[MUD-Dev] The laws of probability

[Adam Wiggins]

[Chris L:]
> One thing I've been looking at is causitively controlling probability
> within the game.  Thus, at the crude level, a Ring Of Luck could say
> make all probability choices come out in the player's favour, or a
> Ring Of Bad Luck could make them all come out against him.  It gets
> more interesting if you merely warp the probability field instead of
> forcing it to 0 or 1 however.  Then you could have a curse of Minorly
> Bad Luck, which would just mean that probability choices for that
> player would start to fall against him more often.

Very cool, although I'd want to make it a bit more complex than this.
Tie in things like phases of the moon(s), strange rituals used to
activate various luck-inducing items, items which can induce bad luck
on others, and so on.  Now you get an effect of voodoo 'magic' which
is actually not having any immediate effect (ie, a fireball consuming
your enemies) but instead you wave your arms around, chant some list
of words when the moon is waxing, and rub your lucky ring to ensure
good luck on that night's endevors.  Conversely, make a charm from a strand
of someone's hair and chant a different ritual under the waning moon
to ensure bad luck for them.
In a way, this is a sort of player balancing thing - if many people hate
your character, they would all be doing bad luck rituals out of spite.
Just one by itself may not have a large effect, but if several people
are doing them simutaneously, you suddenly find yourself with a very
long streak of bad luck...
Not sure that it would fit in on just any mud, but an interesting line of
thought nonetheless.

> The thing you can't do is to invert the entire probability field.  You
> can't have something like, "Wear this ring and all the old certain
> things become nearly impossible, and all the old incredibly rare
> things become possible".  Follow that far enough and your character is
> going to asphyxiate because the probabilities underlieing brownian
> motion and the motion of all the air molecules/atoms near him just
> accidentally conspired together so that your character is now in a
> pure vacuum, only to find that 3 seconds before he expires all the air
> has returned to form a small black hole just below his navel. 
> Inverted probability fields are things of nightmareish
> unpredictability -- literally anything can happen, and more frequently
> than what should happen.  

Heh, memories of the Improbability Theory from Hitchiker's Guide.
Would be cool to have a Ring of Improbabilty, even if it was just a god
toy.  For those that don't know the theory, it states that things which
have a probability of exactly 0.0 are 100% guarenteed to happen.
Been a while since I read it, but as I recall the example was the
indestructable spaceship Titanic.  It was created to be, according to
their probability theorists, completely indestructable.  The probably
was 0.0 that anything would go wrong.  So, approxiamately 5 seconds out
of dock, it suffered a Total Existance Failure.  Great stuff..

[more of JC's good stuff deleted]