Retro Mud

A relatively small Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, Retro is known for, as the name implies, its old-school type text based gaming, which is both thorough and easy to get into. Also has very, very many paths that the player can take in playing as a character, which allows players to play differently each time they go through, leading to "reincarnating" your character into a different race and guild often a popular way to go.

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Tropes used in Retro Mud include:

• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Every once in a while, an event will have the players' homes be overrun with monsters in need of extermination.
• Alt-Itis
• An Adventurer Is You
• Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny: A canonical attribute of the Arakun race. Arakun roleplayers love to play this one up.
• A Wizard Did It: Literally.
• Bag of Spilling: You drop all items at the end of the day or upon quitting.
  • Recently changed, now you only drop unthreaded items.
• Big Bad
• Bragging Rights Reward: The Crystal Tower Quest could be the poster child for this trope. Before you even start the quest you need to gather the materials. This requires the Random Number God to smile on you eleven separate times. Then you need to kill a bunch of high-level bosses to forge what's theoretically an Infinity+1 Sword, but actually kinda sucks because of the way it was coded. (Plus it spams up the world channels anytime someone wields or unwields it.) Then, when you finally have the sword and the way in to the Big Bad's dungeon, it's an epic, 20+ hour quest to actually fight your way through the dungeon and kill the Big Bad. (In a MUD that reboots every 24 hours.) And the rewards? Well, let's just say that the one and only time someone completed the quest, which took over a year to complete, a few party members quit playing entirely out of disgust at the quality of the boss's drops.
• Cartography Sidequest: It gives bonuses to gaining certain levels if the player explores a certain percent of the world(s).
• Continuing Is Painful: While Death Is Cheap (See below) the experience loss cap only applies if you do not have enough experience to level, thus if you have experience banked, the penalty can be much higher. There is also a chance that you may take statistic damage (or permanently lose training, which costs even more experience and money), which is greater when you have scars. The damage is easily treated. If it isn't treated, your next death may make it permanent. Also, if you lose too much experience, you can lose a level. Lose three levels and you are forced to reincarnate, essentially starting over as a new race and guild. You keep most of your experience to spend on your new incarnation, but a force reinc tax is EXTREMELY high: That "200 million or more" that you spent? Cut that by a third.
• Critical Existence Failure
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Church of Sikkar, complete with paladins and Knights Templar.
• Death Is Cheap: The most you can (usually) lose in one death is 500k to a million (depending on which flavor of resurrection you accept). In comparison, a high level player will have spent upwards of 100 (or even 200) million or more in levels alone, never mind skills and spells.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors (partially, it isn't that cut an dry)
• Fan Nickname: For everything.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: There's an official story describing what the 'verse is about and why your character is there. It has precisely nothing whatsoever to to with the gameplay or any of the areas.
• Goddamned Bats: Some lower level enemies have a spell that can melt all of your gold, while doing not so much damage.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: A major complaint among Fallen and Paladins, who can apply points earned by killing NPC monsters to improve their sword or shield. Going from a brand new sword or shield to a maxed out one takes about two years of hard play, and at the end, what you have is less powerful than items any newbie can buy after a few weeks of farming.
• Homage: Dan Shive of El Goonish Shive once played Retro Mud (though does not anymore), and made a series of strips about the game.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: True, to an extent. The passive damage boosts offered by elemental secondary guilds that Mages can take (Alchemists can take them as well), combined with the passive damage boosting skills they get means that they can inflict up to 2000 damage every other round. Thus, a high level Mage has the highest potential damage in the game over a short period of time (which is generally preferred for high-level parties). Fighting guilds generally only get skills that boost the number of attacks they get per round until they take their tertiary guilds. Even then, Mages will outclass everything else in damage, UNLESS a melee character is properly built, as (unlike mages) their statistics will provide a high boost to damage AND can inflict damage much longer than mages. Mages tend to be preferred anyways, as mages don't have to be in melee to inflict a lot of damage, and a melee character built to inflict damage tends to be extremely poor at taking it, which is very dangerous unless the enemy is already inflicting low damage.
• Magic Knight: Paladins and Fallen, good and evil versions respectively, sort of.
  • They're much more "knight" than "magic", though.
• Only Mostly Dead: That's what ressers are for. They're only a extradimensional telepathic conversation away.
  • Well, if you can call haunting a resser from the Judgment Fields telepathic, than yeah I guess that would work.
  • That or asking for a ress on the in-game chat channels.
• Player Killing: War is dedicated solely to a few minutes of good old fashioned every man for himself bloodshed.
• Respawning Enemies
• Single Biome Planet: Five of them. The only one that's not is Welstar.
  • Wysoom - Ocean Planet
  • Sosel - Jungle Planet
  • Perdow - Dark Planet
  • Raji - Cloud Planet, of the gas giant variety
  • Crypt - Death Planet
• Squishy Wizard: Mages, mostly.
• The Medic (Biomancers)
• Wallet of Holding; Averted, money has weight just like everything else, meaning you could be hold too much and drop it all in exhaustion. Luckily, it's doubtful that anyone would steal it.
• You Fight Like a Cow: Gotta love bards
• You Have Researched Breathing: One of the most Egregious examples ever seen. In order to use freeform emotes/poses, which you can take for granted on pretty much any other MUD ever written, you need to amass 100 roleplaying points. A very good character may earn one or maybe two RPP per week, if they're lucky. You do the math.
  • This requirement was lessened somewhat (only 5 RPP required now for a limited version of freeform poses) in February of 2010, after more than 10 years. You still need to hit 100 for the full version.
    • One of the players wrote a RP story in response to this change, in which her character was horrified to discover there were many things she simply could not do, before waking up and finding it was All Just a Dream.