[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Based on my own automated treasure generator implementation, I'd suggest that you have this configurable as a percentage of the total hoard value, but set a sensible minimum. Otherwise, you could spend years waiting for the random generation of an item worth $7.29 or some other absurd small value to finish off a coin-free hoard.

Yes, in a mixed horde the coins will be leveraged to "pad out" the total value - ie the coins are figured after everything else, when I know exactly how much value I have to work with.

When without coins, I intend to follow the same philosophy that I do when building random hoards in the Dungeons on Automatic dungeon generator (when using the DF8 treasure service instead of just suggesting a target value).

In DoA, a horde is assigned a target value which has wiggle room; after a certain amount of flailing trying to hit it exactly, I give up and the user gets what they gets. On DoA I accept treasure that busts through the cap (by a modest amount), and I also accept the horde as complete if it's a modest amount smaller than the goal. IIRC if it has to reject an item 20 times for not being able to make the value work, it quits.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

That's what I did. The use of dice was purely for the use of humans. A machine-based implementation shouldn't have to lean on that.

I have actually a half-working generator that hews closely to DF8 - the part where it can take arbitrary dice-powered tables that may give instructions to go to other dice powered tables that give instructions to... etc. It can literally take in the DF8 tables and Do Things with them.

The part that doesn't work is taking the Things it gets back and making a handy result, like finding the final dollar value or making a readable English description instead of just spewing out the names of the table entries.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

In my own implementation, I did something in this direction by checking/unchecking subcategories, limiting random choices to or excluding them as desired. For example, the armory of a fighting order might consist entirely of arms and armor, while a long-lost dungeon might contain no perishable items (that is, no cloth, no paper, no leather, etc.). This is something which could be implemented broadly with proper use of item attributes, but coming up with proper attributes to reflect specific "treasure type" conditions could be tricky.

One possibility is to use "tag" type db-filtering logic, where the user can pick appropriate sounding tags. Items that match more of the tags are weighted heavier, items that match less of the tags are weighted lighter, and items that match none of the tags are completely excluded from the possibilities.

Categories (like the ones in DF8) are "harder" divisions than the tags - a combination of the two, plus value limiting, would give pretty fine control.

But I'd have to go through and tag every item in the database, or find a willing victim volunteer to do it.