MUSH Planning

Opening Remarks:

There are a lot of articles out there discouraging new wizards from attempting to open their own MU*. The thought process seems to be that there are so many of them out there, and that each and every new game that opens means the other games will lose players.

Perhaps that's true. Then again quite a few gamers are on more than one MU* on any given night, so the arrival of a new MU* on the scene is not necessarily going to take players away from all the others.

However there are a lot of poorly executed games out there. The initial ideas are good, or they've chosen out a theme that is popular, but that alone is not enough to guarantee a good game. Below I've outlined my particular method. My project, Heroes of the Wheel, has been open now for almost 5 years. During that time I have rarely logged on and not seen people RPing together. Good logs are generated and many of the players have stuck around since the very first day that we opened. We may not have the highest log in out there, but what we do have is a strong, and for the most part, happy, player base. I have also started one or two spectacular failures by failing to heed my own advice.

Before you buy a site:

Contrary to popular belief, starting a MUSH (I'll continue to refer to all MU*'s as MUSHes for the rest of this article, simply because that is what I use and am used to) does not begin when you buy a site. In fact buying a site is something like step six or seven in the process.

Before you buy a site, before you talk to your friends about starting the game, go to the grocery store and buy a notebook. Any sort of notebook will do, as long as there is some blank paper and something to keep it all together involved.

Write down your theme. Write down the proposed name of the game. Write down your vision for this game. Why are you starting it? What can you do with your games better than the first 400 World of Darkness games did? What are you going to offer that isn't already offered on the first 9 Pern games or Wheel of Time games or Lord of the Rings games? What problems have you seen in past execution that you plan to solve?

When I put together Heroes the MUSH market was already glutted with Wheel of Time games set 2-10 years before the books. I observed the fact that because 2-10 years before the books is canonically a very stable and well-defined time, it was difficult for the main political force of the game to really do anything without endangering the future timeline. It also meant that when 2-10 years of IC history had passed the wizards either had the choice to break from canon or start up the timeline. I decided to chose the Trolloc Wars, 2000 years before the books, as the venue. This has worked both because there was plenty to do in the Trolloc Wars, and because according to the books not much was known about what happened in them thanks to a great fire that destroyed most of the library. This meant I was free to liberally extrapolate...and create plenty of problems and adventures that the "modern" Wheel of Time crew had never heard of, and would even consider impossible. I stayed true to the source material by stating that one had to be able to at least extrapolate the potential situation out of the material. Heroes has had a few months where things slowed down and got quiet, but never has there been absolutely no problems for anyone in the world to tackle.

Define your success. Success is not always high logins. Tales of Ta'veren, in its heyday, had upwards of 70 people logging in each night. But their turnover was extremely high and when one hit a +where one realized that almost all 70 of those people were sitting alone in a room, not out RPing with one another. For Heroes, I defined success as a solid playerbase, with over 80% of the players and over 50% of the characters staying around for a year or more, and at least 70% of those who logged on getting themselves into a room with other people and RPing some sort of scene together. Heroes also now has a decent login at 27 or so on weeknights at peak times.

Design Your Grid:

Once you know why you're starting the game and what you're hoping to accomplish, you can pull out your source material and design your grid. Because of my stated goals above I opted for a grid that was very small. I'd estimate there are maybe 100 rooms on Heroes of the Wheel, despite there being 2 areas. I also designed in ways for people to get to the areas quickly. The first two areas featured by Heroes, Tar Valon and an original area named Cubiyari'Shain, were placed a day's ride apart. This meant that two people who wanted to get together to RP could do so, and even if there was no reason for one or both of them to be in the cities, the little villages and wilderness sites that I sketched onto the map provided spots for unlikely meetings.

I started with a simple bubble-and-stick map that listed the name of each room and a line leading from it to the exit rooms. This had the additional advantage of giving me a visual reference to use and check off when I finally did buy the site and begin building the grid.

Design Your Policies:

I decided to let the players pick the focus of the game, and it seems like for the most part, no surprise, they picked the magic users and those associated with them. Many wizards seem afraid to do something like this because they think they're going to end up with a bunch of bloodthirsty twinking powermongers. We have certainly had our odd twink, but the ratios are about the same as those MUSHes that insist that some people have to play farmers before they'll open up more legendary warrior slots. On those other games the farmers simply RP as if they were legendary warriors until people want to beat them, but I digress.

However, keeping a very open ended policy on the powered characters has given people even more of a reason to get together. Heroes does not have many farmers that sit in one room while the magic user sits off in another, but it does have a great deal of magic users who get together and bicker with one another nightly. Your focus as written above will be different and so your policies will be different, but make your policies fit what you want to achieve. Don't put a policy in place just because every MUSH you've been on has a similar policy and therefore you feel like every good MUSH ought to have that policy. If you do that you'll lessen your chances of meeting your own success goal and make both yourselves and your players crazy.

Design Your Code:

I am hopeless at code. Yet before I even had a code wizard I knew exactly what commands were essential to the game I wanted to run, so that I could give clear instructions to the code wizard when I did find one. I also knew what code to try to download off the internet. I did quite a bit of that as well.

The list I came up with was short: +where so that people could find one another, the chargen code because I knew I wanted a fair reference for people to use as a tool in rp, and the +bbs so that people could be caught up on current events, and +finger because it has proven generally helpful to me personally in the past as I try to initiate RP with others. That was what was needed for opening. Over the years we have added many nifty code features and functions that make life easier for all, but because I knew exactly what was required for opening, we opened far faster than we might have. The code wizard was not, for example, off coding a weather code when what I really wanted was a +finger.

Find Your Staff:

At last you're getting closer. You need to figure out what you need in terms of staffers. More than that you need to write out a job description, and what qualities you're looking for. You're not looking for just anyone who will code or just anyone who has had some area leader experience. I promise you're not. You are looking for someone who will code for you and who also will be on board with the philosophy and vision of the game you are trying to found.

In the case of Heroes, what I went looking for were people who wanted to RP most of all. I wanted folks who were willing to make an alt or three and get out there and meet newbies. Creative folks who could find a reason to RP with just about anyone and who wanted to do so, because, as I would later tell my staff, every other function of being a staffer was secondary, in my mind, to fostering RP on the game. Eventually I found all those folks, including someone who could both do all of the above and code, and was very happy and rewarded for it. Unsurprisingly I found them not by advertising willy nilly, but by going to folks I had enjoyed RPing with ElseMU*, letting them know the evil I was up to, and asking them if they wanted to get involved. I was surprised, as well, as I didn't know one of my RP buddies even could code. She indicated her interest once I'd outlined everything else. It was also easier to get staff because by now I had an action plan and could tell people exactly what I needed (I need room descriptions for these five rooms, could you write them up and email them?) rather than having staff who showed up and then logged back off when I was not there, or started digging rooms willy nilly. Everyone knew what was going on.

NOW Buy The Site:

Chose carefully though. If you know what's good for you you'll be with these folks for a long time. A MUSH can stand a move or two but not a move every six months. A MUSH can survive a server crash or ten, but not a server crash every week. Know what you're paying for. You're looking for reliability, customer service, responsiveness, a fair billing policy and a fair price. The same things you look for when you buy anything else. Going to some MUD site that hosts for $5.00 a game may be a dream come true. It may also kill your game if the hosters don't know what they're doing. I learned the site lesson the hard way, so I pass these caveats on to you.

Go To Town!

With your written plan of action in head, you are ready to get to work and actually dig, desc, newsfile and code the thing. How long this takes depends on you and your time, but my final caveat, for this article at least, is don't rely too heavily on your staffers. This is your baby, not theirs. For Heroes, the pen and paper stage described above took one month. The online development stage took another month. We were up and ready to rock by the third month. All of my staffers were quite helpful, but I'd say 90% of the work was between myself and my code wizard. That breakdown went something like this: all of the code went to the code wizard, and the rest went to me as the developer of the game. And why not? It was a labor of love...as it had better be if you're going to invest the time and energy to start a MUSH at all.

These tips won't guarantee you a great MUSH, but they will lay the foundation for a strong start and greatly help your development. Future articles will show you some ways to keep your players coming back for more. In the meantime I'd suggest a look at "The Care and Proper Feeding of MUSHes" guide, which is one of the most comprehensive common-sense Admin guides on the net.

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