Ahhhhhh, I see what you're saying. And it's the very fact that the system has been, as you say, "dumped down" that makes me not like MUSH/MUD setups. Why, you ask? Because I don't do hack-n-slash. Meaning when I run a game, players who are actually role-playing will get far more experience than those just sitting on their duffs and rolling dice to kill things. Also, as a GM/DM, I will "fudge" rolls based on the role-playing going on. If a players really gets into a description of something he/she is trying, and I really like it, even if they botch the roll I may let them succeed anyway. Also, I take great care not to kill characters whose players make an effort to role-play. Yes, sometimes there is no avoiding it, and I'm more than willing to reward stupid behavior (on the part of the character, not the player) with death. But I don't want a character to die just because the dice went against him/her at the wrong time. Does any of that make sense? As far as creating an entirely new system, I'm not headed towards that (at least not at this moment). I'm thinking of going with a GURPS system simply because it's got a little more tweakability than 3e. However, given my thoughts on magic at midnight (which I will probably post and ask for ideas about later), it will be highly specialized and not simply use what GURPS has right now. Stacy In a message dated Fri, 7 Jun 2002 8:35:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time, FelixEisen writes: > Any MUSH or MUD RPG is, at heart, a 'tabletop' RPG -- except that it's been > 'dumbed down' so that the computer (a mere mathematical beast) can cope with > most or the entire system. What I'm saying is that the RPG design that we > created for HellMUSH would be easily 'expanded' to a tabletop version, or to > a version that would be useable for your web-based RPG site. > > OTOH, if you want to design your own system from scratch, > that's your > perogative too...