[MUD-Dev] requests

[Brandon J. Rickman]

Marian Griffith was asking for comments about a collection of web pages,
this particular section caught my eye:

--- borrowed from http://www.iaehv.nl/users/gryphon/index.html ---

The following series are amongst the most popular stories for roleplaying
games.  Of course had there been a book for the dungeon and dragon games
that would be by far the most popular one for muds but there isn't. 

- Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern(TM) 
- Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time 
- J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings 
- Paramount's Star Trek(TM) 

We are looking for people who are willing to put in a brief
explanation of why those books are so good, and such wonderfull
worlds for roleplay. And yes, advertisements for your favorite
game are acceptable. Or at least we're providing
space for that elsewhere and will allow links to those pages.

--- ---

First, has anyone come across a particularly good discussion of the
most popular mud themes?

Second, there are an unfortunate number of books based on Dungeons
and Dragons, at least in the US and the UK, probably the most 
significant being the DragonLance series.

Finally, those stories/themes that are the most influential are not
always the most popular, if one looks at quantity and not quality
(or quantity over time).  Some quick research on the Mud Connector
reveals:

5 muds based on Dragonriders of Pern
23 muds based on Jordan's Wheel of Time (aka the Series Without
an Editor)
9 muds based on Tolkien/Lord of the Rings
9 muds based on Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek
[14 muds based on TSR's DragonLance]
[19 muds based on White Wolf's World of Darkness]

While the Jordan series is very popular at the moment, I doubt
there will be more than a dozen Wheel of Time muds in a year or
two, or that more that half of the 23 "currently available" even
exist.

Some potential criteria for popular themes:

A wealth of source material - All of these themes, less so for
Jordan, provide a lot of printed material for mud creators to
draw from, and this material is well distributed.  The Jordan
material is not as accessible, unless you actually read his
books and take lots of notes.

A large unexplored but well defined world/universe - The bigger
the world, the easier it is to build a specific area or
system of that world without directly competing with other muds.
The World of Darkness muds are usually based around major cities,
the game world is _this_ world and is plenty big.

A broad non-age, non-gender biased audience - McCaffrey and
Tolkien have been read by people of all ages, Star Trek draws
fans from almost three generations.  As for gender: you don't
see a lot of muds based on Rambo, do you?  Or muds based on
romance novels?

And of course, some distinction should be made between
authored worlds and RPG based themes, i.e. muds based on
popular media versus muds based on games designed to be
games.

And then there is ZenMOO.

- Brandon Rickman - ashes at zennet.com -
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