What do you think? Are BBRPG's the next step in MUD evolution or are both two completely different genres?

You need another option:

They're exactly the same thing, the browser is just another type of client.

Agreed with KaVir. My MUD is a BBRPG too, since there's a Facebook app you can use to play it, right?

I agree that they are the same.

I think that you might be being overly literal in interpreting BBRPG as including terminals in browsers. Presumably the OP means that there are graphics involved, such that text is no longer the primary medium.

I would note that genre != medium, so the poll does not allow one to say that the genres are the same, but over different media.

BBRPG = Bulletin Board RPG or Browser Based RPG?

I was just thinking of a text MUD played through forum posts or a browser based terminal. If you mean any browser based RPG..wouldn't that include things like AdventureQuest and Runescape?

I believe he means browser-based RPG, presumably the various Flash clients that have cropped up. I would be somewhat surprised if we were talking about bulletin boards as the future, here. :wink:

I miss BBs actually. :grinning: I think that MUDs are good for providing a platform that anyone can use to either immerse
themselves into fantasy, or build a fantasy for themselves and others. What makes muds great is their simplicity,
but that doesn't mean that Telnet is the only way to provide them to the public, or keep them simple. In fact, I wouldn't
be surprised if telnet goes the way of the "dodo" in 10 more years. Browsers are definitely the ideal present and future IMO.

I think that you have to be careful not to try to merge things into a 50/50 blend of text and graphics though. Clients like
MushClient are awesome, but if you take it much further from that, you might be displeasing both audiences.

The main advantage of web browsers is that most people already have one, so they don't need to download and install special software to play the mud. For a long time this was the main advantage of telnet, but with Vista no longer including telnet I think people these days are probably more likely to have a web browser than a telnet client.

So I do think browsers will start to become a more common way to introduce new players to muds - and indeed there are already quite a few browser-based clients that are used for exactly that. However I don't think we're going to see them replace the more feature-rich downloadable mud clients any time soon.


I used to think that too, but I've since changed my mind - I no longer believe that there are two clearly defined audiences. There are quite a few players who enjoy both text-based and graphical muds, and will happily play both. Such players might well enjoy a blend of the two. And even many of those who claim a preference for text-based muds often seem to enjoy introducing graphical elements.

By the way, you could create a fully graphical interface using MUSHclient if you wanted to. You could also allow the same mud to be played as a pure text-based game by other players…

I've been toying with the idea of creating a simple fully graphical mud using a custom MUSHclient plugin, just to see what it's like.

MUDs tend to be real time, while browser games typically are not. Modern day php bbses are still less advanced than the telnet BBSes of the '90s if you exclude text markup.

I did mean browser based RPG's.



That's not true. Most of the browser based games out there that are not RTS but rather RPG are real-time based.