TriadCity
Multitheme-themed MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) founded in 2001.
Ranked 255th of 780 worlds statistically.
Ranked 7th of 18 worlds in the Multitheme genre statistically.
Address:

Db Size:
(Unknown)

Players Connected:
5 (8 hours ago)

Maximum Connected:
6 (last 30 days)
Status:
UP

Version:
Unknown

Average Connected:
4 (last 30 days) ▼20%

Minimum Connected:
0 (last 30 days)
Connection Screen

     Welcome to TriadCity!

     When prompted enter your character name and password.
     To join and create a character, type 'join' and answer the questions.
     Or you may login as a guest with limited capabilities: use 'guest/guest'
     Be sure to read the TriadCity Web site in full:
          https://www.smartmonsters.com/TriadCity/index.jsp.
     Questions: support@smartmonsters.com, or ask Help when logged in.
     Enjoy the City - and remember that here death is permanent!


Character name (or 'join' or 'guest'): 
Description
TriadCity is an acclaimed virtual world made of words. It's blind-friendly, has more women players than men, and is cited by The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism as a new form of literature. Where many games focus on "kill the monster" style adventuring, TriadCity explores themes which have been central to Western culture: good and evil, personal versus collective identities, violence and nonviolence, matter and spirit, freedom and slavery. TriadCity differs from much of the MUD tradition by being set in an urban environment. It's a city where all of historical time is simultaneously present: you'll find astronauts, hoplites, cowboys and Friar Tuck together on the same mag-lev subway. And, it's big: currently pushing 18,000 rooms, of 100,000 projected. Unique to any "game" we're of,...
Read more at MUDConnect.Com

Links
Average Players Connected By Week
Average Players Connected By Season
Language:
English [1] [2]

Codebase:
[Custom] server currently in beta [1]
Custom [2] [3]

Created:
2001 [2]

Location:
USA [1] [2]

Theme:
socially relative concepts of good and evil in a large-scale urban environment [1]
Culturally-relative concepts of good and evil [2]
Original World Built [3]

Category:
Not Listed Here [2]

Description:
TriadCity is an acclaimed virtual world made of words. It's blind-friendly, has more women players than men, and is cited by The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism as a new form of literature. Where many games focus on "kill the monster" style adventuring, TriadCity explores themes which have been central to Western culture: good and evil, personal versus collective identities, violence and nonviolence, matter and spirit, freedom and slavery. TriadCity differs from much of the MUD tradition by being set in an urban environment. It's a city where all of historical time is simultaneously present: you'll find astronauts, hoplites, cowboys and Friar Tuck together on the same mag-lev subway. And, it's big: currently pushing 18,000 rooms, of 100,000 projected. Unique to any "game" we're aware of, TriadCity imposes various forms of subjectivity on players, presenting highly individualized views of the world to characters depending on their attributes, skills, and histories. This means that two players entering the same room simultaneously may see it differently. These differences can be subtle or radical, depending on the intentions of world authors. We know of no other virtual world where this level of individualization is possible. Also unusually, TriadCity offers multiple paths to character growth in addition to standard hack-and-slash. Violence is possible in TriadCity but not privileged; in many circumstances it's the worst possible choice. In TriadCity death is permanent: characters who die don't respawn. This means the choice to use violence needs to be carefully considered - rather more like real life than traditional games inspired by, say, DnD. In TriadCity characters gain experience by using their skills; by contributing to the game world; or simply by exploring. This offers a far richer player experience than typical for the MUD genre. Although huge, the game world is highly detailed. Room descriptions and contents vary by time of day, creating very different feels by day or night. NPC behaviors are highly individualized: nearly all NPCs have homes to go to, jobs to perform, and hobbies to engage in, the goal being to fill the city with constant movement and variation. NPC AI is based on concepts from robotics and is far more advanced than AI we're familiar with from earlier games. There are multiple thousands of NPCs and more than one hundred thousand Items in the game world at any moment. An example of "advanced NPC AI": certain angry NPC critters have the ability to coordinate with each other strategically to defeat player attacks on their strongholds. For instance, they might allow a player group deep into their territory, then attack to close the invaders' escape route; and while the invaders are isolated from help, deliberately target players with the weakest constitutions, or the weakest armor, or some skill or attribute necessary to the survival of the group - perhaps the "pack tank" carrying the group's water or ammunition. Or they might pursue a different strategy altogether. The point is that they're able to intelligently analyze the situation and respond adaptively. There are AI robots based on the personalities of Oscar Wilde and Douglas Adams' depressed soul Marvin. Human NPCs can be assigned personality matrixes based on the work of Carl Jung. Even the pigeons will look at you crossways if you try to steal their crumbs. Similar AI innovations can be applied to player characters as well. Character subjectivity was mentioned above. Characters can also become ill; can experience hallucinations, blackouts and fugue states; can find themselves conversing with people others can't see and who may or may not "really" be there; can be drugged; can fall down drunk; can froth with epilepsy. There may or may not be treatments available. Depends. The code is all-original, written by senior technology professionals with decades of experience. It's robust, bug-free and extremely stable. Play is via browser-based clients which encrypt network traffic and work happily through company firewalls; players can choose between a plugin-free HTML5 client or a "classic" signed Java applet with identical functionality. Commands are free English, typically but not necessarily in the imperative mood, e.g., "show me what's inside the second box" is just as good as "look into the second box", or even "what's in the second box?" The parser also speaks canonical DikuMUD, so you can "look in 2.box" if you like. You can create arbitrary command aliases which are saved between logins: you might prefer "gcc" to "get the coins from the corpse". Player-stealing is not allowed. Player-killing is allowed only in an Arena entered by choice. Much effort is made to keep the game newbie-friendly: there's an introductory tutorial for new players, and all the veterans are extremely friendly and helpful. The web site includes a rich guide for players, written in part by players themselves. There's an online Help robot who successfully answers about 80% of the questions asked. Extensive online Fora contain gold mines of player lore. Player houses are completely customizable; new player houses are build-able from ground up. Equipment and other Items are customizable. Although the world is ginormous, no automated mapping system is provided. This is deliberate. Instead, interested players can acquire the Cartographer Role, and receive experience and game bucks in return for the maps they contribute. Unusually for an Internet RPG, TriadCity has as many women players as men, an accomplishment the authors are extremely proud of. There's a feast-and-famiine cycle to TriadCity: sometimes you'll find a couple of dozen players on regularly, other times only one or two, or even none. Please change that by coming and staying and bringing your friends. The developers promise to begin formally marketing "real soon now". TriadCity is free to play. There's a concept of "premium" items which can be purchased via Zynga-like Reward Points; but these points themselves are given away, for instance as thanks for recruiting new players. Impatient players are welcome to buy them but this isn't really emphasized. Premium items include player house customizations, safes, grow lights and other "add ons" interesting primarily to higher-level players. So what's it all about? Largely it's a satire, focusing as satires do on greed, laziness, stupidity, shallowness, believing what you're told, conforming to social norms, and generally not thinking enough. The developers say it's intended for "smart grownups". Up to you to decide whether it works, or not. Resources: The TriadCity home page: http://www.smartmonsters.com/TriadCity/index.jsp. TriadCity on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TriadCity. TriadCity on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/TriadCity/295456477228706?ref=hl. TriadCity on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TriadCity The TriadCity authors' blog: http://triadcity.tumblr.com/. The TriadCity developers' blog: http://triadcitydevelopers.tumblr.com/. [1]
TriadCity is a large-scale multi-user role playing game with a literary orientation, currently in beta. Where most MUDs focus on "kill the monster" style adventuring, TriadCity explores themes which have been central to Western culture: good and evil, city and country, nature and civilization, personal and collective identities, violence and nonviolence, freedom and slavery. "Literary orientation" means that narrative techniques from the novel and other traditions are incorporated, such as voice, point of view, characterization, plot, and so on. Various forms of subjectivity are imposed on the characters which players create, some relative, some radical. This means that character histories and views of the world are potentially unique to each individual player. We entered beta testing on 10/1/01. The code is very stable, but the player base is still very small: not many people on most of the time. Best time to find folks is Sunday evenenings 5 - 9 pm PST. This is our weekly "online party", and is usually pretty fun. Player interface is a Java applet; sorry, no telnet. The client works on Windows and Linux, but not yet the Mac (we're working on it). Requires Sun's Java Plugin. We hope you'll check us out, and will tell us what you think! [2]
Where most MUDs focus on kill the monster style adventuring, TriadCity explores themes which have been central to Western culture: good and evil, city and country, nature and civilization, personal and collective identities, violence and nonviolence, freedom and slavery. Literary orientation means that narrative techniques from the novel and other traditions are incorporated, such as voice, point of view, characterization, plot, and so on. Various forms of subjectivity are imposed on the characters which players create, some relative, some radical. This means that character histories and views of the world are potentially unique to each individual player. TriadCity is Web-based; sorry, no telnet access. The client is a spiffy Java applet, and runs on Windows and Linux; we're working on the Mac. The game is very new, so, although the code is quite solid, there are few players right now, and many features yet to implement. Best time to find more players on than usual is Sundays, 5 - 9 pm PST, during our weekly online parties. There's often free stuff given away, and there's usually a lot of fun. Thanks! We hope you'll check TriadCity out, and will tell us what you think! [3]

  1. MUDConnector.Com
  2. TopMUDSites.Com
  3. Mud Magic
I'm one of the developers of TriadCity, so take my bias into account. TriadCity was founded to answer the question, 'What if you take the text-based MUD/RPG genre seriously as literature?' We wanted to figure out what narrative techniques and styles of characterization would make sense in a medium which is by definition social, but at the same time is compressed into a computer screen. We've kept some of the defining genre traditions: you can still go around killing monsters. But, we've re-shaped those familiar pieces and subsumed them within a very different kind of fictional experience than has been typical of earlier MUDs. The world is different. Instead of deriving from the traditional sources of DnD and Tolkien, we've based TriadCity on the 'universal city' idea of Modernist literature, especially Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. In TriadCity all cities of western culture and all historical epochs are present simultaneously, along with fantastic and surreal elements, blended together inside a framework which is essentially satirical. The fun of this is that we can ambitiously set out to take snotty pokes at absolutely everything, and have a reasonably coherent structure for doing that. Player interactions are different. For example, we can impose various forms of subjectivity on character experience. Your character and mine may walk into a room together, and perceive that space differently, either subtly or radically depending on the intent of the author who created it. We don't know of that ever being done anywhere else. Violence exists but is not privileged as a path to character growth. Death is permanent. There are unique roles such as Malopath, a kind of psychic vampire. Characters can advance by contributing to the game world, but that's not mandatory and nobody forces you. There's a lot of sophisticated AI going on, although it's intended to further our fictional purposes and is for the most part not shoved up your nose. The game world presents a high degree of cultural allusiveness, but doesn't demand a PhD. We started TriadCity in 1999. Since then we've watched the mega-success of 3-D graphical MMOGs, especially World of Warcraft and Second Life. Although we very much admire a lot of the user-generated content in SL, we find the cartoonishness of the graphical experience off-putting. For us, our own ability to form excellent pictures in imagination is so much more powerful and fulfilling. We don't think this makes TriadCity retro. We think it makes it better. We frequently attract refugees from these cartoon worlds. They're very welcome. There are a lot of down sides. The project is a commercial failure, thus we have only a very small volunteer group adding content and programming. There's nearly always work going on, but, compared with Blizzard's ability to throw a gazillion developers into adding new continents to WoW, forget about it. There are 17,000+ rooms in TriadCity today, but the world is just beginning to be fleshed out enough to sortof start to see how it all fits together. so... Read More
MudConnector.Com Review by on Sep 10, 2012
SmartMonsters' Triad City is the first MUD I've ever played. I was caught by its description as a game for smart adults, and the fact that violence is not a central concept. I've thoroughly enjoyed the learning experience and found the other players very helpful. I'm really looking forward to moving beyond level 10 so that I can begin exploring some of the more dangerous areas. I definitely recommend Triad City to anyone who enjoys something outside the ordinary.
TopMUDSites.Com Review by on Oct 10, 2005
TriadCity is a great MUD if you are interested in some variety from the usual hack and slash fare found in most MUDs. It allows for great character development without requiring you to take part in violence. Examples include advanding a character through the use of herbal magic and healing skills, finding rare artifacts, and even playing board games (there is an in-game version of Chutes and Ladders that help rack up the experience). The community is small, but there is a core of die-hard users who are commited to playtesting as the game grows. Overall, I would highly recommend TriadCity.
TopMUDSites.Com Review by on Jun 22, 2005
Triadcity is an original, totally free MUD in which players have more to do than find and smash monsters - Roleplaying, non-violent interaction (such as journalism, Cartography, and more) and of course, vicious combat are all here in abundance. This MUD is intended as a form of literature, not merely a game. As such, the entire world is very 'smart', with hundreds of literary references and many fascinating locations. Unlike most MUDs, this one is set almost entirely in an urban environment, and is not limited to medieval-era technology(although medieval weapons and the like are very common). If you like to think and you like to read, then give Triadcity a try. It may be just the change of pace you've been looking for. Still in Beta, but progressing steadily, so get in on the ground floor. I've enjoyed my experience so far and still play to this day!
MudConnector.Com Review by on Feb 21, 2005