PDSM at 500'

[Slick]

I've been playing Angband for several years and have never found Power Dragon Scale Mail *ever* until yesterday with a new Ranger at 500'. I take it this is extremely rare. My question is: exactly how rare was it? Once in a lifetime? I really don't understand the rarity, object level and the generation code to tell how rare it is.

(side note, the same character had the opportunity to get Tenser's in the black marketafter returning from 500' to sell off some goods, but was unable to come up with $160000 and didn't want to raise the bucks by killing townies. (CL 12) I am pretty sure the RNG will kill this guy after all this good luck.)

[Pete Mack]

The odds are less than one in a lifetime; most people don't win the lottery after all. I've only ever seen it once at native depth. I did once find both mhdsm and balance dsm out of depth in the same game, but pdsm is rarer still.

[Psi]

I saw PDSM once in Vanilla - having already knocked off Morgoth and then dived down deeper.

I've seen it in ToME of course - where you can buy it from the Dragon Hunter's store.

Never seen it in FA (or O) despite 100s hours of game time (I play on my commute).

[Slick]

Wow, I guess I'm all out of good luck for the rest of my life. This combined with that Royal Flush I had a couple of years ago playing Texas Hold'em at a friend's house means that I'll spend the rest of my life just using up my remaining (bad) luck...

[Irashtar]

You really need to go back to Probability 101 if that's how your feel about it.
My unlikely to several orders of magnitude moment was having Galadriel drop a ring of speed +18. I still have strange things happen, like in my current game, I found a rod of speed on level 50, quite out of depth.
Now make us proud and have that lucky sod take out Morgoth!

[The Sparrow]

Wow, I guess I'm all out of good luck for the rest of my life. This combined with that Royal Flush I had a couple of years ago playing Texas Hold'em at a friend's house means that I'll spend the rest of my life just using up my remaining (bad) luck...

lol...im thinking that the 1 in 650,000 for a Royal Flush in Texas isn't as rare as PDSM at '500 feet. Though I've never seen either. I've hit quad's in Texas Hold 'Em several times and I found GDSM at '600 feet once...

[Narvius]

I think either one depletes an average human's luck completely.

[RogerN]

As a rough estimate, I'm going to say that the chances of finding PDSM at native depth (5000') are less than 1 in 10,000 per item drop. It has a rarity of 64, meaning it's 64 times less likely to drop than "standard" items.

Finding it 90 levels out of depth is significantly more improbable... but not as improbable as you might think. About 1 in 20 items is generated with the chance of being out of depth under normal circumstances. Out of those, there would be about 1 in 10 chance (at depth 500') of generating an item that could potentially be native to depth 5000'.

So the total probability of finding PDSM on the floor at 500' comes out to about 1 in 2,000,000 per item drop.

[Zikke]

As a rough estimate, I'm going to say that the chances of finding PDSM at native depth (5000') are less than 1 in 10,000 per item drop. It has a rarity of 64, meaning it's 64 times less likely to drop than "standard" items.

Finding it 90 levels out of depth is significantly more improbable... but not as improbable as you might think. About 1 in 20 items is generated with the chance of being out of depth under normal circumstances. Out of those, there would be about 1 in 10 chance (at depth 500') of generating an item that could potentially be native to depth 5000'.

So the total probability of finding PDSM on the floor at 500' comes out to about 1 in 2,000,000 per item drop.

Your math points to having something from 5000' ft drop at 500', but you would need to add in the chance that, of all the things native to 5000' it would pick the PDSM. Or is that part of the 64 number?

[RogerN]

Your math points to having something from 5000' ft drop at 500', but you would need to add in the chance that, of all the things native to 5000' it would pick the PDSM. Or is that part of the 64 number?

All of that should already be included in the 1 in 2,000,000 estimate. That's 1 in 200 (chance of generating item from 5000') multiplied by 1 in 10,000 (chance of choosing PDSM from all available items).

[Narvius]

So, yeah, we're basically at "PDSM at 500' requires 3x more luck than a royal flush".

[Psi]

Never seen it in FA (or O) despite 100s hours of game time (I play on my commute).

Rather coincidentally, I found PDSM in FA this morning! Admittedly at 4950' rather than 500' though.

Annoyingly it doesn't have rDis or rConf which was a surprise. Checking Os edit files shows that it must have been inherited from there rather than Nick being mean! Still got to plug my rDis hole then...

[Nick]

Annoyingly it doesn't have rDis or rConf which was a surprise. Checking Os edit files shows that it must have been inherited from there rather than Nick being mean!

Well, rather than just me being mean

[Seany C]

So, yeah, we're basically at "PDSM at 500' requires 3x more luck than a royal flush".

Well, I've had two royal flushes in my poker career and no PDSM in 11 years of 'banding, but measuring pieces of armour and poker hands received could be tricky...

[aeneas]

The odds are hard to calculate. You have to include the effects of auto-scum, if you have it on. I am going to assume you had it on .

I have found PDSM exactly once, and I've played a lot of Angband. I came down some stairs pretty early (around 1500') and detected objects. There was a jewel-encrusted crown on the floor, and I was wondering if I should bother with it when I noticed it was a _backwards_ jewel-encrusted crown... I decided then and there that I would not die with that armor on, and I did eventually win- that winner is somewhere on the ladder. Most boring game I ever played .

PDSM is rare. Really rare. Once in a lifetime is not an exaggeration, and it's a good thing as it makes everything else easy- you don't have to juggle equipment at all.