Hey guys, I want to make a very small RPI mafia-themed mud for another community I'm apart of. No more than 50 rooms, some very basic admin/player commands, maybe some special stuff for unique "roles". 5-9 players at a time.

How should I get started?

What codebase should I use?

Does anyone have any experience running a mud?

While I've not -run- a mud, I've helped do some minor tinkering and building with a programmer friend of mine.. long.. long.. long ago. But it was lambdaMOO based, since that's what we played. The biggest obstacle he had was finding enough coders, not necessarily builders since that was his whole gig. And once he found coders, well, there were also egos to be dealt with.. so make sure you can get along with the folk you'll be working with and can separate friendship from business. Sadly, it never really got past alpha/the building stages since real life took its hold. So, if you're going to try, the most I can say is be dedicated. You can get sucked in before you know it, and it can take tonnes of time and resources (ie, hosting if you don't have your own server). I don't mean to sound discouraging! Just realistic ^^; Building a MU* can be fun.

I'd say to use PennMUSH if anything, I know of a few successful MUSHes out there that use it. Just keep in mind though that running a MUSH is a hard, thankless job - be prepared to learn a lot of coding and to deal with a lot of stress and potentially wasted time if something happens to go wrong (debugging is a pain in the rear even at the best of times)

Purely my personal opinion though.

oh it wont be a business or anything

just a small hobby project

emphasis on small

Well, I'm looking for coders who know about running muds, mud codebases, etc things like that. Send me a PM if you are interested. Will pay a reasonable rate.

This post is a little bit old, but here's a few general tips on keeping a MU* working well:

• Focus on doing a small number of things well instead of a lot of things very blandly. It sounds like you're already looking to fill an underdeveloped niche so that'll already help out a huge amount!
  
• Good documentation is worth is weight in gold, especially for MUSHes or MOOs with their bizarro-syntax.
  
• It's going to feel like you're working very long hours for not much in return. Keep personal progress reports, they'll make you feel better when you go back and look at everything you've done.
  
• Stuff will refuse to work for mysterious reasons. Even after you've bug-tested it three times. Have a good solid policy on what players should do if the game starts flippin' out.
  
• "Drama" will happen. Expect it to happen, prepare for it to happen, and make sure at least one person on staff has the personality to take care of it with a minimum of screaming.
  
• If you or your staff are going to have player characters, especially on an RPI, at least be transparent about the fact that you do so even if you'd rather not say who they are. You want to keep your playerbase's good faith.
  
• And for crying out loud, have fun with your hobby! Nothing's worse than a staffer who can't stand what they're supposedly doing for enjoyment.
  

Hope those help!