Welcome to MUD Pages

Welcome to MUD Pages, one of the best and most detailed mud and text game listings sites on the Internet. We have listings for muds, mushes, moos, mucks, and all kinds of other online text games, with tools and resources at your disposal to help you find and play the mud that is perfect for you.

What is a MUD?

A MUD is an online mutliplayer text game where people from all over the world generally connect using a telnet or mud client and go about killing monsters, gaining new items, rising in power and socializing with other players and mud staff. Every mud works a little differently, and some, such as mushes, generally don't have any killing of monsters (or mobs in mud terms) at all. Instead such things are role played and acted out in text by the players and staff. Muds generally allow you to choose a race, such as human, dwarf or elf, and a class such as warrior, magic user, thief, or priest. You then customize your character more depending on the game you choose to play, and go out into the world, killing monsters which give you experience points. After gaining a certain amount of experience points you raise in level, becoming more powerful, gaining new skills and being able to use better items.

This is the general sequence of progress on a mud, but one of the biggest attractions of a good mud is also the social element to it. Most muds only have a handful of players on at any given time, but don't let that scare you away. In these small communities one usually has the opportunity to make good and lasting friendships. Then again the larger muds, which generally have hundreds of people on at a time, offer a level of activity that helps you feel more like you're a part of a living breathing world. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. On a small mud you really make a difference. Your characters are well known and your voice is heard by the other players and staff alike. On a large mud there is always someone to play with if you are outgoing enough to look and ask, and the sense of community is a lot stronger as the actions of other characters more visibly affect your own world.

Why Play a MUD Instead of a Graphical MMO?

Graphical MMOs certainly have their place in the world. There's nothing quite like going on a hack and slash fest on World of Warcraft or running a large raid on Everquest 2. However the question you need to ask yourself is this: Why do people read books when they can just go see a movie?

There's something to a book that allows you to become much more absorbed in a story than with a movie. It is your imagination. The words of a book set the stage for you but your mind paints the picture. The same is true with MUDs. You are given so much greater freedom of expression and ability to imagine things the way you want. With a graphical MMO everything is given to you at face value and your mind simply processes the information displayed.

Another great thing with MUDs is that they are generally more feature rich than MMOs. MMOs constantly need to be spending time satisfying the populace (often called nerfing), as well as working on graphical upgrades and new graphics for new content. This takes a tremendous amount of time. A mud can use that time to add entirely new features, and as a result we find that muds generally have much more to do than MMOs.

Finally it's a point I brought up already. On a MMO you are a face and a voice amongst hundreds of thousands sometimes. On a MUD, you are usually a face and a voice among dozens at the most. Some muds have over a thousand players, but even then the odds are much better in your favor. There is something to be said about fame, and on a mud, your character can much more easily become a name everyone knows and that gets passed on down through history as the years pass by.

So why play a mud instead of a graphical MMO? I guess it comes down to personal preference, but if you like books more than movies, you will likely enjoy muds more than graphical MMOs. If you like making a difference in your world, then a mud offers that chance much more readily than a graphical MMO. And if you like to have more freedom and ability in what you can do, then a mud offers greater development potential for features on average than a graphical MMO does.

Then again, you don't really need to choose one or the other.  Many people who play MUDs also play MMORPGS, and they just switch between the two as their personal tastes dictate that particular moment in time. 

How do I play a MUD?

It's easy, you can either connect via telnet if you use windows xp or earlier, or another operating system. Or you can download and install a mud client. (We recommend MUSHClient as our free mud client of choice). For telnet, you simply type telnet:// instead of http:// and then the mud's host name, followed by a colon (:) and the port number. So If I wanted to connect to d20MUD: Forgotten Realms, whose host name is d20mud.com and whose port is 4000, I would enter telnet://d20mud.com:4000 into my browser address bar. For clients there are usually forms you fill out to connect to a mud, and usually they save your settings so you don't have to type your mud's address and port everytime you want to play.

So that sums it up. You're about to begin a wonderful hobby in an exciting world of text gaming. Now all that is left is to choose the mud that's right for you. Check out our list of featured muds or browse our listings. You can also use our search functions to search for something you really like, maybe dragonlance, or harry potter. This world is yours to explore, and there are many options. So why waste any more time? Let's find a MUD on MUD Pages!