MUD Basics

The Joy of Text RPGs

You'll discover that this sort of open-ended, combat experience-based text game will satisfy your typically male, deep-seated desire to achieve a series of tiered goals. Or so the behavioral psychologists tell us. Men, especially males in the 13-35 age metric, love to play combat-variant RPGs in order to cater to their need to pile up conquests, like experience levels, gold, better equipment, and the gamer respect that comes with veteran (!newbie) status. This need stems from the trauma we boys experienced on childhood playing fields, where we were told to get points or runs or ribbons for our school, city or bowling club.

On the other hand, women of this same age metric prefer puzzle-solving, life-simulation and other non combat-centric games. This is most likely due to the fact that women are pressured to conform to post-industrial-revolution roles in the kitchen, schoolhouse or tavern, and often excluded from vein-popping mock combat-based field competions by their school boards or parents. If you're a woman that loves text-based RPGs, you're breaking through a dozen socio-economic barriers, and we love you even more for that. Welcome.

The good news is the JediMUD's game play caters to both the ladder-climbing equipment collecting combat junkie and the contemplative puzzle solver. Some of the areas are immersive backdrops to truly compelling role-playing. Add a live human element in the ever-present JediMUD community, and you have a gaming experience unlike any other.

First Steps

Before you can enjoy the endlessly entertaining aspects of this game, you'll need to master some basics. Unlike graphical platform-based games, text games require an understanding of the "command line." To illustrate the command line interface, I'll take you through a short tutorial that is meant to showcase some cool tips and tricks that I've learned over the years to make my text RPG experience more enjoyable.

Midgaard Tutorial

If you haven't created a character yet, do so. The easiest class to play is the cleric. No alignment penalties, decent amount of hitpoints and a great set of healing spells. Make sure your character's hometown is set to Midgaard. This is the zone where we'll host our introductory tutorial.

When you login to the game, if you're a level one character, you'll be placed just upstairs from the standard Midgaard hometown start location, The Temple Altar. By placing level one newbies in the Hall of Adventurers (1s of the Newbie Transporter Room), it was thought that you would be more likely to blunder into the Newbie Training Zones. Let's wait a few more minutes before blundering about in there.

If you're not a level one Midgaard hometown character, you'll be placed at The Temple Altar to begin. Go upstairs.

So here you are, in the Hall of Adventurers. First, let's look around. Type "look".



This is the long description of the room. When you move around, you'll see the long description. In the old days, when we were all using 1200 BAUD modems, this extra text caused significant lag. With high-speed networking, disabling the long description is less of an issue. Still, if you don't like seeing the long description of a room every time to move, type "brief". Brief is a command that belongs to a set of commands called toggles.

Type "toggle" now.

Toggles

The toggle settings display is the closest thing to reviewing your JediMUD gameplay "preferences." Toggle works on a character by character basis, so you'll need to configure the settings for each of your characters separately. Let's run through your options.

We covered brief. If you type "brief" again, you'll enable long descriptions. Type "brief" again, and you'll only see brief room descriptions. That how a toggle works. You move back and forth between two states: on and off.

Here is a table with the toggles and the command to enable/disable each feature.

Toggle (Preferences) Chart

TOGGLE	DESC	ON	OFF
Brief Mode	long/short room descriptions	brief	brief
On Quest	monitors quest channel	quest	quest
Deaf to Shouts	monitors shouts and yells	deaf	deaf
Gossip Channel	monitors gossip channel	nogos	nogos
DirT Protect	allows a mage to teleport to you	nodirt	nodirt
NoAnticipate	enables/disables ranger anticipate	noanti	noanti
Summon Protect	enables/disables summoning	nosum	nosum
NoTell	prevents private tells from other players	notell	notell
EQ Mute	hides player equipping messages	eqmute	eqmute
Auction Channel	monitors auction channel	noauc	noauc
NoRepeat	disables repitition of channel communications	norep	norep
Item Stacking	groups items in inventory and on ground	nost	nost
Compact Mode	remove an extra line feed between room descs	comp	comp
Wimp Level	set the hit point amount under which you will flee	wimp #
Auto-Exits	if supported by the zone, will display exits	auto	auto
Grat Channel	monitors the congratulations channel	nogratz	nogratz
NoChase	allows rangers to pursue fleeing mobs	nochase	nochase

Setting Your Prompt

The prompt system has been completely re-written. Previous prompt mnemonics are only partially supported, so your old prompt may produce unexpected results. Check with the in-game help system for more information.

If you haven't set your prompt, I suggest replacing the default prompt with the following prompt.

> prompt ~[%h/%H %m/%M %v/%V~] %o %a %X %Av %S %c

[14/14 25/25 13/13] 100 1999 0

This gives you a prompt that tells you the following things:

• your current hit points over your max hit points - if your hit points fall below 25% of your maximum value, this value will automatically turn red (autowarn)

• your current mana (%n) over your max mana - if your mana falls below 25% of your maximum value, this value will automatically turn red (autowarn)'

• your current moves (%w) over your max moves - if your movement falls below 25% of your maximum value, this value will automatically turn red (autowarn)'

• mob condition (%o) (during melee)

• your armor class (%a)

• the amount of experience needed to reach your next level (%X)

• your current alignment value (%Av)

• your tank's current status (%s) (during melee)

• your current status (%c) (during melee)

Make sure that your client emulation (ZMUD, CMUD, tintin, tintin++, winterm, and telnet) is set to ansi. To enable color warnings, type:

[14/14 25/25 13/13] 9am 100 1999 0  color complete

Your color is now complete.

[14/14 25/25 13/13] 9am 100 1999 0