Looking for Muscle Growth MUSH

[Semigloss]

RPing in online chat can be fun, but the best RP is the serious kind, with established characters who have personalities and lives outside of a single scene. Online chat can provide that sometimes, but on a MUSH or a MUCK or a MUX (or even just a MUD sometimes) it comes standard. That's where I like to RP.

Where is your favorite place to RP? Which MUSHes have the best muscle growth and the best RP?

[Yachirobi]

Honestly, you probably need to try the furry MUSHes but I haven't tried one of those in over a decade. Sounds like a good idea, though.

[lurker5]

Call me country bumpkin, but what's a MUSH?

[Semigloss]

Originally Posted by Yachirobi

Honestly, you probably need to try the furry MUSHes.

I was afraid of that! I have nothing really against RPing as a furry, but I wish I could have a choice about it. It seems like no mush can be popular without being furry these days and that is so annoying.

Originally Posted by lurker5

Call me country bumpkin, but what's a MUSH?

A MUSH is a specialized kind of MUD. A MUD is a text-based gaming server for MMORPG games, except instead of all the fancy graphics of modern MMORPG, they just ask you to read what is happening. It makes the whole game a ton cheaper to produce and most MUDs will gladly allow players to play for free, just to keep their player-base large. Plus, what good to 3D graphics do for anyone, anyway? They are just distractions for the serious gamer, and they burn up so much of your computer power.

There are tons of variations on the MUD server. Each game tends to have its own special version depending on its needs. One of those variations is called MUSH and it is special because it is essentially a chat server that takes the form of a MUD. Instead of playing an MMORPGs, fighting monsters, collecting experience, grinding away, people just RP with each other.

You're usually expected to wander around the rooms chatting and doing stuff while staying in character. For MUDs in general there is a wide variation of how seriously people take their characters. In some places the game is just a game and they chat as themselves. In other places (called 'RP enforced') people are asked to chat as their characters. MUSHes are much more likely to expect you to stay in character because RPing is almost all there is to do.

MUCK and MUX are two other popular MUDs that work the same way mostly.

[Semigloss]

Thinking about muscle growth RP on a MUSH has suddenly lead me to some ideas about how a muscle growth MUD might work! Imagine an MMORPG about muscle growth. Grinding for muscles is so obvious now that I've thought about it.

Just like in most RPGs, you would select a race, but instead of ordinary choices like elves and hobbits, you would make your choice based on the sort of muscle growth you like. Choices might be: human, mutant, alien, god. Choosing human would keep your muscles realistic, not ever growing beyond the possible. Being a god would allow your muscles to grow enormously, and 'mutant' and 'alien' are medium options, with aliens being less restricted than mere mutants. I'm sure the race choices can be improved.

Being a werewolf could be a race choice, but it could also be a condition that one might gain during play.

And the game itself would be exploring a fantasy world, fighting monsters with your muscles, and finding hidden treasures that can cause your muscles to grow, like magic potions, alien exercise equipment, werewolfism, etc. And there could be mechanisms for stealing muscles from other players.

The game would calculate and keep track of all your measurements and generate text describing how muscular you are automatically. As you gain muscles the effectiveness of the muscle-boosts that you get would be reduced to keep your muscles within the limits of your chosen race, without ever becoming completely ineffective so you can keep growing forever.

And of course there would be the RP that would be the main attraction of the MUD.

If anyone were to create something like that, I'd love to come play with you. Or is it possible that it already exists?

[Yachirobi]

I would be curious about it but I think that if it were to be a game-game, you'd have to make everyone shift back and forth. A goal of the game would be to trigger transformations in others and/or get triggered yourself. But there would need to be conflict. If you're a triggerman, someone who makes others grow, then you'd want to avoid getting big yourself and you would eventually seek people who don't want to grow either. For those characters, getting big would be a failure (but hopefully they'd still wank IRL so it would be all good.) Vice versa, some people would want to grow and would be going around trying to find others to trigger their transformation. Their game would be to find someone to set them off while not making anyone else grow.

[Semigloss]

That version is hard for me to understand. It certainly seems strange that anyone would not want to grow muscles, but even assuming that's possible, the mechanics of the system you are describing aren't clear to me at all.

I didn't include shrinking in my idea because it is traditional for players on MUDs and MMORPGs to make slow but steady progress, with no sliding backward. RPG character gain levels by collecting experience, and somehow losing levels or experience is a very exceptional situation in most games.

But now that you mention it, for the purposes of muscle growth, muscles should be lost as well as gained. Muscle growth should be temporary and require maintenance, so that the growth doesn't have to always be slow. Actually, there should probably be more than one kind of growth, with each kind having various durability. For example, magical growth could go as fast as it comes, while mad-science growth could be more lasting but still fade if not for repeated treatments, while growth from exercise such as fighting monsters would last longest of all, maybe even be unlimited in time and only fade by special circumstances like muscle theft or muscle-draining monsters.

Could you go into more detail on how you imagine your idea working? How does the triggering happen and how can it be avoided? Do are triggermen supposed to want to trigger growth? You say that triggermen would seek people who don't want to grow, but people who don't want to grow would be triggermen, and surely triggermen would be trying to avoid each other to avoid growth.

So actually wouldn't the triggermen end up collecting a group of people who want to grow, and insulating themselves as much as possible from other triggermen? I imagine a triggerman using his muscly group of followers to defend against other triggermen who might invade and try to trigger their triggerman. Except it's not clear why any triggerman would ever seek out another triggerman if avoiding growth is the goal.

[wolffried]

I'm somtimes found on tapestries, a furry MUCK... drop me a message here if you wanna RP