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Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS) – The Long Look Back

What is a MUD?

A MUD is a multi-user dungeon. Think D&D or an MMO, but text-based. There were no graphics outside of the occasional ASCII art. Everything was described, each room having a (mostly) detailed description of where you were, and where you could go from there. There were as many codebases as there are nations of people, so I’m not going to go into all of them, because that would be absolute folly. The two styles of MUD that were most common to me were ones based off of White Wolf’s tabletop series (Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, et cetera), and ones based off of some kind of D&D setting. These were all real-time games, and for the most part, the faster you could string together commands, the better you were. There were, of course, cooldowns and things like that, but in the more PVP-oriented MUDs, the faster you typed (or the better you put together aliases/macros/triggers), the more skilled you were at the game.

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