Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: FantasticDorf on January 03, 2023, 04:58:38 pm
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For the suggestion, by assigning a office as a tavern, the tavernkeeper or for lack of one a mayor or expedition leader can dispense bounties on reticuled targets, to which the bigger the bounty deposited on the current creature leverages the amount of world-generated interest for monster-hunters in both reputation for payment and unclaimed bounties. Both coinage and artifacts can be be used with for example 50 gold pieces on a freshly forged stack, will bring regional & foreign monster hunters from further afield, and cause them to cease cluttering the fortress taverns or temples and actively go and seek the monster out to claim the reward.
A office would also be nessecary for accepting petitions and payment, when on a seasonal basis monster hunters, dancers and mercenaries would be expected to recieve a salary if one was agreed, though different visitors may expect no payment to stay. The administrative side of the tavern or any location office would also allow you to retire any of your long-term visitors with immediate notice and let you know when they're ready to apply for citizenship if they don't decide to immediately leave with excessive earnt wealth, and spread more reputation for you.
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Why?
If we want something dead, then we would either send a squad of fortress dwarves to do it or create an adventurer to kill said creature.
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Why?
If we want something dead, then we would either send a squad of fortress dwarves to do it or create an adventurer to kill said creature.
Motivates, and helps supplement the entire system for monster hunters to keep cavern culling automated. If hunters fail, the creature becomes a named 'great beast' and attracts more hunters, and successful payment would raise the sites reputation as to send better armed and skilled monster-hunters (or entire troupes). This is not dissimilar to more valuable taverns attracting troupes of performers instead of solo performance artists, or saying that successful mercenary work could be achieved by having them paid, or a number of mercenaries in your service for a long time.
- You could also completely dummy the hunter bounties to make it a bloodsport without other creatures interference by catching and releasing the bounty in a closed environment, like a pitted FB or some topside megabeasts like a wild hydra sure to keep adventurers busy.
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Why?
If we want something dead, then we would either send a squad of fortress dwarves to do it or create an adventurer to kill said creature.
- make monster hunters more useful. you can sort of assign them kill orders instead letting them wonder and drink
- limit risk to squads. That creature flying around the cavern lakes, how many drowned soldiers are worth eliminating it when you could have some humans try first?
- make fun sport of beasts and slayers. It’s fun to see who wins in a fight, but usually watching the monster hunters/monsters is dull because they have no target.
- retiring/unretiring a fort kinda sucks. It shouldn’t, but it does, so making an adventurer to go kill something means hours of cleanup and tons of lost citizens. Even if improved it’s unlikely the fort will ever be the same after unretiring
I like this suggestion. Being able to put specific bounties on creatures would be great. Why limit it to the fort though? You can’t send a squad out to find a theif who made off with your artifact, but what if you could put a bounty on the theif and the artifact? Or a bounty on the leader of a rival civ/tower/pit?
This could be taken pretty far into villains concepts:
- bounty hunter/assassin/monster slayer/theif guilds
- inciting wars by publicly offering money to kill foreign leaders/citizens
- bounties on items allowing you to effectively run a criminal fortress
- stirring up more world activity with little adventurer parties on assassination or theft plots; winding up in jail, starting wars, or just sowing political chaos
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- make monster hunters more useful. you can sort of assign them kill orders instead letting them wonder and drink
- limit risk to squads. That creature flying around the cavern lakes, how many drowned soldiers are worth eliminating it when you could have some humans try first?
- make fun sport of beasts and slayers. It’s fun to see who wins in a fight, but usually watching the monster hunters/monsters is dull because they have no target.
- retiring/unretiring a fort kinda sucks. It shouldn’t, but it does, so making an adventurer to go kill something means hours of cleanup and tons of lost citizens. Even if improved it’s unlikely the fort will ever be the same after unretiring
I like this suggestion. Being able to put specific bounties on creatures would be great. Why limit it to the fort though? You can’t send a squad out to find a theif who made off with your artifact, but what if you could put a bounty on the theif and the artifact? Or a bounty on the leader of a rival civ/tower/pit?
This could be taken pretty far into villains concepts:
- bounty hunter/assassin/monster slayer/theif guilds
- inciting wars by publicly offering money to kill foreign leaders/citizens
- bounties on items allowing you to effectively run a criminal fortress
- stirring up more world activity with little adventurer parties on assassination or theft plots; winding up in jail, starting wars, or just sowing political chaos
By relying on bounties I am basically putting things up to the RNG to resolve with unknown odds but at the same time tying down the resources needed to pay the bounty that may not be fulfilled for years. If I send my own people to do it, I can calculate the risk and timeframe more easily.
Bounties seems to be mainly something that make sense for villains because these individuals may have plenty of wealth but no ability to raise large armies of their own. They are also likely to have petty goals (eliminate specific individuals) which are not rational for whole governments to pursue.
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Interesting idea. It might also allow to recruit mercenaries to supplement your force after some misfortune, pay someone sneaky to retrieve an artifact etc.
Reminder to myself: Rename 'bounty hunters' to 'witchers'.
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Bounties seems to be mainly something that make sense for villains because these individuals may have plenty of wealth but no ability to raise large armies of their own. They are also likely to have petty goals (eliminate specific individuals) which are not rational for whole governments to pursue.
Interesting idea. It might also allow to recruit mercenaries to supplement your force after some misfortune, pay someone sneaky to retrieve an artifact etc.
Theres also the uncompleted Dungeon Master/Chamberlain spymaster position role, which is meant to be your counter-intelligence and also pro-villanous action agent. But i haven't put that anywhere further in the OP because they'll probably have a noble office of their own and the only real meaningful interaction they have and *might* have with the tavern, is posing as tavernkeepers to steal counter-intelligence from people they serve wine to, and potentially pick up some double agents/easy agent targets.
I mean my original post more in the vein of the wandering guests.
Reminder to myself: Rename 'bounty hunters' to 'witchers'.
Top tip, this is doable through tokens on the creature file pertaining to the names of professions especially (ei craftdwarves instead of the default).
By relying on bounties I am basically putting things up to the RNG to resolve with unknown odds but at the same time tying down the resources needed to pay the bounty that may not be fulfilled for years. If I send my own people to do it, I can calculate the risk and timeframe more easily.
Killing the bounty yourself might still mean you have to pay the dwarf who claimed the kill in order to shift the money (hopefully, being able to just recruit our own dwarves as monster hunters might be a viable career option, it would be nice to see them autonomously spend money earnt outside the fortress between settlements searching for beasts so they don't die to broken armour that needs constant fortress re-forging.)
And on the other hand I did think afterwards about what happens if the beast moves suddenly offscreen into the greater world/cavern systems, and whether hunters would go into pursuit offscreen after it. My initial thought on this potential thing happening is that either the animal should be tracked, or be made unable to leave by giving it a special name title as soon as the bounty is called upon, but the first option is probably more realistic.
And if the fortress catches it with no particular person in stead to properly claim on it, it might null and void the payment until its released/pitted again.
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By relying on bounties I am basically putting things up to the RNG to resolve with unknown odds but at the same time tying down the resources needed to pay the bounty that may not be fulfilled for years. If I send my own people to do it, I can calculate the risk and timeframe more easily.
Having the ability to put a bounty out doesn't mean there's some obligation for you to use it, but some people like me would. Not all suggestions need to be relevant to your personal play style, this one would work for mine.
And on the other hand I did think afterwards about what happens if the beast moves suddenly offscreen into the greater world/cavern systems, and whether hunters would go into pursuit offscreen after it. My initial thought on this potential thing happening is that either the animal should be tracked, or be made unable to leave by giving it a special name title as soon as the bounty is called upon, but the first option is probably more realistic.
And if the fortress catches it with no particular person in stead to properly claim on it, it might null and void the payment until its released/pitted again.
It could get pretty complicated outside the play-area, do they need some proof like a FB head, etc? Taking trophies is probably something in the long term plans anyway...
If would be even more interesting if you could put a bounty out to capture beasts alive. I'm sure that rabbit hole could go pretty deep.
Either way, I think it would be fun to give targets to monster slayers, even if the mechanic wasn't too much more interesting than that. I've got plenty of fancy crafts to offer up for dead troglodytes.
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Killing the bounty yourself might still mean you have to pay the dwarf who claimed the kill in order to shift the money (hopefully, being able to just recruit our own dwarves as monster hunters might be a viable career option, it would be nice to see them autonomously spend money earnt outside the fortress between settlements searching for beasts so they don't die to broken armour that needs constant fortress re-forging.)
And on the other hand I did think afterwards about what happens if the beast moves suddenly offscreen into the greater world/cavern systems, and whether hunters would go into pursuit offscreen after it. My initial thought on this potential thing happening is that either the animal should be tracked, or be made unable to leave by giving it a special name title as soon as the bounty is called upon, but the first option is probably more realistic.
And if the fortress catches it with no particular person in stead to properly claim on it, it might null and void the payment until its released/pitted again.
What is the point of a monster hunter? What is a single monster hunter going to accomplish that ten regular soldiers aren't going to accomplish better? If I have a lot of surplus wealth but no army, then putting a bounty on something makes sense but in our position in fortress mode, we have an army and we aren't going to rely on bounties to do anything at all, using any wealth we might use to pay a bounty to instead upgrade our squads to be more powerful (or repair their armour as you put it).
I had originally hoped they would *not* implement the whole squads leave map thing, precisely because it would make room for adventurers/merceneries/monster hunters etc to interact with the fortress beyond simply enlisting in their forces. Fortress Mode took a massive chunk out of Adventure Mode with that update and thanks to it we rendered the kind of quasi-adventure mode interactions with wandering characters implied by bounties redundant.
There is perhaps still a use for bounties in Adventure Mode were we to have a civilian character that became rather wealthy but isn't a great fighter but wants someone dead, but pretty much we always play as a great fighter character don't we? If we want them dead, we do it ourselves. The RNG nature of bounty completion is an unavoidable limitation to the concept, it is always going to be more reliable to do it yourself (in both modes).
We need to have more political limitations on what we can do with our forces (particularly in Fortress Mode) before bounties make sense.
Having the ability to put a bounty out doesn't mean there's some obligation for you to use it, but some people like me would. Not all suggestions need to be relevant to your personal play style, this one would work for mine.
Resources are finite. A feature that is almost never going to be used because it serves no purpose to most people is not an efficient use of development time.
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Nobody is holding you to account that you must, just that you can. I would want the disposability of not rearing a dwarf for 18, or perhaps 12 years from a baby, then seeing their head pulped and instant-killed in first contact by a forgotten beast, when i can throw monster hunters at a problem.
If they succeed well, couple of good memories to hang onto for earning a quick bounty-buck, move them into squad military when they apply for citizenship, easy peasy.
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Nobody is holding you to account that you must, just that you can. I would want the disposability of not rearing a dwarf for 18, or perhaps 12 years from a baby, then seeing their head pulped and instant-killed in first contact by a forgotten beast, when i can throw monster hunters at a problem.
If they succeed well, couple of good memories to hang onto for earning a quick bounty-buck, move them into squad military when they apply for citizenship, easy peasy.
You really didn't understand anything I was saying.
The issue here why provide bounties for the monster hunters to kill a specific monster they *might* pursue, rather than just hire the monster hunters to kill whatever you want killed which they *will* do. The issue was never about you hiring monster hunters in general.
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You really didn't understand anything I was saying. [snip]
Im just inclined to report these posts if you continue to harrass other people in this thread, because we understood your point the first time but this is needlessly trying to drive the thread off topic, due to the lack in variation in your repetitive answer other than the fact that other people including me, the OP and other participants have differing opinions. Of which you were never required to be called in to defend your point so vehemently.
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Im just inclined to report these posts if you continue to harrass other people in this thread, because we understood your point the first time but this is needlessly trying to drive the thread off topic, due to the lack in variation in your repetitive answer other than the fact that other people including me, the OP and other participants have differing opinions. Of which you were never required to be called in to defend your point so vehemently.
No need to be so touchy, that wasn't an insult. Hiring merceneries into your forces in general is *not* the same thing as offering bounties for specific enemies and your response seemed to be confusing the two things, as if I was arguing against both.
I am not harassing people, I am the only one here engaging in constructive criticism of the whole bounty concept. Which apparently isn't allowed.
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I like this even just from an RP pov.
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+1 to the idea.
Maybe these bounties/contracts could be binding and perhaps there's a set time limit to fulfill it? Breach of contract would then be considered oath-breaking and result in an appropriate sentence (which in case of dorf civs would be a hammering).
And bounties could be expanded to Adventure mode and happen in world gen too.
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+1 to the idea.
Maybe these bounties/contracts could be binding and perhaps there's a set time limit to fulfill it? Breach of contract would then be considered oath-breaking and result in an appropriate sentence (which in case of dorf civs would be a hammering).
And bounties could be expanded to Adventure mode and happen in world gen too.
More reasons for the player not to ever use the bounty mechanic. If we give people a general contract and just order them to kill whatever it is, we cannot break the contract as long as we can pay them per month or whatever. While if we issue bounties, there is a good chance we will find ourselves unable to pay for the completion of bounties issued perhaps years ago.
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More reasons for the player not to ever use the bounty mechanic.
Don't assume each player plays the game like you do.
But anyway, my suggestion with the contract stuff was poorly thought now that I look at it with rested eyes. The breaching part and (too harsh) punishment for it was aimed at the person hired, not the one who does the hiring. A harm to the reputation of the breacher would be probably more appropriate.