[MUD-Dev] re: Crafting Systems - preventing recipe decomposition?

[Adam]

From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com>
> Ron Gabbard writes:

>  If you end up with recipe-based crafting, those recipes will be
>  published and all players will know how to make the stuff.  So
>  that cannot be the discriminator to separate serious crafters
>  from those who just want the end-result.

Quick question (for those with experience with craftingd/etc
degenerating into recipe systems, with full-details published on fan
sites):

What if you adopt the approach used by the DragonCrystal game?

  http://www.gamefaqs.com/portable/gamegear/review/R26217.html

  a simple straightforward
  levelling-treadmill-whilst-wandering-around-a-maze game

Every item (Rods, Books, Potions, Weapons, Armour, etc) came in IIRC
8 colours - with each colour mapping to a different magical
ability. You either had to use a Book/Rod of identify to find out
what a colour/item-type pair was (but identify was very rare) or
else just had to use the thing, and if you were lucky you
auto-identified it (but might kill yourself in the process - e.g. if
you targetted self with "lightning bolt" or targetted a monster with
"polymorph" and turned it into something lethal).

All of which would be ruined if someone wrote all the colour-item
pairs on a website (different for each item-type). Some idiot
actually did (if you search for hints/cheats, you can find such
pages) - I say "idiot" because if you played the game more than a
few times it became blatantly obvious that the mappings were
randomized every time.

So, (to finally get to the point ;), what if you had a recipe based
system (crafting, spellcasting, etc) with, say, 8 different actions
that could be combined in sequences up to, say, 10 actions long,
giving you 8^10 possible combinations, and then every time a new
player-character was generated, the server randomized which of those
possible combinations mapped to actual game recipes?

Obvious problem 1: The spell "armageddon" might (randomly) get
mapped to using the simplest action just once. Obvious solution:
introduce some heuristics, such that powerful/etc effects are less
likely to involve simple combinations.

Knock-on-effect: So long as the heuristics only altered the
probability, and still made it possible for every combination, the
number of actions that could match a certain effect is still as
large as originally, so there's still no point trying to map them
out (its a meaningless exercise!).

Obvious problem2: Players keep randomly recreating new characters
over and over again, in an attempt to get the 0.000001% chance that
the character will have "armageddon", "morph self into dragon", and
"instant unlimited wealth" as simple-to-execute actions
:). IANA:(psychologist), but I would suspect that with enough
possible combinations, the probability of success would be so low
that almost everyone would give up before getting such a powerful
combo - so that the rarity of such abilities would still be
preserved.

...but I've never run a MUD/MMOG which had this problem, so I'd be
interested to hear what anyone who HAS has to say...?

Adam M

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