You want collaborative roleplay

By collaborative roleplay we mean: you and other people write a scene together, in character, in prose, mostly in real time. Nobody rolls initiative unless the game says to. This is the part of the hobby that the word "MUD" hides, and it is alive.

Look for these codebases

The TinyMUD line is where this culture lives, because its servers are built for people who make things rather than for people who kill things.

• PennMUSH and TinyMUX — the two big MUSH servers. Most long-running roleplay games you have heard of run one of them.
• AresMUSH — modern, built specifically for roleplay, with a web front end and scene logging as first-class features rather than as softcode somebody wrote.
• Evennia — a Python framework rather than a finished game. Games built on it vary enormously; several of the newer roleplay games are Evennia.
• MUCK — its own culture, heavily social, and worth knowing about if the fandom worlds are what you are looking for.

You can filter the catalogue by any of these: each codebase page links to the games we have measured running it.

A client that will not fight you

You do not need one — every game here speaks plain telnet, and your operating system probably has a client already. But for scene-writing, three things matter more than they do elsewhere:

1. A command line that survives a long paragraph. You will type multi-sentence poses.
2. Logging. You will want the scene afterwards.
3. UTF-8. Names have accents in them.

See the clients section. If you use a screen reader, the capability tables there carry a row for it — we could not establish an answer for every client, and where we could not, the table says unknown rather than guessing.

What the first night is actually like

Most roleplay games have an application process: you connect as a guest, read some help files, and write a character up for staff to read. This can take a day or a fortnight. It is not gatekeeping for its own sake — it is how a game keeps a shared setting coherent — but it does mean "log in and play" is rarely the shape of it.

Games with nobody on at the moment you look are normal here, and the activity heatmap on each game's page is more useful than its live count: a game with fifteen people every evening and none at 4am is a healthy game seen at the wrong hour.

What this site cannot tell you

Whether the people are any good. Whether the staff are fair. Whether the setting is one you would enjoy. We measure servers. There is no rating here and there will not be one — that is a deliberate decision, not a gap.