game at the university in 1982, all the players but me were first-timers. D&D wasn’t all that well known here back then.

>It’s kind of that “all boats rise with the tide” concept. Even things
>only tangentially related to D&D benefited from the attention it gained.

Some of the articles in magazines in the mid-1980s did mention “Dungeons and Dragons”, because by then the game was becoming better known but hadn’t yet reached “game teaches kids black magic” disfavour. We did almost certainly get some players who had extensive experience of D&D around then. A few of the MUDs that followed MUD1 in that period did have a D&D flavour to them, too. The main injection of D&D was not until DikuMUDs, though, which really went to down on the AD&D mechanics that dominate commercial MMORPGs to this day.

D&D did have an influence on most of today’s MMOs, it’s just that this influence does not extend to the “MMOness” of them.

Richard

@Bartle,

I am aware, and said as much earlier on in the thread. I’ve read the note from you in the timeline saying as much. But… if you look at the timeline, you’ll see that ADVENT was created shortly after the people who worked on it had started playing D&D, and ADVENT lead to both Zork and DUNGEN, no? And DUNGEN and the other stuff had a bit to do with the development direction of MUD1, right? So there’s likely indirect influence coming from that direction too. Again though, none of the structural elements remain, but none of the structural elements were all that important to begin with. Again, the key concept behind D&D is that you can structure roleplaying formally. Even MUDs rely on that concept, though it’s about all the have in common in terms of the experience. And it’s obviously not a concept unique to D&D, but D&D was the first thing to popularize it and show just how far you could go with it.

Even if D&D had absolutely zero influence on MUD1 at all, it still would’ve been very important if only because of that. MUD1 may not have had as big of an audience without D&D, though that’s of course hard to gauge accurately. It’s kind of that “all boats rise with the tide” concept. Even things only tangentially related to D&D benefited from the attention it gained.

Eolirin>That’s why I say D&D was so very important not for the mechanics, not for what it did with it’s systems, not for what type of structure it brought to the table… but because it captured the imaginations of so many people, because it got so many people thinking about things in a new way.

It did, but none of that was a factor in MUD1, nor (judging by the way they didn’t tap further into D&D’s mechanics) many of the worlds MUD1 immediately inspired. Its main influence on today’s MMOs didn’t come until much later with DikuMUD, and that was through its mechanics. There may have been a lot of indirect influence, though, through the fact that many players had played D&D or AD&D and they brought the culture of D&D with them into MUDs etc..

Richard

@Michael: Perhaps my definition of story was to simplistic and I was not casting the net wide enought. Storytelling was to me more of a telling of events, emotions, lessons after they happened. D&D was more like living your life. It happens as you play and you can’t skip to the last page because the ending has not been written yet.

My most memorable moments mostly involved bar fights at the Vulgar Unicorn as a halfling with my half ogre sidekick. It was insane fun, but there were no trancendent moments of the quality that a good writter can craft. When I read Paul’s sacrifice on the Summer Tree in the The Fionavar Tapestry, it really made me wonder if D&D was really capable of these moment.

eep! something looks borkled with te quoting thing. The Raph quote from the old “What is a virtual world” entry should be:

“MMORPG: an MMOG where the game presented is an RPG.”

“the improv lacks any form of traditional structure”

What I meant was that it doesn’t deliver a three act, mythical narative structure. The game itself is structured.

I have no idea what happened in the above post…..I was trying to quote Derek and Wolfe but it didn’t work apparently.

This new quote system is not working as intended. It misquoted the “How do you get a well funded…” in the above. Wolfe actually said it and the blue is Matt’s response.

I would add these are obvious to us now with the benefit of hind sight. I’m a huge fan of both people and I don’t see the need to trivialize the RPG to bolster the MUD.

Richard, you trace back to Tolkien. Shall we cite Dante for his important contribution of “levels”?

More seriously: Asheron’s Call, too, was conceived by MUD fanatics. We called it a “3D MUD” before the buzzword “massively multiplayer” was coined. I found — and find still — that ex-MUD developers/players are quickest to embrace the core skills of MMO design. (I call it Applied Social Anthropology.)

[quote comment="138766"]

You have two choices:

1. Become independently wealthy first and then self-fund it.

2. Garner enough of a reputation/history of success that you can successfully demonstrate to investors that you’re able to execute (ideas are easy, execution is hard).[/quote]

Both of these would appear tricky if you want to achieve innovation by Idea Diffusion, the first one because its mostly unlikely. The second one because it basically means you have to go down the path of Blueprint Copying.

I guess for several reasons, but the primary one is that a success story is not associated with an individual but the whole team, company and business behind the result. For an investor to be able to rely upon a previous success you’ll have to prove that you will use the same successful process for developing the new title.

This in turn becomes a positive feedback loop which makes it impossible to follow up on Bartles wishes of inducing change to the artistic expression within the medium.

So what remains is the third choice of finding investors willing to take big risks. I guess you will need to present a development team with some significant industry experience even in that case. And preferably also have some guidiance from veterans without falling back too far on the standard sollutions just because its cheaper to implement these?

More likely we’ll see changes to the industry come from some unexpected source.

Oh, I should add that you have to also find investors with an extremely high tolerance for risk since what you’re proposing adds extra risk onto an already extremely risky endeavor.

[quote]
How do you get a well funded mmorpg project on the road which is free enough to develop something based on idea diffusion rather than blueprint copying?[/quote]

You have two choices:

1. Become independently wealthy first and then self-fund it.

2. Garner enough of a reputation/history of success that you can successfully demonstrate to investors that you’re able to execute (ideas are easy, execution is hard).

@raph: Yeah, some things comes more of a result of the quantity of players than design (raids, dancing and crafting). If only 5% of the population enjoys a collaborative activity (dancing/crafting) most MUDs (perhaps peeking at 40 simultanous) would have problems sustaining it as part of the culture.

I can’t think of a single significant feature in MMOs that I haven’t seen some version of before, but yes, scale matters and you get something different when you change the scale.

I still think D&D has the most influence because I assume most who create MMOs have played it and thought “wouldn’t it be cool if we could create this fantasy world in a computer simulation”. Then they went on a build a MMO where you can build a character… I think most of the rest would follow from that pursuit. The essential features aren’t that advanced.

When it comes to MUDs I think many who went on to create their own MUDs were inspired by single-user text adventure games in addition to D&D. That’s how they felt to me anyway. The MMOs don’t feel that way, at least not the ones I’ve seen or read about. The depth appears to be lacking.

(The “quote this commen in your reply” link seems to provide the wrong text.)

Richard Bartle wrote:

Now if you’re talking about today’s big Fantasy MMOs then yes, there is a direct line to D&D through the DikuMUD gene. If you were talking about a single-player Fantasy game like Oblivion then I dare say there’s a link there, too (I’m just speculating, mind you). So if your particular interest were D&D derivatives, it would make sense to say Oblivion and WoW were both cut from the same cloth. However, even though Oblivion and WoW are similar in many ways, they are different in a way that WoW and Club Penguin aren’t.

CRPGs like Oblivion clearly harken back to Wizardy I and Ultima I. Before them were less-successful CRPGs (on the Apple ][ at least) of “Temple of Apshai” and another proto-Ultima one whose name I’ve forgotten. Wizardy I and Apshai were obvious D&D implementations.

Another game to note was Eamon – kind of a single-player DikuMUD, although it came first. I wouldn’t be suprised if the DikuMUD authors played Eamon. From a functional (not matrilineal RNA heritage) POV, DikuMUD is very similar to Eamon, but its complexity is akin to Wizardry I. Multiplayer is a relatively small conceptual leap from there.

My point: There has been a tremendous amount of cross-species DNA exchange. Lineage gets fuzzy. It’s an interesting discussion that goes nowhere… except that it points out to current WoW players that the same basic game goes back nearly three decades… and is getting a bit stale.

“D&D kinda swiped that from wargames though no?”

D&D abstracts character traits like charisma, intelligence and wisdom in a way that describes the attributes of a hero beyond impersonal units on a battlefield. Yes, there were attributes assigned to units in war games, but the purpose was purely for combat. D&D was the moment that gaming went from distant generals fighting strategically on a battlefield to epic heroes, seemingly out of the pages of a novel, fighting for honor and living lives of adventure.It went from war time strategy to character driven narrative. It went from impersonal to personal. The character sheet had the effect of creating a personal attachment to your hero and allowed us to imagine personality traits. The difference between the War Game and the Role Playing Game (the RTS and the RPG) is the perspective. The RPG is played from the perspective of the hero, not the general, and D&D was the first to do this. It defined the space and everything else followed. We take this all for granted now, but in 1974 this was a new idea.

@Gene, D&D kinda swiped that from wargames though no? What D&D brought wasn’t representation via stat – that’s a much older concept, I mean hell, Baseball has been using statistical abstractions to define it’s players for ages and it’s essentially the same concept – it was the concept that those stats could grow and change over time. It’s character advancement via leveling and not statistical abstraction that’s the real mechanical innovation of D&D’s systems. And yeah, leveling was a *huge* thing that’s influenced a lot of stuff, even MUD1. Important contribution to be sure, but not something vital to MUDs or MMOGs in terms of what makes them MUDs and MMOGs. I’m kinda arguing from the same position that Bartle is here, that the mechanical bits that are used to fill various needs in a virtual world are pretty much interchangable and replacable and don’t speak to the inherent core of what actually makes them virtual worlds. D&D has had an awful lot of use in providing specific mechanics to fill those various needs, but it’s the needs that define the genre, not the solution to those needs. And the needs are not at all the same even if the systems to fill them can be co-opted.

MMOGs don’t need D&D to be MMOGs, though D&D has been very useful in helping to solve various design issues. This isn’t about minimizing the importance of D&D in terms of gaming as a whole, just about isolating out where it’s contributions actually *were*. And they’re not in the same places that Bartle is talking about.

Derek Licciardi>the core gameplay mechanics of most CRPGs, singleplayer or massively multiplayer, stem from P&P games.

There’s certainly a way you can look at a lot of MMOs and a lot of single-player RPGs and say yes, these share mechanics with D&D. If you look at another dimension, say graphics, then many of them share this with other computer games. If you look at yet another one, say tactics, then some have much in common with wargames. They aren’t all bound by any of these, though. What all virtual worlds – from WoW to EVE to Second Life – have in common is some kind of “virtual worldliness” factor that separates them out from everything else.

Now if you’re talking about today’s big Fantasy MMOs then yes, there is a direct line to D&D through the DikuMUD gene. If you were talking about a single-player Fantasy game like Oblivion then I dare say there’s a link there, too (I’m just speculating, mind you). So if your particular interest were D&D derivatives, it would make sense to say Oblivion and WoW were both cut from the same cloth. However, even though Oblivion and WoW are similar in many ways, they are different in a way that WoW and Club Penguin aren’t.

>I’ve heard arguments all of the web about thing like, “The Shadowrun dice rolling mechanic would make a good underlying system for an MMO.”

So it might. Designers aren’t restricted to inventing original mechanics for everything they do. Mechanics aren’t what makes an MMO an MMO, though.

>It just seemed to me like this post got dangerously close to
>sounding like: “We former MUD designers did it all by ourselves
>and hereby lay claim to all MMO history.”

Well, without us MMOs would have had a different history, but yes, there were lots of influences from elsewhere. However, when you look at the MMOness of MMOs, there’s an audit trail from almost every one of them stretching back to MUD1. WoW to EQ to DikuMUD to AberMUD to MUD1. If you want to consider the Fantasy elements, then you’d have a different trail: WoW to EQ to DikuMUD to AD&D to D&D to Tolkien. If you want to look at the combat mechanics, it would be as above except continue from D&D to Chainmail. There are many different tracks you can follow depending on what interests you. If it’s the “real-time, automated, persistent, shared, imaginary places you can visit through the vehicle of a character” definition, though, you’re pretty well going to end up at MUD1.

>However the pen and paper guys also created an environment and
>way of thinking about things that spawned the RPG and made a
>major impact on MUD.

It wasn’t a major impact. Tolkien was a much bigger impact, if you want to credit someone else.

Gene Endrody>when I’ve thought about Sherwood’s family tree, D&D and Rogue were impossible to ignore.

So you were trying to create a rogue-like D&D, and the fact that you made Sherwood an MMO was only a secondary consideration?

>I ask the gamers: Were you playing RPGs like Baulder’s Gate and
>Diablo before you got into MMOs? or was it the MUDs that got you
>into this?

This is like movie-goers whether it was Titanic and Sleepless in Seattle that got them into watching emotional movies or The Battleship Potempkin. Few movie-goers will have heard of the latter, but most of the directors will have, and if you ask them about montage then they’ll tell you all about it. Sure, it may have been silent and in black & white, but it informed most of today’s movies through its innovations. Its not having been seen by most of today’s movie-goers doesn’t render it irrelevant. Likewise, the MUDs that came before UO and EQ and Kingdom of the Winds are not irrelevant merely because today’s players didn’t play them.

Eolirin>The game was a very basic MUD in that it had rooms, chat channels and the ability to move about the world. The game was called “Monster” even though it was devoid of so called monsters.

Yes, that was Rich Skrenta’s creation, I know about it (I cite it in my book as one of the occasions when virtual worlds were invented independently). It did actually feed into the MUD tree through the development of TinyMUD, although sadly for the D&D-influence case all the game elements of it were removed for this purpose.

Matt Mihaly>in some cases, such as Avalon or the Iron Realms games, the connection pretty much starts and ends at the ideas of scalar health and mana

D&D didn’t have mana, it had one-shot spells ripped out of Larry Niven’s Warlock series, so mana isn’t actually a D&D influence.

Richard

@Eolirin,

I might have missed your point. I do agree that MUDs can’t be directly descending from D&D or any P&P RPG. That’s pretty easy to see so we’re in agreement that as long as you do not trivialize P&P’s impact on the development and evolution of MUDs you’re good. That’s what I thought Richard was doing in his comment. In the end it might all be semantics though as it seems that the web of influences is hard to put into a straight line of branches and leaf nodes. The whole thing is more like a weighted graph where the weights change when viewing the graph from a different angle, thus obscuring the ability to choose a single vertex as the center of the graph.

About the only pattern we can make out if it all is that P&P generally came before MUDs which came before MMOs and there’s some sort of connection there that’s rather tough to define. Let us not forget that P&P != D&D. P&P covers many more forms of gaming than rolling dice and bashing monsters.

http://www.dyasdesigns.com/roleplay/dicelessgames.html
http://www.sjgames.com/toon/
http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/rpg/series.php?qsSeries=19

The multiplayer aspects of MUDs(Diku, Moo, MUSH, LP, …) and MMOs are important but so too is the world that provides context for the players to exist and that context is heavily derived from P&P. The rules that govern how hundreds of players play together in a MUD or millions in a MMO all seemingly have been influenced by the rules governing how a few friends would sit down together and play a P&P RPG. Direct descendancy is tough to prove but heavily influenced is just a weaker connection along the same lines of descendancy and with the case of P&P and MUDs it’s difficult to truly say if MUD is a direct descendant or merely heavily influenced by P&P. Depends upon which angle you’re looking at teh graph.

And MUDs are reskinned Dbase III+ databases. Right.

When we talk about something that is both art and technology, it’s difficult to separate the two. And I’m not sure it’s important or helpful. The goal here, it’s been said, is to either “innovate more” or at least avoid doing the same old things the same old way. I’m not sure those things are either; A) possible, or; B) to be directly sought after. Why?

Well, you can use a tool without understanding its history. In some cases, in fact, if we’re looking for innovation, it’s good to *not* have a perfect idea of the past use of the tool. One can become too focused on comparisons with the past. For example, we have people here talking about which features, specifically, are in MMOs vs MUDs vs. DikuMUD vs… etc.

A hammer and a saw both have a handle. Does that mean one is the forerunner of the other? Or that they share a common, grandtool? Maybe they do. Or maybe the guy that first put a handle on one tool then said, “Yowza. Let’s add this to the other sharp rocks.”

My point is that when it comes to games (as opposed to more directly quantitative studies), lineage matters much less to me than comparison, regardless of what influenced who. Is there an element of fun in live, D&D games that can be replicated in MMOs? Yeah. Cool. That’s great, then. Is there something of the compulsive, numerological “this-always-goes-there” building from MUDs that is (for some) a neat part of MMOs and (for others) a quirk that dates back from the “database-y-ness” of earlier games? Sure.

If a new “Web kid” comes along who has some interesting ideas for how to use Flash for these games… does he have to go back and play text MUDs to make sure he’s not recreating the wheel? No! Wheels work really, really well. And he may learn something from the recreation process.

This form of art/leisure (like so many others) is so heavily influenced by so many forms that to require a distinct pedigree is, I think, something of a waste of time. The fact that you show examples of how similar, successful games were created independently of each other seems, to me, to be a proof of this. “Game ABC did XYZ and it was influenced by game DEF. Game GHI also did XYZ, but independent of DEF.” OK… So… what was the point again?

Not that it isn’t fun watching the fur fly

I’m not sure I can get behind the idea that MUDs are reskinned versions of D&D. Some MUDs are, to be sure (particularly the DIKU family), but others bear very little relationship to D&D. For instance, some MUDs have very heavy socio-political elements in them that are core to the gameplay and have no precedent in D&D. Others focus on player-created content in a way that also has no precedent in D&D.

I’d agree that to some extent (a very limited extent in some cases), the monster bashing portions of MUDs derives somewhat from D&D but it’s a pretty tenuous connection (in some cases, such as Avalon or the Iron Realms games, the connection pretty much starts and ends at the ideas of scalar health and mana. In the Iron Realms MUDs most of your abilities won’t even work on NPCs, in fact, as the games revolve around complicated PvP.)

Of course, other MUDs don’t even have monster bashing (some of the MOO branch for instance). Shangri-La, for instance, a once-popular sexually themed MUD, didn’t have any killing at all that I recall.

@Gene, that’s an irrelevant question though.

Zork and then the Lucas Arts adventure games got me into computer gaming in general, so you could say that Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max are responsible for me playing World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, StarCraft, and coutless other completely unrelated genres and games. As a player, something that interests me can have tangental ties into other (mostly) unrelated areas.

But that does not mean that those other areas are all that important in terms of being able to *make* those things though. Useful maybe, important, not so much. BG and Diablo aren’t even remotely comparable to UO or WoW in terms of what needs to go into building them and building them well, though Diablo and WoW are closer to kindred spirits. But no matter how you look at it, the core systems are so completely different in terms of what they end up providing the player that the more specific lessons learned from one cannot be ported to the other and trying to make the games with the same mindset would be doomed to failure. You can grab a useful mechanic here and there, but you need to understand what you’re really trying to do and what you’re really offering and need to be offering or you’ll botch it up.

“That central core of what an MMO “is” does, however, inherit from MUDs. What’s more, it stops there.”

Ok, I’m not going to disagree because as pioneer, you get to define the terms. Hovever when I’ve thought about Sherwood’s family tree, D&D and Rogue were impossible to ignore. WAR, WOW and EQ also sit in the RPG family tree. Whether these games are a unique type of RPG or whether they are a unique type of virtual world is just a matter of perspective. From the perspective of an RPG, you’re left with a different central core that pays homage to a different family tree. I ask the gamers: Were you playing RPGs like Baulder’s Gate and Diablo before you got into MMOs? or was it the MUDs that got you into this?

@Wolfe, I think dictates is the wrong word, because yeah, the lack of difference in terms of feel and intent is pretty much “accidental”, and it’s not at all manditory. It’s just a high risk investment, and it’s expensive, so no one innovates much, or even tries different things. But EVE and WoW have very different “feels” or if you want to call it artistic message, and going back closer to the beginning, UO and EQ did too. So it definitely doesn’t *have* to be like that.

@Eolirin

Like I said to Richard you guys are right in that MUDs and MMOs are not reskinned D&D, but it’s not as black an white as the two of you are letting on. Small anecdote from my MUD days here:

I was at the UMass Lowell for most of my CS undergrad work and we had a VAX VMS system there with some form of a social space on it. The game was a very basic MUD in that it had rooms, chat channels and the ability to move about the world. The game was called “Monster” even though it was devoid of so called monsters. For all intents and purposes this game existed without the influence of D&D even though many of the admins for the game played in a weekly D&D session including myself. When it came time to expand the world and evolve it to the next step, the admins used their D&D experience to plan how to evolve the game. We were able to get beyond the basics of setting up objects (what properties should they start out with), combat (what dice rolling system needed to be implemented, skill system design) and eventually NPCs. (what attributes do they have) All of this was prototyped in the first version by implementing what we knew from D&D and other P&P roleplaying games like GURPS, Shadowrun, Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu.

Without those games and that knowledge, the process of creating the evolved game would have been significantly harder so it was and is very difficult to ignore the influence of P&P on our MUD. I kept this experience with me as I moved to admin other MUDs through the 90s. I would venture that this line of thinking and decision making in early MUDs was more prevalent then those that shunned all form of P&P influence to create a world with people in it. On the same token, I do not go so far as to say that MUDs tried to recreate the D&D experience online. The only game I know that tried to do that was Neverwinter Nights. If recreating D&D online is what MUDs we’re trying to do then they failed for all the reasons you mention. We built something new by picking apart the remains of a P&P experience and using elements from it that helped accelerate development while discarding the rest of the P&P experience as not needed. Still, we used our P&P experience to make it happen and knowing where you came from is just as important as having a vision of where you are going.

@Richard,

Reskinned D&D might be a bit over the top but let’s face it, the core gameplay mechanics of most CRPGs, singleplayer or massively multiplayer, stem from P&P games. P&P games provide a “visual” context with which to observe things like skill systems, dice rolling mechanics, class balance, etc., etc. All of these influenced the current crop of MMO designers in some way or form. I’ve heard arguments all of the web about thing like, “The Shadowrun dice rolling mechanic would make a good underlying system for an MMO.” Ultimately, that gets a designer thinking and their experience with P&P games is an ingredient in the formula that becomes their MUD or now their MMO.

So while I can understand your statement that “And yesterday’s MUDs are reskined D&D” is not actually true, I don’t think it is quite as black and white as you’re making it out to be. Designers look to lots of sources for inspiration and P&P has traditionally been a treasure trove of nuggets to be leveraged in an MMO.

Bah, I hit a tab and a return and posted my message before I’d finished typing it…

>It would be as easy for table top RPG gamers to claim that MUDs
>are just obvious evolutionary change from pen and paper

Easy, but not how it happened. MUDs may well be an obvious evolutionary change from pencil & paper RPGs, but that wasn’t an evolutionary change that took place.

>And yesterday’s MUDs are reskined D&D.

This is the sort of remark that looks as if it should be true, but isn’t. You can’t use such assumptions as a basis for an argument; you have to use observations that actually are true. You especially can’t argue this way when talking to someone with personal experience of the matter.

Richard

Gene Endrody>If “today’s virtual worlds are the leaves of a tree”, as Richard says, it’s D&D that’s the trunk.

Roy Trubshaw never played D&D. I’d played it quite extensively, but I took very little from it; the main thing was the level structure (and I did consider other possibilities; I went with D&D’s because it gave me what I wanted). D&D didn’t really have a great deal of impact on MUDs until DikuMUDs, which really took D&D structures (but not the gameplay) to heart. In terms of trees and branches, MUDs/MMOs and D&D are branches off the Tolkien tree, along with Fantasy literature and Fantasy movies/TV. Going further back, Tolkien’s work itself was a development of myth and religion.

>What was more significant or revolutionary? D&D or the MUD?

Significant to whom? The “worldliness” that separates MUDs/MMOs from other forms of computer entertainment isn’t a consequence of D&D at all, it actually owes more to a role-playing game I created and played for my own amusement when I was in my early teens (before I – or possibly anyone else outside of Gygax & Arneson’s gaming groups – had heard of what was to become D&D). Now the class system we see in today’s MMOs was indeed ripped out of D&D, and therefore you can legitimately claim that D&D is an ancestor of today’s MMOs; however, it’s not an ancestor of what makes MMOs MMOs. Likewise, the graphics in today’s MMOs can be traced back to Spacewar!, so Spacewar! is an ancestor of today’s MMOs; however, it’s not related to the “MMOness” of them – that which distinguishes how they inter-connect with one another, yet are separate from other forms of computer game/product. That central core of what an MMO “is” does, however, inherit from MUDs. What’s more, it stops there.

>It would be as easy for table top RPG gamers to claim that MUDs
>are just obvious evolutionary change from pen and paper

and THEY deserve all the credit for today’s MMOs.

“Today’s MMOs are mostly reskinned muds.”

And yesterday’s MUDs are reskined D&D.

Meh, I still don’t see D&D as being a good starting point for MUDs. As Raph said, if that’s what they were going for, they failed miserably. I actually would submit that they failed for a different reason than Raph posits though.

D&D, especially the early D&D that would’ve been contemporary with early computer games, has a very narrowly defined intent in how it’s to be played. It’s entirely about small group situations and specifically about dungeon crawling. Anything else is built artificially around those game mechanics by the players, not by the system itself. D&D’s greatest impact came not from D&D itself, but from the fact that it inspired the players of it to examine things from a different direction. Even D&D mechanically didn’t do much to engender what we’d call roleplaying today… that was all the players adding things that didn’t exist in the rules and weren’t really even encouraged by the system. It provided a window into something else, but the players were almost completely responsible for building the door and going through it; going beyond it’s mechanical strictures to create something greater. Nothing really reskinned D&D, because D&D itself wasn’t the core of that experience. It was only the framework around which that experience was created. The real core was the gaming group, the GM and the interaction with the players.

MUDs have very little to do with that intimate 3-8 person group that goes around rolling dice to stomp monsters. It’s got more to do with the visualization of worlds and the attempt to populate them with real people. As Raph brings up, the questing systems had more to do with text based adventures than D&D style leveling, and you see elements of that in many different areas. The concept of a persistent world that you can move around in and effect state changes in is more representative of those early text adventure games than it is of the typical D&D group. Wandering from room to room in a MUD is much more evocative of that than anything else. Even more damming to the comparison is the loss of the GM. While D&D would have you running a game for other people, custom designing and modifying the gameplay to their tastes, character abilities, and playstyles, MUDs basically replaced the GM with what amounts to the Z-Machine, making it more closely related to a large scale multiplayer version of Zork than anything else. It became static rather than dynamic, bound to the conceits of the mechanical systems and pre-existing development work.

The group dynamics were different too, if only because of scale. Competition became partially institutionalized in a way that it rarely would be around a game table. Economy became a factor, something that never really comes up in D&D (and I’m not talking buying equipment with gold when I say economy). You ended up with worlds where people would come and go at will, never really being locked in to the same group of people for the same adventures, but all sharing the same space, something that was just plain impossible with D&D. You lost that intimacy of the gaming group, the extremely personal way that the game was played with a small close knit group of friends. And you instead got a whole community sharing the same world. You might not like all of your fellow players, you may not agree with all of them, and you might not even play the game with most of them… but they were still there, part of the same world you were playing in. It’s not even remotely comparable of an experience to sitting around the game table playing D&D, and it has nothing to do with a hyperbolic comparison of how much people pretended to be someone else in them. They’re just not the same beast, and they *can’t* be no matter what you try to do. Scale assures that.

So I see early MUD development more as “Hey, let’s create a world and fill it with real human beings” and less as “Hey, you know, it’d be cool if we could do this D&D thing over a computer network”. I’d go as far as to say that D&D’s influence on gaming was similar to Tolkien’s influence on D&D itself; something that got people interested in the topic but that ultimately had little to do with creating a line of derivation that built on the specifics of what it did. Tolkien’s elves and wizards look nothing at all like the elves and wizards that he inspired once you go beyond the surface similarities that can at best be called stereotypes. CRPGs and MUDs look nothing at all like what D&D actually does beyond that most superficial layer as well. You have levels and classes and “roleplaying” but the experience and ultimately mechanics are not even remotely similar.

Apologies — I haven’t written in trackback functionality yet. No need to approve this comment. I just wanted to let you know!

I linked to and partially quoted your work here over at WGFriends, as I found it somewhat related to a separate discussion. Hope it’s not a problem!

- John

@Amaranthar, actually, iirc Bartle’s been on the record as saying about the only thing inspired by DnD was using levels. So I’m pretty sure MUDs don’t really have that much to do with DnD, at least in terms of how they evolved. It’s more coming from the high fantasy roots that dnd also grew off of. Tolkien is likely a bigger influence in this stuff than Gygax was.

Weren’t MUDs basically an attempt to put D+D into computer processing?
And speaking of instances, P+P games were all instanced.

MMOs have removed more features from MUD gameplay than they have added

and

Look at the golf thread in a talk I gave last year in Spain to see what I mean.

Harkening back to ye-olde-evolution discussion. These remind me of mass extinction:

1) There is a stable ecology. (Pre-MUD or pre-EQ)

2) Something comes along (a meteor) and kills off most of the animals, leaving a lot of empty uninhabited land. (Introduction of PCs, or introduction of 3D accelerators)

3) The survivors multiply, lots of evolutionary experimentation happens. Such as giant centipedes or flying fish. (List of first 10 MUDs, or first 10 MMORPGs)

4) Once the land is repopulated, overpopulation occurs. (DikuMUD clones, or soon-to-come MMORPG clones)

5) Most experimental species die off. (DikuMUD wins out, XXX wins out)

6) Back to a stable ecology awaiting the next meteor. (Or paradigm shift)

Raph>from Mark over at Mythic/EA

Lest readers gain the wrong impression:

Mark Jacobs is one of those handful of people who invented his own virtual world independently, which means he can legitimately claim his work isn’t strictly part of the MUD tree. I know very little about Aradath, but it wouldn’t surprise me if you could track some of what he was trying to say with it through Dragon’s Gate, DAoC and Imperator to WAR. Ironically, given the way the argument about similarity between MMOs unfolded, he’s one of the few designers who has every right to make WAR an evolutionary advance on earlier MMOs, because he’s basically continuing his long-standing oevre.

Also, Gordon Walton cut his MMO teeth playing Avatar on PLATO, so he, too, comes at this from a different angle. Indeed, Bioware’s MMO is one of the two large-scale worlds currently in development that I’m really looking forward to seeing in action (the other one being what CCP is working on).

The point about the invention of MUDs (or MMOs, for those who think they’re unrelated) being obvious is one I raise myself, as you say. Look at the golf thread in a talk I gave last year in Spain to see what I mean. We were always going to get these things. However, almost all the ones we did get can trace their ancestry back to MUD1 (for reasons I explain in the above talk), whether their designers like the fact or not. It’s just the way things happened.

Today’s virtual worlds are the leaves of a tree, and to deny the relevance of the branches and the trunk is to miss out on an understanding not only of how we got where we are, but also of where we’re going.

Richard

I’m never bored by comparing MUDs to MMOs, but people who “implying that today’s MMOs owe their entire existence to the MUDs of yesteryear” are over simplifying. Rogue type games and D&D were the two greatest influences on Sherwood. I didn’t play MUDs until well after launch, mostly because I met Matt Mihaly. However, someone could say there’s Diku influence on Sherwood and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. I was influenced by Diku’s influences. MUDs, early RPGs like Ultima, Rogue type games and D&D are all part of an established set of best practices or required reading and giving all the credit to only one of them is unfair. I think that’s what rubs some MMO developers the wrong way. Richard’s point of challenging old best practices, whatever their origin, is still a good one.

@Wolfe, well, that’s generally true, but I mean there are some maverick companies that totally buck the old ways of doing things. Like what Nintendo did with the Wii. It’s not *impossible* to pull off, though you may need to make some budget sacrfices. But you’re right that few people take risks in the game industry. Thing is, considering how well some of the people that do take big risks end up doing (like Nintendo), you’d think people’d try it more often.

Time wrote:

Enough of the “this is wrong”. Let’s hear some “this is right” or “what about doing it this way?”

To take a famous quote from a movie:

Col. Nathan R. Jessep: You want answers?

Lt. Daniel Kaffee: I think I’m entitled.

Col. Nathan R. Jessep: You want answers?!

Lt. Daniel Kaffee: I want the truth!

Col. Nathan R. Jessep: You can’t handle the truth!

People, such as Raph, are posting new and innovative ideas all the time. For the most part, people don’t listen because the ideas are so far outside their understanding of a MMO (aka: WoW-clone) that the ideas don’t register. This same idea myopathy exists with much of the VC that provides the money.

I think the real issue is that Bartle is an opinionated person and comes off as such. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s opinionated. He’s exactly whom you want to have on your panel to stir some controversy. It’s questionable if you want him on your board of advisers if the best he can do is express his thoughts in disparaging remarks or offer no constructive input.

Enough of the “this is wrong”. Let’s hear some “this is right” or “what about doing it this way?”

It is an interesting conversation, and something of a broken logical progression. From a historical standpoint I think it is more supportable to say that had the current designers of modern MMOs not fallen in love with the interactive world context of MUDs, those modern MMOs would not exist in their current shapes.

Some of us are still in love with MUDs, and deep down frustrated with modern graphical games for not being them. While still enjoying the pretty.