[MUD-Dev] lockpicking

[Matthew Mihaly]

There's been some talk about lockpicking and how to avoid people able to
just sit there and constnatly lockpick, which will, given time, defeat any
system. Raph pointed out a major flaw in the idea someone had to keep
track of every lock and its relationship to every player (ie storage
issues). We don't actually have houses on a widespread scale right now,
and no lockpicking at all, but when we put it in, the way I'm going to do
it is require regular maintenance of house defences by the owner in order
to ensure security. For instance, making the owner do something (what
doesn't really matter) to a lock that will make it unpickable for, say,
random(x) number of hours. When someone goes to pick a lock, there will be
some straight random chance of him succeeding (small, so trying over and
over will be required, though you wouldn't be able to try more than once
every 5 seconds or so). However, the lockpicker won't know if the lock is
currently protected or not. He'd just get normal failure messages. This,
then, rewards the vigilant homeowner, and punishes the absent
homeowner. It also makes the lockpicker think twice about whether to spend
a couple hours trying to pick a lock, as he's not going to be sure whether
or not he even CAN succeed.
--matt




_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev