Member Discussions

I would like to talk about multiplaying (one person having more than one char on the same mud), and the impact it might have on on a mud (compared to a mud that does not allow it).

As a concpt I see nothing wrong with it. If you enjoy a mud, it's quite understandable that you would want to explore other aspects of it, learning how to play successfully not only as a fighter or human or what have you - all the while keeping that beloved first character alive and active.
What I can't understand is why some people use this option to create an alter ego in the OOC-environment too, that is, inventing a fictional RL person who has nothing to do with the one they really are, or at least pretended to be first time around.

Or perhaps I do understand a little. I think there's a measure of "Ha, I fooled them!" mentality in it, sort of like the pleasure of pulling a good practical joke on a friend. But I think that there's often more to it; Perhaps a sense of power over the ones you succeed in misleading. Perhaps you get to see other sides of those people, sides that you wouldn't have seen if interacting with them through your normal/first identity. While I'm all for broadening your horizon in any regard and it might be seen as a positive thing that you see this or that player in a new light, I hold that the act of deceiving your fellow mudders OOC'ly is wrong and might result in generel mistrust throughout the mud.
If we assume 3 players have 3 characters each, and with each of those characters comes an alter ego (that is, each of the nine characters has a seperate OOC behavior). How are these 3 people ever to connect in any real way? Now imagine 10-20 players having even more characters and accompanying alter egos. Such an environment is a fertile ground for mistrust and accusations, in my eyes an atmosphere that doesn't encourage RP.
As I've said before I play muds primarily to RP, but I wouldn't play a mud with no OOC environment - I go there to get to know people and have a laugh as well, and I can't help but feel deceived and lied to if I discover that someone has shown me two different 'ooc-faces'.

I'd like to know how you guys feel about all this. What are the limits on multyplaying on your mud, and if allowed at all, what is the reasoning behind that exact limit (2 or 5 or 10 chars)? If you don't allow it, is it just a matter of forcing players to concentrate on portraying only one charaters, or do you have other reasons?

Thanks,
Massaria.

@ SWRPG, we have never permitted Multi-playing, and in all reailty, probably never will. While we do allow each person to have two different characters, they are forbidden to be logged on @ the same time, and thus interact. The reasoning behind this is that there are just too many players that have, will, or be tempted to share things (quest items, eq, ect..) between their chars. Like IMMYs having Morts (another practice that we have banned), the temptation to cheat far out-weighs any benefits gained by allowing it. I know there are those out there that are very rule-abiding, honest players, however, I, nor any of the staff of SWRPG, or even any of the former pbase (We're currently 6 months into upgrading and thus, being closed to the public, currently do not have a pbase) have complained about it, or even see any benefitial reasoning as to why we should allow Multi-Playing. I suppose one could argue, that by allowing it, more RP could be generated for more chars are logged on, but from what I've seen on most, if not all, RP Enforced/Encouraged MU*s, 1/2 the pbase cannot propperly RP, or don't even RP @ all. Anyhow, that's my input. I would be interested in hearing/reading about reasons why Multi-Playing could be considered benefitial though, for I cannot think of any.

In a strict roleplay environment, there is no place for *players* to interact with other *players.* It is an environment to delve into a fantasy persona and have that persona interact with other fantasy personae.

If I want to hang out online with the players of these characters, I go to IRC or Instant Messaging, completely outside of the game environment.

There are -very- few instances I can think of where multiplaying would *improve* roleplay, and MANY instances I can think of where it would *ruin* roleplay. As a result, I am not interested in games where players can have more than one character at a time.

Yes of course multiplaying can mean in some cases the reverse of the usual accepted meaning of the word, that is (a:) one two or more people sharing a character, for whatever reasons they may have, or, as you say, (b:) one person having multiple ooc personae.

In the first case, yes of course each of them might end up making acquaintances through ooc means, but has this anything whatsoever to do with being ic in a roleplaying game? Any new friendships obtained whilst mudding or MMOing should remain exclusively out of character on the relevant channels.

Now, if these players of character X wish to form individual friendships out-of-game, but never declare their sharing, this may lead to awkward, perhaps unethical situations, long-term, but it should never influence a rôle within an RP session in a game.

As for individuals who you may suspect be just one person with multiple ooc personae, why, this could simple be a protection to ward off casual (non-meaningful) enquiries from complete and often long-distance strangers (fair enough, no?) or because they love mind-games or for a million reasons less obvious than this.

But, again, that's their problem and not something that should affect your shared RP sessions. I accept that your trust of them will take a nose-dive, but the situation is beyond your power to change and, again, irrelevant in gaming terms.

On the mud I play, you can have several characters as you please. However, you can only play one at the time. This stops people from multiplaying. :) You might have more characters and explore different facets of the game, but more characters means dividing your attention. On average I think people often take a second character (alt [=alternative character]) when they sometimes become bored or feel like a change. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. Last mud I played who limited the number of alts in possession (max of 3-5 or so) did this to get rid of all the space these alts cluttered. I didn't entirely understand the point, but it was something I could live with. Immortal choice I guess.

As for people who play 'OOC characters'. I think there are two categories of these people.

The first one makes an alt and adds to it a different OOC personality so the alt is not recognized as one of his/her. The goal is to make people think somebody else plays this alt. The motivations for this vary. Ranging from pranking a friend, trying to find out if people truly are as nice as they say so and to having a secret alt for roleplay or playerkilling and not wishing one alt to be associated with another. I've seen this quite often, sometimes people will wait 15 minutes in between logging alt 1 and alt 2. So people will not get a clear guess on who is who.

Wether this is bad for the mud atmosphere and created distrust, I think that depends on your mud society of players. If you act like an ass to every newbie then that only shows more about you than the other one. If you always act the same, then nothing is wrong. Personally I ask the same questions to every newbie I come across. Making no exceptions. If they choose to lie to me, then that's their own to keep. If they want a secret alt then that's fine by me. :) And if I find out later, then I'm impressed if they were able to keep it secret for a long time.

Also conerning alts, I have always learned not to enclose the names of the alts of others you know either in a note, through a channel or whatever. If they wish to tell then that's their choice to make, not mine.

The second one makes one alt or more and each and every one has a new OOC personality attached to it. This one has only one goal, which is to rp the person who rp's. I find this one the strangest and it's difficult to tell who the OOC person truly is. There's not much you can do about it other than shrug your shoulders at this RP freak who is so addicted to RP that they have started to RP OOC for it.

The second category I find difficult to deal with. I only encountered one person who acted like this and the difficult thing is that you can't really form an image of who the OOC person behind the OOC character behind the IC character is. ;) It could well be that this generates a feeling of distrust once you find out that three people you thought were unique are all suddenly one person who RP's them for the sake of RP. :/

I think there's two different definitions of "multiplaying" going on here.

Traditionally, multiplaying is having more than one character logged in at the same time, but the original poster seems to have taken multiplaying as having more than one character.

As far as having more than one character, I see nothing wrong with it and in fact would probably never play a MUD that placed a small limit on the number of alts I could have. Maybe limiting it to 3-5 would be reasonable (more so 5 than 3), but I see absolutely no harm in players having multiple characters. Now the issue of them taking on OOC personas? I think the most common reason is to keep certain alternate characters from having any sort of link. I've done this in the past, and it wasn't for any malicious mind games or the thrill of lying to people, in fact it was quite tedious and not very satisfying. But the reason I did was because one of the characters I was playing was a notorious, feared, and rather hated PKer. All of it was done within the confines of roleplay, mind you, as roleplay was necessary for any player killing to take place. But the sad fact of the matter is, it is very difficult to keep an IC and OOC persona seperate, as if you are a real bastard with your IC persona, your character, that often causes people to make certain judgements on the OOC persona, the player. Now my primary character was the leader of one of the major world governments, known as a guy nice OOCly, and while it was an evil character, I had a wide base of friends and allies ICly. I didn't want my actions as another character to have any bearing or affect on my primary character. A good bit of MUDers can't make that distinction. If everyone knew Clan Leader and PKer were the same character, I can see it now... I kill someone in my own clan with my PKer, then I'm going to have to hear whining and bitching "y did u kill me?" from that member of my clan to my clan leader character. Even worse, it may cause people to decide that, OOCly, I'm a jerk and then they'll no longer want to associate with me as a player or my Clan Leader character. It would likely cost me members of my clan and such. There's perfectly valid reasons for people to take on different OOC personas. Most of the time, however, if I have an alt that I'm trying to pass off as a different person, I refrain from as much OOC interaction under that character as possible.

As far as the traditional multiplaying, having more than one character logged in at the same time, this has its ups and downs. Some of the benefits are, for a fledgling MUD, inflating their constant number of characters on. For a new player, logging in and seeing 12 characters logged on (even if its only 6 people, they normally won't know that) it makes the MUD seem more lively and would be further reason to stay. Also, it can help roleplay, as if everyone has two characters logged in, that's twice the oppurtunity for some good RP to be going on somewwere for other people to join in. Now of course, there are the negatives. People cheating mostly. Exchanging items, grouping with their own characters, or just otherwise using both characters logged in at the same time as a means to help one another.

Something that goes for either case, multiple characters or multiple characters logged in at the same time, one of the biggest problems I have is people aiding their other characters in RP. In the before mentioned clan, we were invading the main city of another clan that was mostly inactive, but EVERY active member of the clan (minus the leader who was hardly around) I had successfully turned against the clan and convinced them to work with me. Even the "Vice President" of this clan, who had all of the same access and knowledge as the leader, helped me work to take this city and government down. Well, this other player had a beef with me, and then created a couple of characters, had another renamed, and had all of his other existing established characters (probably had 8 characters total) all turn against me and the clan I was leading, and begin aiding this inactive clan against me. It was pretty ridiculous, but I think in any environment, it's best to limit players from being able to help their characters in any way, but definitely including RP help.

Now, regardless of whatever positives could come of multiplaying, I'm not going to allow it. I can just see the benefits of it.

I don't know if this is really that big a problem, but I have a straight forward solution for it.
Note that I'm just a player, not a coder or builder.

You could just have an account system with a limited number of characters.
Now this is the tricky part; all characters on that account comunicate OOCly with the same name.
This way people who avoid ooc can remain annonomous, or people can have one or more characters who's player's identity is unkown (so long they're carefull).
It doesn't seem so hard to me...

(not a coder)

That would be neat. Account names and character names would likely need to be seperate, and maybe even have it to where once they create an account, they are in game and can talk and such, then enter character creation from within that point. This would allow newbies to get advice and help w/o having to create, then likely recreate, and would allow for people to just hang out in an OOC environment without necessarily having a character, although obviously having a character would be the draw of the MUD.

I frequent various muds pretending to be a blind player.

>I think there's a measure of "Ha, I fooled them!" mentality in it, sort of like the pleasure of pulling a good practical joke on a friend.

It's beyond hilarious.

On the MUSH I co-admin, multiplaying is usually strictly fobidden unless said player is known to be a good roleplayer and can handle the responsibility of playing more than one character simultaneously. And for those currently multuplaying, right now it is just a few admins doing so (including myself) and even at that point, those ALT characters are strictly kept IC and are removed from any OOC channels. the players original characters though remain OOCly available.

As it stands now, even myself I have a difficult time handling three characters simultaneously so I definitely do not think having a fly-by-night player having 3 or 4 characters going is a smart idea.

And we do ecourage OOC interaction quite a bit on relevant global channels. In fact, OOC interaction takes up much of the day till the generalized roleplay time rolls around.

My mud holds a simple policy...or will when we open, though the policies are in place themselves.

Players can have multiple chars, but only 1 is allowed on at a time.

Players caught sharing characters find their main characters jailed for 2 weeks, and the shared character dusted.

If players are found to be botting or having multiple chars on at the same time, the bot is dusted, the main char is jailed (in the second example, both chars are jailed).

Immortals are allowed to have mortal chars, but can't have both logged on at once. Since all immortal activity is logged, if the immortal is found to be cheating, the immortal AND all chars he/she helped to cheat are dusted.

> My mud holds a simple policy...or will when we open,
> though the policies are in place themselves.

There is no way to prove whether or not someone is multiplaying. Checking the IP address may catch a few careless individuals, but those who want to multiplay can easily get around it - you'll mostly end up punishing people for playing from the same school or university.

My policy is simply:

Players can have multiple characters, but you're going to find it hard to control them at the same time.

Players can share characters, but if the other person steals your password, tough luck.

If players are found to be botting or having multiple chars on at the same time, my game design obviously needs some more work.

I agree thats its difficult to prove it, and there are a lot of ways to get around it. Its hard to catch people doing it, but at the same time, if I catch it, or one of my other imms do, the policy is enforced.

One thing I've noticed is that people will usually keep to a specific "style", of playing and of talking. So, if 2 chars, for instance do the exact same stuff over and over, and speak to others in the exact same way (inflections, socials, emotes, etc) its possible they are the same person.

Also, if you believe they are multiplaying, there are some fairly simple tests which can help weed them out. Such as taking both chars into separate rooms and asking one to type (one letter per line) the alphabet forwards, while the other is asked (one char per line) to say count backwards from 100 by twos. (ya need 2 immortals for this) It's not infallible, nor elegant, but most people can't do two things at once, so they get caught.

Oh well, in a perfect world players would actually adhere to a mud's policies, and most do...but there's always a couple nitwits. lol

Without reading anything but the first post here, I think I'll interject with experiences from my own MUD through the eyes of a few players. We're not a strict roleplay MUD, and infact, we're rather a themeless mass of fantasy concepts randomly stuck together and patchworked for the time being. Eventually I plan to put a theme into action, but I sort of inherited the MUD and the original owner cared nothing for theme, or world really.

Now, one of our players was a very odd sort. Her main character was extremely hyper active, extremely giddy, and very silly. We have custom created spells with custom spell descriptions, and she came up with all sorts of crazy spells for this character. From Pikachu Bodyguards, to one of our defense spells turning her into a Hippopotamus. I know this is a bit low-key compared to the roleplay that many of the people in this thread have come to expect, but it was this character's style.

On the other hand, she had a second character, this one a he, who was extremely serious and charming. He was the high-brow of high brows. Where as she interjected made up words and all sorts of silly phrasings, he used the Queen's High English and had spells which directly fit his character's roleplay. His bows were enchanted with arrow spells, his spells were all perfectly fitting and more of the caliber that some of you might come to expect.

And this is just one of our players. The differences between the two characters were quite drastic, and often people couldn't tell they were related. This allowed her to express several interesting forms of roleplay, and really show several different sides of her nature. We had several other players that were just like this.


Another example of where allowing multiplaying as in having more than one character, not more than one on at a time, would be having a Good and an Evil character. I've done this myself plenty of times and even ran an RP campaign on another MUD as both the antagonist and the protagonist leading both sides. It can be fun, and I identify with each character differently.

I think Multiplay restrictions have no real justification in the MUD unless the MUD has some reliance on perma-death and on the discovery of new things, or the MUD has serious file storage issues. You're just restricting the different avenues of expression that the player can have, and roleplaying is all about expressing yourself.

All the MUSH/MUXes I've played allow multiplaying, and it is common to assume that everyone has more than one character logged in at once. Never been seen to be a problem in these. There are rules that say you shouldn't help your alts, and should keep interaction to a minimum.

Given that most MUSH/MUXes are RPI, I don't see that multiplay is incompatible with RP at all.

Perhaps that's because in MUSH/MUXes, cooperative RP dictates that you usually know a lot more OOCly than your character does ICly. So there's fairly little truly hidden knowledge.

And I like it that way :)

Actually I can to some extent. Let's say I play a real nasty character. - Addy - everyone hates Addy. It is unfortunately somewhat the nature of players to associate the player behind the character with the attributes of the character. So when I make a goody two-shoes character - Goody , some of the players will reacte to Goody as if she were Addy. Ad in a third character that is of loose morals - Tricks - and some others may assume I am like that character if that was their first impression. It seems that many players are more interested in the person BEHIND the character than the actual character. As a result they associate character traits with the player. This tends to limit the players chances of interacting with new people on some MU*. The creation of alter player ego lets people approach the character as if they are a new person. The key to stopping this, (as yes some harmful people could be doing this) is for Admins to enforce the a secrecy pact. There will always be ways of determining which characters are someone's Alts. But on the other hand, it would allow a new character to have different interactions upon creation and perhaps let the players relate via character first.

As for the gotcha - yes there is a certain amount of a thrill some of my friends and I do just that. On the other hand we do not discusss real life on roleplay muds much, we preserve most of that for a IM environment.