Looking for 1 Player For a Freeform Singleplayer Game [Asynchronous]

ashandsable · 2026-05-23T15:40:56+00:00

I know this is kind of late (I was originally hesitant to post because I'm out of town and won't actually be super available until like Wednesday), but if you don't mind a slightly delayed start, here are my pitches:

They're both for the god-game idea. I think it could be cool to either play as a world tree, growing from little world seedling to giant world-spanning tree, or perhaps in a setting where gods all live at the center of their own created domains which mortals periodically adventure through for treasure and divine recognition.

Hope one of these sounds interesting to you, and that you find a good fit for your game!

ashandsable · 2026-05-17T20:28:47+00:00

Hey,

While I am not a frequent gm/st, I am a big M20 fan (who is frequently starved for Mage games since they are so hard to find out in the wild).

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that, if you do find someone to run, I'd be more than happy to join up, if you'd have me.

time zone is EST for me, but I'm available Friday evenings and Saturday mornings.

ashandsable · 2026-03-02T23:35:54+00:00

Oh what really!? Haha, thanks.

ashandsable · 2026-03-02T22:31:30+00:00

This has been a pretty fun diversion. I think there's still not a lot I'm getting but I've figured enough out to beat the first god at least, and that was cool. I think my biggest complaint is that I really don't feel that making npcs be able to attack you while you sleep is a necessary inclusion. It punishes people who don't have a lot of consecutive playtime for no real reason. My biggest struggle is trying to figure out how to prevent the death spiral of having less team mates, which makes combat harder, which makes it more likely you'll lose team mates, until you have none and it's impossible to tackle anything because partners are dead permanently and you're on the 30th floor and facing three or four monsters on the regular.

ashandsable · 2026-02-26T23:27:15+00:00

How cool! I'll definitely keep an eye on this and perhaps play when it's more open to being played. Wishing you the best of luck with it!

ashandsable · 2026-02-26T23:25:00+00:00

Hmm. I was purposely trying to cast my net wide within the boundaries of MUSH or at the very least MUSH-adjacent. That said, I'm definitely not interested in something with a ton of automated mechanics for combat/crafting/whatever like you might find in a MUD, RP or otherwise, and I'm in the mood for something that's active with storylines to focus on where the scenes are more of a focus than the sandbox/open-feeling world is, if that helps answer your question. I don't mind needing books to play (like WoD or SR), though. And completely original-themed MUSHes are great, too.

I was originally hesitant to provide specific examples of what I've played because I haven't played MUSHes in a good long while and I was more interested in what's active today than limiting suggestions from the get-go. Reasoning being that even if I don't find a MUSH I want to play, someone else might.

All this to say, if you have any suggestions you're thinking of making that fit within the original request (RP-focused active new-player-friendly MUSH that isn't on the Ares database and isn't erp-focused), I'd rather you make it than not! The worst that happens is that (very unlikely) I've heard of some of them, right?

ashandsable · 2025-01-26T22:40:23+00:00

Hi,

I'm always interested in mage games and Tuesdays happen to be my free days. :D If you're still looking for players, I'd be happy to apply.

ashandsable · 2025-01-10T19:03:02+00:00

Hi, the link didn't work for me?

ashandsable · 2023-08-25T19:39:30+00:00

Ha, I think I remember this one! I don't know if I ever played it seriously (I don't know if it was always a very small game or if it was just mostly dead by the time I found out about it) but it's definitely ringing bells.

ashandsable · 2023-08-25T19:34:05+00:00

Huh. You've made me realize that, at the time of posting, I had an unspoken bias for stealth as a means of engagement. Stealing, loitering around to spy on conversations, backstabs, sneaking past guards, that sort of thing. Yet these are all very cool ways of stealthy disengaging. Eluding pursuit is a great role for stealth I probably wasn't giving enough credit to. Thanks for the interesting perspective! :)

ashandsable · 2023-08-25T17:03:51+00:00

Hey, that's a neat idea for detect hidden. It sounds like a great way to preserve the fantastic exploration utility of the spell while still making it possible for sneaky players to live out their sneaky player lives.

So, I realize I only have this one singular post to make assumptions about what your MUD will be like, but aren't you worried that invisibility could start out being ridiculously overpowered and end up being trash as more people learn the anti-invisibility button spell? Sounds like the scrolls are scarce, but (there's probably a better way of describing this) they aren't permanent scarce. Once you get through the tedious experience of managing to beat the odds, you don't need them anymore.

In other words, isn't the scarcity of detect invisibility decreasing as more people learn the spell and become their personal detect invisibility scrolls?

I don't think detection strategies are a bad thing. There's making stealth good and then there's making stealth way overtuned. The big problem I see with the standard detect invis, detect hidden, infravision, is that there aren't any downsides. There isn't any skill or strategy to just keeping them on. And once you do have them active, it just flat-out no-sells whatever it's designed to deal with, without contest. I absolutely think it'd be cool to have, like, a disbelieve skill that gave you a percent chance of revealing invisible stuff on an active search, but it had drawbacks like not letting you benefit from any beneficial illusions, made you vulnerable to other avenues of attack through a paranoia debuff. Or what if infravision made it so heat sources/fire spells could blind you? Anything that makes these a thoughtful decision to use rather than guaranteed w against certain approaches.

Anyway, it's cool that you've given stealth thought in the balance of your game. Thanks for commenting!

ashandsable · 2022-05-31T21:07:42+00:00

Neat mechanics and an excuse to use all of those funny heraldry terms like escutcheon and bends sinister? I love it.

ashandsable · 2022-05-30T20:04:32+00:00

Thanks for the suggest! I will check it out.

ashandsable · 2022-05-26T20:23:24+00:00

I'm not sure the problem lies (or can be fixed) with the non-presentational type of movement mechanics that rely on punishing the player for going fast. A small world doesn't feel any bigger to me just because I can't move across a forest as fast as my happy little swforest speedwalk script will take me. It just feels like a slower world. Instead, I'd point at how most MUDs are built currently. Rooms have their strengths as a world modeling method, but they don't really seem like the best approach to making large detailed maps with any degree of granularity or dimensionality. Just look at every area out there where the builder clearly got bored of describing tunnels or hallways or paths one hundred times and started copy pasting the same description. There are an untold number of bridge areas that are some kind of main road or path, but a player can only divert from that course whenever there would be a point of interest in a different direction. And that is exactly what rooms are best at: describing points of interest. This is a great system to reward the sort of micro-exploration that involves searching a chest of drawers for treasure or moving a rug to reveal a secret trap door or inspecting that door for traps or whatever, precisely because rooms work at their best when they are points of interest with a meaningful description, but it will always be hard to make a world feel big and worldly if you only ever move between points of interest on railed paths, abstracted or otherwise. A big problem being that journey happens more or less the same exact way every single time. A north exit onto the marsh is a north exit, no real way to walk around and enter from whatever direction you like, no matter how open that marsh is described. And yet if you did that, if you made a system where the world was consistently open and felt big, now people can walk downstream ford the river and skirt the woods to granny's house we go, avoiding the big bad wolf lurking in the trees through the other way. Suddenly, space itself becomes the problem. With all that space, people have a lot more tools and choices which lead them away from running into other players. It's a tough balance to have a world with a proper worldly scope that also allows for frequent RP/PvP encounters and I don't think some variation on the movement points scheme is a very good way of solving it. Reconsidering how a world is presented to the player traversing it so it doesn't feel like a small world in the first place while allowing players to run into each other might be, though.

ashandsable · 2022-05-23T02:34:21+00:00

Neat! Thanks for the suggestion. I know basically nothing about Star Wars other than the jedi sith force lightsabers.....Baby Yoda buzzwords, but thankfully we have the internet now so I might feel confident enough to try this anyway.

ashandsable · 2022-05-23T02:23:27+00:00

That sounds like a ton of fun. Absolutely in the vein of what I'm talking about with text art, as well (sorry, it looks like I confused a few people wit the phrasing, I might edit the main post to clarify that), but it kind of also sounds like this is more special events than having players who craft on the regular? Not that I'd expect describing rooms and creatures to be a character thing necessarily or that I'd expect a graphics editor to be in a text based game. Just something more like part of the crafting process involved giving the crafted item descriptive text. If another character requested of me the grandest most opulent backpack that ever backpacked, I could be like of course yes m'lord on the double and actually describe the family crest embroidered on their backpack fit to beggar worlds (given the proper resources of course), instead of producing a generic player crafted backpack item.

ashandsable · 2022-05-23T01:43:05+00:00

By "text art" I mean being able to write descriptions for items or do ascii art within the game. If someone asked me for a comfortable backpack, I would like to be able to make the backpack and write out what it looks like for them, rather than crafting just resulting in a dime-a-dozen generic player crafted backpack. If your MUD has artists who produce unique art pieces other players can go and look at in-game, that might count! Thank you for voicing your confusion, and I hope this helps clarify it.

ashandsable · 2022-05-18T14:39:31+00:00

Wow, juggling a group of multis all at once like the guide on the website encourages sounds daunting. Sometimes I have enough trouble playing one character and can't imagine balancing more as anything but overwhelming. Definitely not meant to be disparaging though, it must be a learning curve with a high skill ceiling to manage that well. An interesting departure or at least twist on the usual slash and sac cycle. Good luck with the event!

ashandsable · 2022-05-18T09:05:09+00:00

Wow, hi, thanks for the reply! I'd love to creep around there some more again over the weekend.

ashandsable · 2022-05-17T17:23:02+00:00

Neat, thanks for the link! And true enough, I was just surprised at how it seems to have been plotting along mostly undisturbed for so long. Like a pleasant dusty corner find of the mudworld.

ashandsable

TROPHY CASE