ON THE PROPER CARE AND FEEDING OF MUSHES

ON CHARACTER TYPES [Page 2]

ON THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF CHARACTERS
ON THE MATTER OF FEATURES
ON THE DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF CHARACTERS
ON THE PROPER USE OF PUPPETS

THIS PAGE:

ON THE ABILITIES OF GUESTS

SECTION INDEX (Each Section is a separate page)

ON THEME	ON CHARACTERS	ON CONSENT
ON ADMINISTRATION	ON CODING IDEAS	ON GEOGRAPHY
ON COMMUNICATIONS	ON ROLEPLAY	ON MAGIC
ON IC ORGANIZATIONS	ON TINYPLOTS	MAIN PAGE

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ON THE ABILITIES OF GUESTS

NOTE: All this is based on the assumption that your Mush is basically "Open Admission," meaning anyone can log on as a guest, and any visitor who wants to create a character for RP will be able to do so, although he may need to complete some sort of application process before he is approved for Roleplay. If your mush is "Invitation Only," and/or intends to keep membership down to a fixed number such as 20 people, then your attitude toward Guests (assuming you permit them in the first place) will be understandably different from mine.

Guests should NOT be allowed to pick up coded objects (no telling where they'll end up), create coded objects of their own, enter the CharGen room(s), or change their names to anything other than what you have selected as an appropriate name for that Guest Character. If it is possible to do any of these things, you can bet somebody will do it. This is one of those cases where a pinch of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Guests SHOULD be allowed to:

1) Send mail to other characters. Occasionally I have found it necessary to send mail (as a Guest) for such purposes as asking a Wizard for help in the CharGen process, or asking a Player to please respond to my e-mail address if he has a job opening for me if I decide to create a certain type of character, or other reasons. Obviously the Guest's chances of getting a reply after he has logged off are much better if he includes a permanent e-mail address in his message, but sometimes mushmail is the only means he has for making his first contact with a particular party so that any subsequent discussion can be conducted privately, via e-mail.

2) Use channels - at least the more public ones - so that he can listen to people conversing on matters of import, can ask questions about how this Mush is organized, etc.

3) Visit the IC Areas and look around. Some debate the wisdom of this, but I feel it is very useful in letting the Guest see how much trouble you've gone to in building the mush, and in seeing how many different cities/countries/planets/whatever you have open at the moment, and so forth. If there are some rooms that are meant to ICly and OOCly secret from those not approved to visit them, then you'll have to work out special access coding to keep out all riffraff, guests or regular PCs as the case may be.

Doubtful cases:

There is one school of thought which holds that Guests should be given "realistic" names, by which they mean "Names that don't run in a series such as Guest1 Guest2 Guest3, or RedGuest BlueGuest GreenGuest," so that they can actually stick their toe in the IC water and chat to people in bars to get a feel for what roleplay on this Mush is really like. On at least one mush, they give each Guest Character a name which is a synonym for "traveler" or "visitor," such as Nomad, Wanderer, Wayfarer, Traveler, Voyager, Stranger. In such a setup, your veteran players who are aware of your naming convention for Guests will recognize them at a glance and won't expect them to be fully up to speed on the local rules and IC politics and so forth, but if conversation does begin, it won't be quite as jarring to try to speak to a "Nomad" met in the local bar as it would be to speak to someone called "Guest1."

If for some reason a veteran player wanted to temporarily disguise a named Character as an anonymous traveler, he could simply add an adjective and create a two-word "name" that other veterans could identify as NOT being a Guest Character. Old Nomad, Weary Wayfarer, Hooded Traveler, that sort of thing.