[MUD-Dev] The grass is always greener in the other field

[Adam Wiggins]

On Fri, 17 Dec 1999, Greg Miller wrote:
> J C Lawrence wrote:
> > Locked doors on houses were fine with percentage chances at picking
> > the lock -- until someone noticed that even a 0.0001% chance
> > requaled a ~100% given a pick-lock macro playing endlessly.
> 
> This is one reason I dislike random numbers. Ideally, I prefer a system
> that would, at most, *appear* mostly random due to the number of factors
> involved in calculating success. Of course, it's not always easy to come
> up with reasonable formulae that make things variable enough.

The system which I have proposed here before, and in fact which I use
myself, is seeded randoms.  The chance to pick a lock, hide in a certain
room, or do other actions which need a hint of randomness but which the
player should not be able to "spam" until they succeed, is based upon a
seed for that location.

So a given lock-picker will either not be able to pick a given player house's
lock at all, no matter how many times they try, with their current skill
level; and then once they can, they can do it every time, prompting the
player who owns the house to buy a new lock if they find that someone
who can gain access to their house does so on a regular basis.

Perhaps this would eventually lead to a complex series of locks and traps
installed on the front of the player's house, no one of which is enough
to stop a master thief, but taken together can foil almost anyone.  This,
of course, at the added cost that it takes the player who owns the house
twenty minutes to get into their own domicile.

Adam





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