[MUD-Dev] Locker/Theft/Anti-Hoarding System Idea

[Travis Casey]

Tuesday, January 09, 2001, 4:49:47 PM, Chris Lloyd <crl199 at soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
>> Andrew Snelling

>> There would, of course, be no guarantee a player would lose the
>> extra items to a thief, but no guarantee she wouldn't,
>> either. There is a notable difference here from the UO theft model,
>> which allowed only PvP theft (although house robberies were still
>> common, despite all attempts to code them out of existence). It
>> shifts away from the confrontational aspects of thievery, and gives
>> thieves a clear economic role in the system, and a justification.

> This has always been a problem - A thief with a 1% chance of picking
> a lock will just do it 100 times until he gets in.

Small math correction: a thief with a 1% chance of picking a lock
will, on average, have to try it 458 times before getting in (that's
the point at which there will be a 50% chance that the thief has been
successful).

However, there's no reason why this *has* to be the case.  One could
adopt the Arduin rule -- that if a thief tries to pick a lock, and
doesn't succeed, that thief *cannot* pick that lock no matter how many
times he/she tries, unless and until the thief gets a better chance to
pick the lock.

(Conversely, in Arduin, if a thief picks a lock successfully, that
thief will *always* pick that lock successfully, unless and until the
thief tries it while having a lower chance to pick the lock.)

This does require a good deal of storage to keep track of which locks
the thief has tried, what the result was, and what the thief's skill
was at the time, but it does solve the problem of lockpick-spamming.

Of course, you could also adopt more complex rules.  For example, many
paper RPGs have critical successes and failures, which happen when one
rolls extremely well or extremely poorly.  With that, one might decide
that a critical success gives "automatic pick" ability as above, and a
critical failure "can't pick" as above.  A typical paper RPG rule is
that the chance of a critical in either direction is 10% of your
chance of that happening.  Thus, if a character has a 1% chance to
pick a lock, and you're using percentile dice, an 01 would be success,
02-90 failure, and 91+ critical failure.  Spamming the lock with such
a low chance of success, then, would generally wind up with the player
getting a critical failure and no longer having any chance of success.

There are also other things you could do with critical failures... for
example, a critical failure might indicate that you've broken your
lockpick off inside the lock.  You have to buy a new lockpick, and the
owner of the house is going to know that someone's been trying to
break into the safe... and, in a magical world, might be able to get a
wizard to cast a spell to find out who that lockpick part belonged to.

Another alternative is to use a difficulty system with automatic
failures: if your effective lockpick skill is low enough compared to
the difficulty of the lock, you simply can't pick it.  Spamming with a
0% chance of success isn't going to get you anywhere.

> Here, it is common knowledge that the items can be stolen, and the
> owner is taking a risk by having them stored in this way. He accepts
> that his place might get burgled. In order to stop the
> lockpick-spamming, instead use some sort of finite resource to do
> the job.

> Example 1:

>   Lets say a lock on a strongbox has 100 health.

>   A lockpick can take 10 health away from the door.

>   A lockpick costs 100 gold coins.

> So... Is the loot in the locked chest worth more than 1000 gold coins? 
> You can only find out by picking the lock and looking inside.

> This way the price of getting in is basically the same for everyone,
> and not time-dependant or luck-dependant.

A problem, though -- this breaks realism.  For some folks, that's not
a concern, of course; for others, however, it is.  To me, it makes
much more sense to have a chance that a lockpick breaks on a failure
-- lockpicks do break sometimes.  That's another way of having finite
resources, but one that isn't so hard on suspension of disbelief.

Something else would be to have different tools for picking different
kinds of locks... the tools for harder lock types would be more
expensive.  A simple skeleton key might suffice for cheap locks,
harder locks might require picks, a combination lock might require a
stethoscope to help hear the clicks, etc.

> Example 2:

>   There's a castle with a strongbox inside.

>   An ogre thief breaks into the castle, and gets to the strongbox.

>   He wants to get inside, and he knows the guards/owners are coming
>   back soon, so instead of picking the lock on the spot, he picks up
>   the box and runs off with it.

>   He picks the lock when he gets to his hideout - And it costs the
>   same amount of resources as if he picked it in the castle.

Here's something else that's often missing from the "lockpick problem"
on muds, though -- the question of time.  In the real world, picking a
lock takes time -- sometimes a lot of time.  On a mud, making an
attempt at picking a lock generally takes no more time than it takes
to type the command and hit return, or to click the mouse.  Make it
take some time, and it becomes much less practical for someone to try
to spam lockpicking.

Even if, say, you make it so that a lockpick attempt takes 10 seconds
of real time, that guy with the 1% lockpick chance is going to have to
spend an average of 4580 seconds to pick a lock... about an hour and
17 minutes.

>> Also key to this system is the ability to 'punish' caught thieves, ie,
>> those who try to steal things far beyond their skill, in such a manner
>> as to keep them out of your hair for a certain period of time, but
>> that's a whole other set of ideas...

> Thieves can be enemies from cities or towns. Players get peeved if you
> lock them up, so large fines will have to do. And no one likes a thief
> - Hopefully players won't trust him any more.

Also, if a thief has been caught before, others might refuse to hire
him/her for jobs -- who wants to hire a thief who isn't even good at
it?

For extra fun, have cops who pressure thieves to "talk" about who sold
them the lockpicks, who they're working for, etc.  If they'll talk,
they may be able to get off or get a lighter sentence... but they may
also make enemies.  If word gets around that a thief squealed on
someone who sold him a set of lockpicks, he's going to have a hard
time finding anyone to sell him another set.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_    Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)   


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev