You also gain, depending on your class (The standards are Warrior, Mage, Cleric, and Thief, although most MUDs offer more than these 4), skills or spells as you level up, allowing you do become more powerful, fight more effectively, better equip yourself, and in general do more and have more fun. As you level, you grow in power, gaining more hit points, the ability to move longer distances at a run, more magical potential, and so forth.
You kill monsters and villains and nasty bunnies and such fare (these are known as MOBs - short for mobiles) and gain experience and levels. It's a bit daunting, as MUDs tend to have their own unique style, context, and interface, but you generally learn how things work pretty quickly. On a typical MUD, you'll start out as a pathetic weakling character (these are known as newbies), and you'll generally be confused and lost. Another way to view it is an online, text based RPG (role playing game) similar to AD&D. Think back to Zork or PlanetFall or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy games from Infocom, or the earlier Unix text adventure games like Adventure or Hack (for those of you young'uns who have no clue what these are, go find out, as you're missing out on good fun). "MUDs" is a catch-all term for true MUDs (Diku/Merc and other combat-oriented MUDs), MOOs (MUD Object Oriented) MUSHes, MUCKs, and other such things.Ī MUD is essentially an online multiplayer text-adventure game. MUD is an acronym for Multi-User Dungeon (also termed Multi-User Dimension by some).