[MUD-Dev] Re: Leaving characters in play

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 18 May 1998 12:56:25 -0700 (PDT) 
Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:

> Perhaps players get a certain amount of 'luck' each day.  A one-hit
> killing blow can be avoided if you have enough luck.  

Fascinating concept!  I already have probability fields (shoulda
mentioned that in the Murkle thread).  Adding secondary or mirror
fields whose sole purpose is to catch and nullify highly improbable
near-zero values (followed by decrementing their ability to do so)
would do this.  

Oooo, I like.  I also seem to recal an SF novel where the lead
character was genetically "lucky", and thus consistenty confounded his 
protagonists by wiggling out of seemingly guaranteed fatal situations
by very bizarre means (a gun fired in his face mysteriouly jams, the
car with no brakes mysteriously suffers an all-tire blowout and grinds 
to a safe stop, the poison cup is accidentally knocked over by the leg 
falling off the over-cooked turkey, the bomb doesn't detonate because
a fly mysteriously gets trapped in the machanism and prevents the
final fatal electrical contact, etc).  

Of course the real problem is coming up with the automatically
generated explanations for what happened.  I expect I'll ignore that
tho, and just nix the calculation so the descending halberd makes a
binary daisy instead of a binary Flopsy.

> This is a nice was to help encourage players to explore.  If they
> walk in on the mighty dragon once, they will get a good scare.  If
> they walk in again, they get roasted.

Yep.  This also banks with the ideas I discussed earlier for player
having an idea of what their luck status (probability field) really
is, and then causitively using that.

  "My luck is really high today.  Lets see if I can't kill the red
dragon with only a bent hairpin and a a mouldy piece of bread!"

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.