At 02:19 PM 6/12/00 -0400, you wrote:

>Allow me to state a few facts that should be obvious.
>
>1) Not all randoms were created equal. What I mean is that I'm sure that
>some spawns are pure random between several items on an encounter table.
>(eg. newbie areas, a spawn has an equal shot of getting a bug, a bat, a
>snake, etc.) However, for the named spawns, I'm equally sure that the named
>has a lower chance of spawning than the place holder. They have to do it
>that way to limit the entry of items into the game. The way the game
>probably works is that it grabs a random number from the generator and then
>performs additional calculations before arriving at the final number which
>it uses to check to see what is spawned. This makes it much harder to
>determine the true randomness of the generator. The only instance I can find
>where there would be no additional processing would be with the /random
>command. And my experience has shown it to be fairly random. If you were
>truly curious, I would advise that you take a large sample set of data with
>the /random command and analyze that data. But trying to extrapolate
>randomness from spawn tables and loot drops is somewhat pointless. There are
>other steps we are unaware of that will not be taken into account.

i'm sure that the named spawns have a lower chance of spawning than the placeholder,
but you don't have to massage the rng for that to happen. one easy way would be
to do generate a floating point number between 0 and 1. multiply that by 10000. now
you set up a case statement for the spawn table and you have a 0.01% granularity on
how rare the spawn is. if you didn't want that much control, you could just generate
a random number between 1 and 100 and do the same thing. pure random doesn't
necessarily have to mean 50/50.