MUD recommendation for newbie

I've got a friend who hadn't even heard of MUD's before until I explained them to him about a week ago. Problem is he is a very visual person and would need to see one in order to really grasp the concept, though he is fascinated.

What would you all recommend as a starting point? Ideally the game would have a solid, helpful community with no custom client required. Also, something with a good mix of combat and other types of activities would be good.

One of my players started making a set of Video Tutorials on how to play Adventures Unlimited and posted them on youtube. The other though is look into muds w/ custom GUIS too

Being "very visual" and not wanting a custom client are a bit mutually exclusive. If you said he was "into reading a lot of text" then that might be better.

A number of MUDs are making more visual representations, using GMCP protocol, and interfacing with clients like MUSHclient.

MUSHclient isn't a "custom client" because it can be used for any MUD. However with suitable plugins you get a somewhat more visual experience.

An example of that is here:



I believe God Wars has quite a nice interface (using GMCP) these days. Also Aardwolf, and the Iron Realms games like Achaea, Aetolia and so on.

Hmm, I can see why you would get that out of what I said. I never specified that the manner I had communicated a MUD to him was verbally (and there was a lot of wine involved which probably didn't help in the imagination department) and that by visual I meant he had to see something to really be able to grok it. I would have come to the exact same conclusion in your place.

Thank you for your suggestions, I'll take a look through them and pick out one which I think will suit him and pass it along.

God Wars II supports MSDP, ATCP and ZMP, but not GMCP.

As far as I know, there are currently 8 muds that support GMCP, and 25 that support MSDP (2 of those only on their test ports for now). 21 of the MSDP muds are using the protocol snippet I released in April, which means they support ATCP as a fallback, and 6 of the GMCP muds also support ATCP as a fallback.

There's one mud (Elephant) that supports ATCP and ZMP, but everyone else seems to be using either GMCP or MSDP as their primary protocol. Even Aardwolf and ConQUEST, who originally designed their own custom protocols, have decided to add support for GMCP and MSDP respectively.

I realise most players don't really care, as both protocols can be used for the same sort of thing, but for those of us involved in the protocol side of things I think it's quite interesting.

Sorry, I got my acronyms confused.