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

[Andrew Snelling]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Travis Casey wrote:

> Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 11:40:06 -0500
> From: Travis Casey <efindel at earthlink.net>
> Reply-To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> To: Chris Lloyd <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Locker/Theft/Anti-Hoarding System Idea

> 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 critical failure result would be an increased likelihood of
being noticed. Ideally, if this were being used in some form of
player-controlled town system, both players and hired npcs could
perform the function of guards for the entire town. While thieves
would have skills allowing them to escape notice, a critical failure
could reveal them or even alert said guards. Spamming failures will
sooner or later hit this critical, and even one npc guard coming to
investigate should be enough threat to the thief (of disruption at the
very least) that it will not be worth his time to bang away at locks
that he has little chance of opening.

> 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.

This last one is more along the lines of what I had in mind. I would
like the thief to be able to reasonably tell whether he can handle the
difficulty of the theft, and be basically guaranteed success as long
as his skill level is in line with the value of the objects or
difficulty of the lock. Once he exceeded this soft limit, the chances
of failure would ramp up rapidly, but a careful thief would have no
real problems with failure.

> > 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.

Alternatively, the costs could be incurred by the thieves which are
caught. Part of having a system like this is giving players the
ability to make bad thieves go away for a time. A jail system would be
an obvious choice... and who's to say the thief couldn't bribe the
guards (npc OR player) to get away? This would get expensive pretty
quickly for a careless thief.

> 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.

Heheh... I like this. It represents one of the advantages of letting
the justice system be player-controlled, too... the town sheriff might
decide to be lenient in exchange for useful info about local bandits
and such, and this gives him a way to coerce it out of the 'criminal'.

The bottom line is that capture should be avoidable by an intelligent
thief, unless he takes clear risks (which could, after all, sometimes
be worth it).



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