I know what you’re thinking: “I don’t have time for roleplaying.”
Well, you’re wrong. What you lack is the time (and energy, probably) for intensive, real-time RP sessions.
The good news for OtherSpace MUSH players is that we no longer need to commit to consecutive hours at a time to stay involved in the ongoing story. It’s good news for me, too, as the guy running the MUSH. For the past few years, it was exceedingly difficult for me to get much narrative activity happening, simply because I didn’t have the time and energy to make it work. On our old standard PennMUSH platform, it only worked if we could get a group together in real-time.
But now we’re on the AresMUSH platform, which is leaps and bounds ahead of what was available when OtherSpace got its start about 24 years ago. You don’t need special client software to connect – you can just connect through a web browser. (But if you’re partial to MUD clients, you can still use them to connect directly to the MUSH at otherspace.aresmush.com 2650.) And you don’t even have to be on the MUSH at all to join in an active scene! There’s a portal for scenes on our website.
You can participate *when you have a free minute* to add a pose. We operate on a 2-pose or 24 hours rule. Basically, if two people don’t pose within 24 hours, anyone can pose to keep things moving forward.
I can’t stress enough how liberating this more asynchronous approach has been. Yes, we sacrifice some immediacy and it can be a challenge to stay “in the moment” when a single scene can take days or weeks to complete. But at least we’re progressing and, I hope, having some fun while collaborating with each other to reinvent the MUSH experience.
We’ve also got a Discord community. It’s linked through a bot to our AresMUSH game, so folks on Discord can talk with anyone who happens to be on the MUSH chat channel. It’s also got a #roleplaying channel and an app called Tupperbox that allows you to create multiple character profiles that you can use in Discord for RP interaction purposes.
So take a few minutes, check out the site, and join our Discord!
