Hmm tried out discworld and to be honest I'm not to impressed. The commands are even more anal than hellmoo (like in discworld you can't just abreviate the item you have to pretty much type it out). I'll probably try to play it a bit more later but as of right now not to impressed.
Well, any item can be nicknamed in-game, and most mud clients support and autocomplete-feature. I'm curious about what other commands are anal, though. The basics are similar to HellMOO, although Discworld seems to have more flexibility.
For example, I can write "get the bottles except the red bottle from my pack". Simple english, Discworld understands it.
A basic player would write "get bottles except red bottle from pack" which is less specific because it could confuse your pack with a pack on the floor. (It won't, but it could happen in other cases)
A seasoned player would just have aliased it to "gfp bottles except red bottle"
Things like "my item", "last item", "item here", "fresh item", "held weapon" and probably a lot I haven't learned yet all make it very easy to manipulate large amounts of different objects, and Discworld has a lot of different objects. You'll find few people wearing the same pants, eveyone has them custom-made.
For those who don't know about Discworld:
Discworld is a flat world carried on the back of four elephants standing on a giant turtle swimming through space. The world itself is a parody of a typical fantasy world, though it does this without getting too cheesy. (In the novels, at least. The MUD has taken a few liberties, but nothing too bad)
There's a few main areas on the Disc:
Ankh-Morpork, the largest city with a river so foul you can walk on it. It's everything from all major cities rolled into one. The ethnic minorities range from trolls to dwarves to goblins to vampires, all seeking their place in society. Female dwarves recently began emancipating, wearing make-up and braiding their beards, tired of fighting and drinking like the males do. There's an assassin's guild where you can go take out contracts on other (PK) players, lots of fun.
It also has an official Thieves Guild. Thieves are allowed to steal only so much each quota period, to keep crime at an acceptable level. Freelancing thieves soon meet their demise.
The Ramtops, an mountainous area riddled with small kingdoms and even smaller villages. Most of the area is vertical. Witches are commonplace and well-respected here. Further down is Uberwald which has vampires, werewolves and tribes of Igors who seek out a master to serve.
Klatch, a desert region. Main city is Djelibeybi, "Child of the river Djel". Egyptian/Arabian parody, don't kill the cats.
Agatea, an asian-themed area. Gold is as valuable as iron here, though exporting it won't work. Only city you can visit so far is Bes Pelargic, very large. Has a few Great Houses you can join, which is kinda like an extra guild. People here are "auriental", because of all the gold, see.
Genua, a city that's a mix of New Orleans, europe and fairytales. Home to the Musketeer guild, named after some kind of grape.
There's voodoo and alligators and stuff here. Also a lot of nice shops for nice clothes.
Most PK players improve their fighting skills so they can fight other players. There's no level cap, but you can still get ahead if you play your cards right. Most NPK players enjoy killing the NPCs and getting money to buy expensive stuff like houses, furniture, their own shop, hire a Seamstress,... There are also a lot of non-combat skills like pottery, embroidery, engraving, playing music, painting, building sandcastles, casting various spells and so on. You can write for the newspapers, write a play, publish books, all sorts of stuff.
Magic is a bit unbalanced when fighting against other players, but it's great for killing NPCs and even greater to make money or just have fun.
There's also very few assholes around. Admins abusing their power is virtually unheard of, and killing other players unprovoked is frowned upon or even punishable by player-run court if you loot their corpse in city limits. Licensed stealing is ok though, and most thieves will sell their stuff back to you fo a fair price.