Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: NRDL on April 20, 2012, 08:45:57 am
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Dwarves need alcohol to get through the working day. Goblins need to take joy in slaughter to get through the working day.
Depending on the personality type of the goblin in question, he or she, in the absence of violence, will either become sullen, depressed, and useless.
A more hyperactive, aggressive goblin will just go insane, ironically getting lots and lots of kills along the way.
If goblins are ever implemented as a vanilla race in fort mode, you must find a steady supply of things for all your goblins to kill. Whether it be animals, zombies, sentients ( especially those ) and even fellow goblins. Yes, this requires goblins to kill each other without a loyalty cascade, or even legal action.
But since these are gobbs were talking about, this could work.
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You say yourself in this, however, that it's based on personality.
Maybe this should be Personality Rewrite material, where they just have such a high sadistic streak most of the time that they, like Black Mage, aren't capable of taking a bathroom break unless they have an anthill or something to use as "victims".
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Love the 8-bit theater reference.
Goblins already have that bloodthirsty sadism, what I'm talking about is an actual addiction to the feeling they get when they take joy in slaughter.
Perhaps not every individual goblin should have to kill something. Something like Aztec sacrifice, for sentients, would be good here. Every goblin, however, would probably take the opportunity to hurt and kill small animals, and anything that can't defend itself.
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Well, that's what I mean about having it as a personality trait rather than a physiological dependency, the way that dwarves literally cannot function properly without alcohol. Like, if they have 90%+ sadism, they will have a psychological addiction to inflicting pain upon others. Then, you just make the range of goblin personalities be something like between 86 and 100% sadism, so less than a third don't have that trait.
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So...it's like a mental illness? Psychological in nature, not biological or chemical.
The general idea still fits. Would this actually work ingame?
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Well, it would probably require coding in a new mechanic, but yes.
There's already some "causing a fistfight" or more general "causing trouble", so just having a goblin keyed up so that they will seek out someone they know they can probably get away with hurting (like slaves or animals or maybe just a lower-rank or weaker goblin) and take it out on them, that could be their "going on break" thing.
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that could be their "going on break" thing.
GENIUS.
...I can imagine goblins in an office setting, hanging around a water cooler, and ambushing weaker goblins as they pass by.
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Give gobbos an animal fighting pit zone and let them conduct dogfights when they're idle. They get happy thoughts when their pet kills another pet. Unhappy goblins can be assuaged by giving them an awesome fighting beast.
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"Enjoyed seeing a pet's death recently."
"Enjoyed torturing his son."
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I'd prefer it as a tag so that it could be transmitted via disease.
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You could transmit a change in personality as a syndrome, as well, hypothetically, and I really don't like token-based personality traits when we have a personality system to start with that is basically doing nothing...
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This might be a way to make the personality traits do SOMETHING. I'm kinda behind the idea of being able to forcibly modify personality, Like the goblins torturing the children they snatch to make them as twisted and evil as the goblins are. Besides, a dependance on violence would make any goblin modes for fortress mode a LOT more fun to play.
"we've run out of prisoners and small animals to torture!"
*Fun ensues as fortress falls apart*
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Alternatively, it could be satisfied by foreign military escapades. It would at least explain why they're constantly sending out pointless ambushes and sieges equipped with crap armor and weapons... a kind of unfortunate accident for the masses.
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that could be their "going on break" thing.
GENIUS.
...I can imagine goblins in an office setting, hanging around a water cooler, and ambushing weaker goblins as they pass by.
goblin thugs you say?
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oh god yes, now it makes me wanna play as gobbos rather than dwarves.
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or to have the same effect you could just make goblins reproduce very quickly so the player would have to kill off their excess population just to keep FPS from tanking.
something like.
-they have litters of 4-6 gobletts at a time.
-Gobletts grow to adulthood in 3 years.
-but then they also have no migration waves
this gives you lots of useless population to throw away on pointless wars with invulnerable dwarven fortresses (and a STRONG Incentive to do so.)