Review Submitted By: Amatsuka
Author Status: Player
Started on Buffy Mud: 2006 maybe? A while ago.
Submission Date: Jul 13, 2010
TMC Listing: Buffy Mud
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Amatsuka]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
In way of introduction, I've been playing Buffymud for a rather long
time of and on. I've always thought that it was an especially
promising game because of the way it's designed and how much freedom
is given to players to create their own stories. Because I believe
Buffymud's best attribute is it's code, I'll mainly be addressing
those features that really make this mud pop and not rather transient
aspects such as the playerbase.
The main draw of Buffymud for me in the earlier years was just how
much control and code support players were given to design their own
characters. Demons in particular have a rather wide array of
customization available to them in the form of 'buffs' they can take
instead of more typical skills or spells. Things like giving your
character a functional tail or wings that you could then describe
independently from your main description was and is just so very
appealing compared to what you find on a typical mud. This leads to
tremendous diversity in the types of creatures you can create either
from your own mind or based on existing fiction.
On top of this there's an additional system which is based on
killing mobs within aggro areas. Techniques are obtained every other
kill or so and can be used to customize you character further,
regardless of race. Despite the name, they're used to unlock a number
of unique abilities such as the ability to fly without wings, resist
or improve your ability to cause various types of damage, and select
from a number of demon buffs without requiring you to have demon as a
race. This allows for concepts such as a demon who is otherwise human
except for having wings or a vampire whose advanced age has granted
him clawed hands.
There are a 104 different techniques and it'd be silly to go through
them all, but I hope by bringing it up, some idea of just how
versatile the system is becomes apparent. From what I can tell from
playing, quite a number of builds are feasible so long as some idea of
what those stats can do is kept in mind as well. The game has three
physical stats, three magic stats, three demon stats, two stats for
guns, two endurance stats, and researching which is used to look up
player histories, concepts, and retrieve information on player events.
Even though there are so many different attributes, players can often
mix and match between as many as they like. Classes limit some options
and control what skills can be purchased, but are mostly responsible
for the cost of training each stat in particular. Demons and half
demons are the only ones who are able to invest in the demon stats,
but otherwise, any distribution is legitimate as long as it makes
sense to the player. Unless you over invest in one direction, I think
you'll be hard pressed to make a build which isn't at least
competitive in some aspect.
Great, you can bring to life a lot of really crazy concepts with just
a little imagination and effort, but what about the world, right?
Besides your typical methods of RP and interacting with other players
such as coded combat and emotes, there are additional ways to reach
out and affect them or the world. This can be done through captures,
confrontations, showdowns, a few loose commands that can be done at
any time, and events. At any time when your character can be
incapacitated, that is to say whenever you're beaten up or
voluntarily incapacitate your character due to RP, a number of options
become immediately available to whoever is looming above you. Right
off the bat, if someone wants to describe some wound you obtained in
the fight or inflict something new on you, they can use a command to
place a line in your description describing it which lasts around an
hour of play. Your captor decides to give you a few bruised ribs then
drags you off to the lair of his choice. Pending rescue from a party
of your friends, it's time to RP a capture.
Basically in this system, the captor decides among a handful of coded
options what will best fit the successful outcome of the RP they're
planning. Like a vampire, for example, might choose 'drain' to mimic
the affects of feeding on you while you lay there helpless to stop
them, but free to react with emotes. Once started, a timer that only
the captor can see ticks down to allow a chance for you to be saved.
So long as RP continues at a reasonable pace during that time, the
effects are immediately applied when the timer reaches zero. This
gives conflict between adversaries a more engaging and fun dimension
for both parties instead of merely sending them to some other point on
the grid after they've been bested in combat.
Confrontations and Showdowns are ways to make more lasting or even
permanent changes to other characters. These commands convert
experience and time online into the potential to do a number of things
such as making those lines in people's descriptions that I spoke of
earlier last substantially longer. In this way confrontations are able
to approximate more dramatic, but temporary effects like broken limbs,
being imprisoned, or forcing someone's alignment to change such as
the microchip did for Spike in the show while Showdowns allow for more
drastic options such as ensouling, maiming, or even killing someone
permanently.
These are only some examples, but actions can have real consequences
so long as the player is willing to put in the work to merit it. These
attempts aren't without risk however because while the player is
saving up enough XP and playtime to do whatever they plan, they're
vulnerable to the majority of options themselves should another player
catch and beat them up.
Then there are events. Basically, players are able to run their own
story arcs complete with scheduled gatherings, a wide variety of
global or targeted affects, and the ability to assume a storyteller
position. For example, you're RPing a troubled high school student
who's dabbling in the occult and think a great way to get revenge on
your peers is by raising an army of undead zombies to rampage across
the town. In a set of three descriptions, you lay out what should be
known without effort, what should be known after research, and what
should be known after investigating further. At first, everyone only
has access to the first description which serves as a kind of hook to
lure people into your RP. Eventually someone's bound to at least be
curious and dedicate a chunk of their time to getting access to your
second description. Afterward, the only way they can proceed is by
RPing. This can be done either submitting logs of the RP or by asking
you to oversee the RP in real time through a set of commands that
essentially allow you to post text to the room the RP is occurring in
without being present yourself. This allows you to describe scenes and
let the other participants interact with the world or NPCs in it which
are important to your event. When they're done, you need to decide if
what occurred merits releasing your final description to them or if
they'll need to try again. Should you decide to let them have it,
they're faced with the decision of whether to come up with a solution
to stop your event and then RP it out. Finally, you then decide how
effective that attempt was with a percentage. Whenever the attempts
add up to a hundred, your event is considered thwarted. All of this
can be a rather quick process or quite lengthy depending on how
complex or powerful the event is.
As with everything in the game, there are ways for players to police
bad RP themselves as well. All these powerful tools come together to
give the playerbase a lot to work with to create exciting and dynamic
RP that is backed up by code, but there is more than I'm able to
write about in such a small review.
There are player organizations that can battle for territory, player
houses, customizable shops where items can be restrung and sold, and
RP rooms to mimic locations that aren't accounted for on the grid.
There's also a system by which items can be altered to have
adjectives added to the beginning or a line of your choosing appended
to the end.
There are vehicles, a large number of different types of weapons, npc
missions, custom languages, unique artifacts, and a job system so that
you need to work for money instead of picking it off of mobs. There
certainly isn't enough space to get into custom attacks which
basically allow you to design your own skills or spells.
Even with all this unique code and freedom, I haven't addressed the
administration. As many people know, great games can be absolutely
ruined if they're run by overbearing or controlling individuals.
Compelling as all this is, one of the greatest things about Buffymud
is the philosophy that the administration has. Most of the time, you
won't even realize the game has admins. They're never visible on the
wholist nor do they pop up very often unless something needs fixed or
there is some serious need for mediation.
That said, I've broken quite a few things in my time here and the
important ones have always been promptly resolved, usually within a
day of my reporting it. In the spirit of fairness, the playebase is
given tools to oversee itself instead of the administration trying to
constantly rule on whose point is more valid. Everyone therefore has a
chance to shine or prove their character deserves something more
through work and showing how imaginative they can be to their peers.
All this appeals to me so much that Buffymud is my favorite place to
play and I can't think of a single game I'd rather have spent all
the countless hours that I have here. If anything I've written sounds
the slightest bit intriguing, stop by and explore for a bit. The
playerbase is rather good about answering questions for newbies.
Don't be shy.
