Alastair raises a number of interesting points, and generally parallels my own thoughts on the matter of monster generation as a function of a kind of NPC society. I'm sorry if this strays off the path of the gauntlet-style monster generator =).
I wrote a about my thoughts of individuals in the societal unit. In that post, I described three needs: Survival, reproduction, and societal. I believe those needs are what may solve a few of the problems and questions raised here, such as camping and the nature of specialization within the settlement.
So you've got a society of mobs sending raiders and scouts to the surrounding area. One of them happens to drop some nice equipment, and a player takes notice... Now players try to farm the settlement. Hardly an orc raiding team can leave without being accosted and obliterated by those bloodthirsty players. Those poor, defenseless orcs.
I think the solution to this problem lies with the fact that the settlement doesn't care about its raiders, and is entirely self-sustaining. Because the settlement/generator keeps sending raiders to certain doom, players are rewarded for camping. And because a settlement/generator can keep sending raiders without worrying about resources, players will be rewarded.
So we need to make it so the NPCs in our settlement understands that sending raiders out is a death trap, and cannot keep sending raiders without an influx in resources to create them. We can accomplish the first through a survival need, that is the prospective raider does not wish to take that job because of the high mortality rate. But that kind of forward-thinking is hard to code, so it's most likely that we'll accomplish this through a social need, where there are different weights on the different jobs that an NPC would choose to take.
If parties of raiders are constantly wiped out, the society could do two things: Increase the amount and strengths of the raiders in hopes of wearing down the players, or stop sending raiders entirely. I believe the first would be preferable if the society had bigger and badder types of enemies that it could send out. But if the players still persist, or the society is too small, I think that we should decrease the societal need for a raider, thus decreasing the overall number of NPCs from that settlement that choose that job. So a player would likely see a steady rise in the toughness of raiders, then a drop in the number of them. This effectively removes the reward.
If that wasn't enough for you, we can try tackling the problem from a resource perspective. Not alot of muds have a good resource model, however, so I don't think this solution would be as simple as simply giving weights to types of jobs for societal needs. Nevertheless, it does provide a few interesting consequences.
Say that the society is set to produce 10 worker orcs, 20 fighter orcs, and 5 master-fighter orcs a week. It costs the society a bit of food and iron/steel (for weapons and armor) to create the workers, a bit more to create the fighters, and lots to create the master-fighters. When a player camps -- the quality of the equipment dropped should probably be proportionate to the amount of resources that went into creating the unit killed. Master-fighters would naturally drop better equipment. But if the settlement only has a finite amount of resources, they may not be able to produce the same quality of resources for their fighters because of farming. Thus, the quality of the equipment goes down and the reward is removed.
But this also leads to strategic planning on the part of the players. Do they take a note of that fledgling encampent that's next to a rich iron vein, possibly coming back to it later once it's started producing top-notch soldiers? If the top-notch soldiers are too powerful for them, do they cut off the line of workers carting iron from the mines, and does the society react to this by placing guards in that area?
The more we can make these generators do, I think, the better =).
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