Re: Introduction to Mud's world
Hi and welcome to the forum.
A description of muds (along with other types of games), can be found Here however To texplain in a bit more detail, a mud as people have said is primarily a text game. You play a little as you would in an interactive fiction game, ie you will see a description like:
"You are in a forest, there is a sword lying on the ground, paths lead north south east and west and there is an ogre near you"
Here you could do things like go in any direction, cast a spell, pick up the sword and attack the ogre.
The difference with muds however is firstly that they're played in real time, so the ogre would attack you every second, and also sinse muds are (as Ironcross said), multi user there are lots of other players online at the same time as you.
This means letting you keep up with the text speech and also play the mud efficiently can be interesting, althou gh lots of the better classes of mud are ones with some assistance for screen readers like low spam modes where there is less text to listen to in combat so you can react faster.
As indicated, many muds are fantasy themeed, with an rpg feel to them where you wander around in a fantasy kingdom, play classes like warrior and clerric, battle lots of monsters and complete quests. Other muds are scifi based and can have you flying around in spaceships, mining asteroids and blowing up aliens or space pirates, however others can be utterly different, you could build an empire or just be in a region full of puzzles. Some muds even despense with the gaming rpg like aspects and have everything by roleplay, so you type as your character does, pick up objects, move around and talk to others and don't fight anything in a predone quest.
To play a mud you will need a client, and then to connect your client to the mud in question, you usually do this by going to connect and typing in the mud's connection info which can be something like "nameofmud.whatever, port some numbers"
The Client I personally use is Vipmud index page here from www.gmagames.com. It has the advantage of being designed to work with screen readers or sapi and will work out of the box.
People also recommend Mushclient find out more here which as has been said needs some plugins working to run correctly.
As to what mud to start with, Well a good place to start might be Alter aeon This is a typical fantasy game with six different classes of character to play, a huge world to explore, lots of quests and things to do as well as regular events. It's had a lot of very Vi s pecific additions to to make it as friendly as possible to screen readers, including a unique client of it's own called mushZ which adds a huge number of sounds to the game and transforms it into an audio rpg.
Other very vi friendly muds include The huge, complex and very detailed Materiamagica the intensively realistic western themed Clok mud the battle heavy Aardowlf,
And turning to scifi there is the combative Miriani, The ever expanding Prometheus and the gentle, mysterious puzzle driven Flux world, their own site is here
Lots of others exist of course, and you'll here about several on this forum, or can find more by looking on www.whitestick.co.uk's games to play online page, but there are some ideas.
I'd highly recommend starting with Alteraeon sinse with it's own sound client and very newbie friendly atmosphere it's a good place to learn about muds even if fantasy rpg style combat fests aren't your thing over all. Aardwolff also might be a good one to begin with sinse again though it's heavily hack n slash it's got a lot of features to make life easier and a very good and decent new player tutorial, plus where Alteraeon has it's own sound client, aardwolf works in a more standard way with text, but it's really up to you.
Hth.
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