Danny:              00:00          Welcome Brahmin, Monhkee Rowan, Spyder one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld.

Eric:               00:19          Eric Oestrich.

Danny:              00:19          And we have with us today Carl the lead administrator of DartMUD. We're gonna jump back into Dartmouth College circa 1991 and walk our way back to the present across the long and storied history of one of the first MUDs ever founded. Welcome to you Carl.

Carl:               00:39          Thank you.

Danny:              00:40          So how did you get into mudding in general? What is, what is your history with the mudding genre?

Carl:               00:48          So I started playing when I was in high school. Probably a pretty typical story as most of our player somewhere around 1997 or 98 at the time, I was a network admin on an IRC network, x-net or icenet back then. And one of the server admins was in the muds and they wanted to provide a, basically a mud service on the network. And we ended up one of the admins for one of the servers, ported of the Smaug code base to connect to an IRC server. And initiate DCC chats and stuff so you could play Smaug mud, you know, while you were IRCing. And so one of the players on there found DartMUD and introduced me to it and we all kind of jumped into DartMUD and forgot about Smaug. And some of us are still playing to this day and I'm, you know, ended up getting involved with the administration side back around 2013. Yeah. It started as a way to waste some time in high school and spend weekends without wasting a bunch of money.

Eric:               02:10          What makes DartMUD unique? What are some of the more interesting systems that set it apart?

Carl:               02:14          So one of the things that really attracted me to it and kept me coming back in my early days of mudding was the classless and theoretically numberless system. You don't just have a hundred hit points and when you got one left, you can run away the system of displaying your characters health and basically your endurance or a how concentration would convert to a number in a, in a normal game. I guess the way those things don't, you can't just quit because you're down to one, one point or out of, you know, down to zero and runaway. You had to actually pay attention to the context clues more than just putting, you know, a numbers game. And that made things more interesting for me. And it didn't make it, it didn't make it just a game, you know, it made it something a little more.

Danny:              03:12          So. I, I have noticed I know personally and I guess everyone else will know at this point, DartMUD is pretty heavy pvp. It's let's say Yolo, one life to live. It is a hardcore mode in that way. And the the races, the race list is one pretty long for a, a mud in general, but it's also pretty diverse. How does that, how does that really affect the balance of the game? How, how does that get balanced with so many races that are very, that are very different from each other, not just shorter and stouter versus taller and have pointy ears.

Carl:               03:48          So the race list is actually smaller now than it used to be. There are a couple of races that have been removed over the years and one of the ways of balancing it and it hasn't been done in recent history is we do remove races if they get to become overused and swap them out with less used races that hadn't been available for awhile. This probably hasn't been done in probably eight or 10 years. So we're probably due for something like that. We actually have a side discussion going with several of the builders to actually make some changes to the existing races to make them more usable or more likely to be used and to try and, you know, rebalance things a little bit more in the near future.

Eric:               04:40          What do you do to keep the game interesting for the veterans that have been around for a decade or more?

Carl:               04:46          Well, we, we currently have a, a story arc that's running. It's a due to due to life events. It's running way longer than it was intended to run. But we, we occasionally do these major story artists like back in 2003 or 2004 due to. Player driven causes. There was a massive rash of cheating going on. There was a comet that struck the main continent and destroyed a bunch of the original feudal castles and also wiped out some players due to that. Due to that event, there were in-game goals that had to be met in order to get things like farming to start working as it used to. The crops and stuff that players were growing either wouldn't grow anymore or they grew at a much, you know, limited rate until the skies were cleared of the soot and dust from the comet.

Carl:               05:54          The current story arc that's going on is a demon invasion that ties into some of the history of the game and actually ties into like the, the Rowan and Elvin races where way back in the history, they basically banish these demons from the lands and the demons are finding ways to gain power and break back through that seal that they put up using magic. And so we have some, you know, creator-driven demon invasions and we're slowly expanding on a end game quests and stuff that wraparound the story of the demon invasion that ultimately is going to culminate in one of the ancient cities that some of these races have originated in but haven't seen in forever being revealed through the breaking of this barrier.

Danny:              06:56          So you mentioned so it was a big comet, like a, like big apocalyptic, well obviously not apocalyptic, but sort of apocalyptic event; half apocalyptic. So you mentioned that the comet killed players. How do the players handle like story related death like that when it's, I mean, did they have any control over whether they survived the comet.

Carl:               07:21          So in the case of the comet which it was named Sulamar's Hand or the Hand of Sulamar the players that didn't survive were the cheaters that were, they were, they were actually permanently banned due to massive abuse of either bugs that were never reported or through out of character communications, allowing them to basically gain massive power in the game. And so those particular players they absolutely had no say in what happened. They were given their chances to turn things around and they chose to either leave the game or to just be confrontational. So they were removed. In the course of the event this group also had a bunch of players that were in amulets, which is a, a, an object in our game that prevents permanent deaths. It saves your soul so that you can be reincarnated into a new body. The amulets of the hostages that these that this group had, ended up being scattered around the game. Some ended up in, in mines, some ended up in oceans not far off the coast. Some of the ones that had been trapped for an extremely long period of time. We're, you know, handled slightly differently. But we actually returned some players to the game that were previously being held hostage and couldn't play at least on their main characters at the time.

Danny:              08:56          It's kind of a beautiful way to deal with known cheaters known abusers. It reminds me a lot of when arena net made cheating characters publicly commit suicide by jumping off that the castle walls. God, I haven't played GW2 in a long time so I can't remember the name of the town, but that was a big controversy back then and it's, it's fitting the DartMUD also does similar things a way before arena net did of course. Speaking of staff' taking the staff, taking actions like that, what do you see is the role of the staff on DartMUD? Is it, do you guys really get your hands dirty with the story, like on a, on a day to day basis with the players or is it more of you're framing things for the players to get involved in and then things evolve with their action as opposed to like the mortals coming down and, and doing things live?

Carl:               09:53          Yeah, so our creators, the player base often refers to them as gods. We're actually, you know, our, our role in the game is there is, we don't fit into the storyline. We're outside of the, of the storyline in the game and are we try to stay during, you know, key stuff, key events in the game. We, we try to say out of the scenes, we don't want to be directly involved. Like with our, with the demon storyline, we do have to, you know, spawn demons and you know, we'll force them to run around town and stuff and, and, and wreak havoc. But we won't send them out after individual players, anything like that. We usually let the, we'll let the, the brain of the demon control most of it's wandering and only take action when, when things, you know, start getting either out of hand. We've, we've had a few demon brains that almost wiped out the entire game and, or we've had ones that end up causing the wrong type of havoc. Like one leaving a town and killing all the wildlife around the town and the hexes and things like that. We'll, we'll jump in and either move them back to what we consider more of the play area for that a particular raid or event or just a get rid of them and throw some smaller demons back in.

Carl:               11:23          But in the day to day life of the game, we try not to interfere. We try not to be involved. Most of our player interactions are done through passive means. If possible, letting a player, if a player is doing something that one of our help files cover and it would get them in trouble, we show them the help file. And if that doesn't prompt a change in actions after a while we maybe have an NPC explain something to them or well through an NPC, explain what's going on and, and why it should be corrected or changed. And if that doesn't work, we have a in game offices where we'll, we'll transport a player to and have a sit down with them then go from there based on how that player responds to the conversation. And most times it results in players changing their ways or, or growing as a player. And you know, that usually results in a positive change and life goes on.

Eric:               12:36          Are these story arcs the end game for DartMUD or are there other sorts of solo or group activities for top level players to do?

Carl:               12:43          There's a lots of quests in the game. The quests range from things as simple as talking to certain NPCs to getting a group of players together with the appropriate skills to find your way into a mountain full of demons and basically killing all of them and locating all of the secret treasure. The larger, more involved quests can sometimes require, you know, up to six or eight players depending on their, their level of skills and the skills they have just to be able to get partway through. Yeah. There, there are reoccurring quests and we do have a several requests that a move around and so there, you know, it's not something that someone can just, I'm going to go to this cave every day and slay this dragon or, or you know, do this. Some of the quests actually do relocate, you know, based on some randomness or other environmental factors. And so they do involve having to locate where, where the quest might be in some cases. We try, we're slowly working on removing the repetitiveness of, of our requests. Then adding in a little bit more forced adventuring, I guess you could say.

Danny:              14:08          I'd, just take a moment here out of the podcast for a word from one of our many sponsors. NaMuBuMo is not as much a contest or competition as it is a challenge to you.

Eric:               14:19          You're invited to create and submit a text game world that must span at least 100 rooms or significant places. The Mud Coders Guild and Written Realms have partnered to bring you this event. Head to namubumo.com and get a headstart.

Danny:              14:35          And remember there's nothing to win if you participate, but you've got nothing to lose if you do.

Danny:              14:40          I was on Dart last night and was going through it was going through the mud school because despite the fact that I've played MUDs since DIKU first came out and I played mud1 at some point as well. I always go through the mud school because I'm interested in how people handle newbie introduction and teaching people that may or may not have ever tried playing a MUD. And it's extensive. I, I went through all of the, all of the timed text that starts and you have to, you know, accomplish things, basically help do a help, look at yourself, do it, examine all of that stuff. And it's pretty extensive. But how I, I did not get really into the world last night.

Danny:              15:26          How do you handle balancing the game between brand of the brand new player and the people that can involve themselves and basically whatever they want. Are there places for new players in the overarching story arcs or is it more of, you know, you have to get through this area get, I know you don't have levels. Neither do I in my system, but you know, you have to be equivalent of what a level 20 or a level 30 of this much skill advancement would be before you can really get into what everyone else is doing.

Carl:               15:57          That really depends on, on what a player decides to do with their character. Yeah. We've had some players that come in and they fall in love with the crafting system and they basically, they don't want to do any fighting. They don't want to do any magic. They want to make stuff and you know, kind of set up a, a general store of, of crafting. You know, they, they want people to come to them for crafting needs. So well in a case like that, I don't know, aside from the dangers of, of our Hex Map and the the wilderness that inhabits it a player doing crafting, they could get a pretty decent start in the main city and they could be making stuff pretty much, you know, in the first half hour.

Carl:               16:45          It won't be anything that's worth anything or anything that tastes good according to the description of the, of the food and stuff like that. As our crafting system does have a, a quality aspect involved for that type of role. A player could, you know, get involved in the game pretty quickly. Now with the fighting and magic, those are our both pretty involved and different, at least in my knowledge of muds that I played before I got involved with our mother significantly different than other MUDs. And while there are NPC trainers that can get you started with those, nine out of 10 times a new player ends up running into an older player who was coming through town for whatever reason and they'll stop and interact and get them on the right path to learning whatever it was that they were interested in. So we do rely pretty heavily on our player base to get new players, you know, up and running just because that's kind of, that's the environment that, that we want to foster. We want that, you know, player driven interaction. So we rely heavily on that. But we do have, you know, when, when a new player does start, we also have a basically a beginner's pamphlet that they start with that gives some additional details about the starting town, basically a handheld map and a few other things to help them get their feet under them and, and Soartes, which is our starting town currently. But that's pretty much how our new players, what they would see when they get into the game usually.

Eric:               18:26          Are there any things that you've wanted to change for a while that just seemed like it's impossible to poke at?

Carl:               18:32          We're actually on a, on a very, very old, this doesn't really effect the, the game so much as it affects our ability to expand the game and do more creative things. Our driver is based on a really old version of LD mud. We've been slowly working on getting an updated version of our mud Lib so that we can run it, run the latest version of the LD driver, which would allow us to actually enable database support. We're still using flat files, which is painfully horrendous to myself. I feel bad every time I have to create a new flat file or find out that some critical piece of data I was looking for is stored in this random flat file somewhere that has to be parsed using some archaic parsing routine that somebody wrote. The big thing that I've been working towards with some help from one or two of our other builders is getting our codebase set up so that we can do that migration to a LDMUD 3.5 and basically get us into a more modern base for us to continue developing the game.

Danny:              19:40          Is there any one feature or game mechanic you'd personally turn the clock back on and stop from being introduced into the mud?

Carl:               19:50          That's a really tough question. There's definitely some, some aspects of the game that, that I don't fully agree with. We recently, before I became the the lead administrator, we had a, not exclusive, but a we had a, a new club basically for, for fighters, a, an organization that came about through the, this demon storyline. And they're, they're called the the starknights and their perks are very Jedi-like. And one of, one of the items like their perks are activated by a, a special pectoral that is crafted in a magical forge. And it very much resembles like the iron man star chest piece or the chest piece for iron man when it's activated and it summons magical armor for these fighters. It's a little a little too sci-fi meet fantasy for my taste. But it wasn't, I wasn't in a position to really change that when it was coming out and it's been really popular with the players, so it would be hard to, to find a way to, to rebalance that, I guess. But it's definitely one of the things about the game, at least, especially in recent history that really kind of a, this makes me a cringe a little bit.

Eric:               21:21          So what's on the horizon for DartMUD? Is there anything interesting happening in the near future?

Carl:               21:25          The, the demon storyline that's slowly progressing. Like I said, it's going much, much slower than well, we originally envisioned a just because life happens and, and we've all been extremely busy. The last you know, a year and a half or so with the, the culmination of this storyline, we'll be opening up a, you know, pretty large new city as well as access to a potentially player access to a new race, but they'll definitely be some racial characters and that city that don't exist elsewhere yet. And so we'll basically be introducing Kitsunes to the games.

Carl:               22:13          I think that'll be a, a pretty big, a shift in the game as it'll it'll actually open up the lands where monhkees originated from, if I remember correctly, as well as a few other things. And I think that'll be a something that'll, you know, spark interest in some of our older players, again, especially with the opportunities of a, having that new area be one of the, one of the starting choices which is something we haven't had in a long time. Pre-comet, you could start in either are our southern continent or our northern continent. And after the comet, the original starting city Aristan was sunk into and flooded with the water where the comet had hit. Since then, we've only had one starting option, which was Soaratos, I think opening that back up and giving, basically giving our players some more room to spread out.

Carl:               23:08          We'll open up some opportunities for a more player driven trade activities and, and just a, some general, you know, plot lines from the, from their own actions. And of course we do take into account like what players do when we do these storylines. So it's entirely possible that they surprise us with some, some reaction to some specific event that causes what we expect to happen to be completely different. It's happened before, you know, if, if things go in an odd direction, we try and and then with it and play along with that a choice. We try not to force the storyline, even if it doesn't quite line up with how we expected it would go.

Eric:               23:58          On behalf of the Titans of Text, I'd like to thank you, Carl, for coming out and talking to us. And explaining a whole lot about DartMUD and it's quite frankly, very interesting systems and its long history.

Carl:               24:14          Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. I thank y'all for the, a, the, the recognition as a, y'all MUD of the Month recently, or I guess it wasn't y'all's recognition, but we were, we were surprised by, by that none of our admins, none of our players really are active on reddit. So we're getting our feet wet with reddit and so we're definitely, you know, looking forward to hopefully participating more in the mud community in the in the coming months and years.