Bay 12 Games Forum

It does not really do to simply model rebellions by dwarves according to whether they personally are happy, because that basically means we can do whatever we wish as long as we give them nice dining halls and plenty of booze, which is not how things realistically would work.  As a solution to this problem I propose that site governments be given a corporate personality.  This would mean that the fortress would have an 'alignment' in terms both personality and values, which contrasts with that of the individual dwarves. 

To begin with the values are set to that of our civilization and the personality is the mean personality of of it's dominant species (so humans are set to 50 at everything).  Various actions and abstract decisions made by the player in play would adjust the corporate personality/values of the government in a given direction.  If an individual dwarf personality and values deviate from that of the corporate personality, then that dwarf's loyalty to his government is undermined, causing him to become prone to rebellion. 

The rebellions themselves work in the powderkeg/spark fashion.  An individual dwarf decides to rebel and keeps this fact initially secret from the player.  Dwarves with subordinate positions not only can lead rebellions while retaining their position but they are far more likely to lead rebellions than the average dwarf is.  The ultimate leaders of the site cannot lead rebellions, but instead becoming sufficiently disloyal causes them to resign from the government.  Subordinate position holders that are particularly honest in their values will also resign the government in a similar fashion if they become sufficiently disloyal/are recruited into a rebellion.  It goes without saying that you cannot reappoint a resigned leader to his former position. 

Rebellions start with an individual, aside from being a subordinate position holder another factor that encourages rebellion leader is having lots of friends.  The rebel leader will recruit followers from the disloyal dwarves, whether they are happy or not in the course of normal conversation and socializing, which will be invisible to the site government.  Once the rebellion has sufficient numbers and strength it will make a bid for power, loyal dwarves will fight for the government, disloyal dwarves even if not already recruited into the rebellion will oppose the government and dwarves who have mediocre loyalty will sit it out. 

Squads will follow the lead of their commander, the difference between squad members and ordinary dwarves is that mediocre loyalty squad members follow whatever stance taken by their commander, while both loyal and disloyal squad members will follow the lead of their commander should he decide to stay neutral.  The outcome of a successful rebellion in a player's site depends upon the state of the site, in all instances a successful rebellion causes the site to become unplayable but how they behave depends upon how complete the site is.

If the site is considered incomplete for the current population, that is to say there is insufficient furniture, rooms, constructed space etc, then the rebel dwarves will abandon the site and build a new site nearby, this will be a hillocks if the fortress population is small; the original site becomes a ruin and new dwarves can be moved in by the player (but not by anyone else).  If the site is considered complete for the current population then they will continue to live there and can be visited in adventure mode; but the population will be capped at the total number of dwarves supported by the architectural layout when the player was overthrown. 

What about placing a cost on any member of the royal family? Maybe half of the cost of playing the king.

Here is where the idea gets complicated.  Not only can you set up positions that are hereditary, you can also set up positions that are succeeded by other positions, potentially one's that exist at a site-level rather than at a government level. 

I don't see why there's any need to add some sort of metagame that can prevent you from playing as whoever you like. "The player" is not an in-universe entity, and doesn't owe allegiance to any of the people or nations in-game. If you want to go roleplay as the demon in charge of the goblin tower that's been raiding your fortress, well, go ahead?

The whole point of this idea is indeed that the player is not a major in-game entity.  Having the player's ability to play as whoever they like directly violates this, the determining factor of the plot is now simply whoever the player decides to take over today, not only is the player *in themselves* part of the plot, but they are the main determinant of it.  In any case, you can easily mod all positions to cost nothing at all, so effectively switching this off. 

I was thinking something similar, but instead of being tied to noble positions it is tied to how loyal another character is to you (where "loyalty" works in the sense of both subjects of a ruler and close friends or partners).  The system could use the currently unused "worship" variable when relating to mortal relationships.

In practice this would be similar to your suggestion, while also solving the issue of "pricing": it's not the rank that's important, but how the historical figure in question sees that rank.  If you're playing a newly ascended king, you can't switch to a member of a group who opposes your rule (depending on how strict you wany to be, maybe only those who actively support your rule would be playable) .  You need to put in some investment before you can take command of any random civ member.

Also, even without playing as a noble, this would allow you to switch to any of your long time adventuring partners, or anyone who respects you enough to follow your commands or fight for your cause.

Your idea and mine are quite complimentary.  But if your aim is simply to create chaos, then you hardly care if your character comes to a sticky end as a result, because you were only temporarily assuming their perspective anyway in order to likely get you out of the consequences of your main characters foolish decisions.

Just fixing a type by which engraving was being spelt engraveing.

Ultimately I think the plan is to have the sites themselves fully customizable, so the above concepts won't really exist at a hardcoded level.

With bandits and criminals, some may have just joined up out of fear of being on the receiving end of the banditry, others may have joined up because they were poor and had no other ways of sustaining them selves, others may have been looking to use the easy way to obtain wealth, and some may just enjoy being cruel. But the bandit leaders are the ones holding it together, if you would do this the easiest way with killing the least amount of people and solving the most amount of future problems, just killing the bandit boss would ideally be the solution. But i don't know if DF currently selects any random dude to be a bandit or the people with the right traits, same with the bandit boss and leaders in general.

Killing the leader in itself would likely achieve nothing more than to split the existing bandit gang into several bandit gangs, which would eventually merge together all over again. 

The better solution would be to then become the leader and then basically order the bandit group to either migrate into an underpopulated site as immigrants or set up their own site. 

Then they have multiple reasons to rebel and attempt a revolution. Not everything should be in the player's control.

They are not going to do this all on their own I presume?

I have fixed a basic problem with the grammer of my new dictionary where  [OF_NOUN_SING]  was being used instead of       [OF_NOUN_PLUR], resulting in silly grammer like the the House of Rabbit as oppossed to the House of Rabbits which is now how it will work.  Having fixed all the pressing concerns with the grammer, I can now strip the dictionary down into a vanilla form and release it as a separate mod.

Paint is very complicated.