Bay 12 Games Forum

If a criminal had such high moral values then they wouldn't have joined the gang to begin with .. and if they are actively participating members then if they are easily persuaded out of their criminal ways by only a bit of conversation then they are equally easily persuaded back into it again...

Likewise, if a civilization are willing to go to war with another civilization over differing values then their conviction that those values are worth killing and dying for isn't something a complete stranger can argue them out off.

Actually no.  Most bandits historically were really just orphaned soldiers forced to steal from the local population to survive.  They tended to really overlap with mercenaries, so a peaceful solution to banditry would often just be to find somebody willing to hire them.  Of course given it is dwarf fortress, the solution is rather simple, just find a suitably depopulated site and convince the local government to accept the whole bandit group as immigrants. 

In order to allow us to play as existing historical characters, we need to consider the potential for abuse by the player in which having brought himself to ruin in one game, he can just retire and take over the historical character that leads the force threatening them and deliberately lead them to ruin before returning to his original perspective. 

I propose as a solution a system by which all positions in the civilization are given a particular score according to their relative importance, written along the lines of 10/100/1000/10000.  If the player rises to that position, then their score is increased to that level provided it is lower than the player's existing score.  The score however is per site government or per civilization and allows you to assume the role of any historical character whose position is scored equal to or less than the players score WITH the relevant entity.

The score is refunded if the player retires the character alive, or the character dies in a manner unavoidable to the player like old age.  If the player's character manages to get killed in a violent manner then the player loses the equivilant score as that character is worth.  So a king is worth 10000 and the player's score with that civilization is 20000 and the player has the king throw himself off a cliff then the player can play as the next king of their civilization, since he would then have 10000 points.  If he kills off that king however then he is back to the bottom of the heap, playing as an adventurer along the lines we have at present.

Fortress mode converts into adventure mode terms because the highest ranking position in your fortress turns into a score with your own site government/civilization government once you retire.  That would mean that if you played all the way until you were the capital, the highest position would be able to play as the mayor *of* your site or you could play as the king of your civilization.  Equally you could play as any of the nobles in your civilization but not the mayors of any other site.

No, GoblinCookie. It's over. It's perfectly understandable that you would want to salvage some dignity, but we're done here. You are intellectually disarmed, and ethically without a leg to stand on. And what's more, everyone knows it. It's time for you to accept it, and move on. This forum is not for debating the niceties of governmental overthrow, or for teaching the fundamentals of logical argument, or for exploring what "racism" means in a fantasy setting, or for discussing human rights. I was willing to humor you for a while, true--but the forum's patience, along with my own, has officially worn thin. That's why my last post was so punishing, and this one is so dismissive. Because not even I am listening to you any more.

Agreed, this thread has long since ground to a halt, so let's end this.  My last word I guess is that once again you are developing delusions that you represent more than just yourself.

How would it harm the players in any way? DF has plenty of room for features. A lot of people play DF in an extremely destructive way already, and Toady accepts it.

Yes, but they play destructively *within* the limitations of their own power.  In effect what you propose is more akin to giving people cheat-codes to cause mayhem, that allowing them simply to cause mayhem.  If I can simply change character strategically, then it is no longer about playing a series of characters and more about being an invincible demonic spirit that cannot be exorcised or warded against. 

To sort-of return to topic, if it takes a long time to rise to power and a lot of effort, then we lose something if we for instance decide to start a suicidal war.  If we can simply possess an already powerful person, then nothing is lost if we lead them to ruin because we just jump to the next powerful person.  In effect you get given the political power to create mayhem and we can lose it, so we have an incentive not to create mayhem just because we feel bored. 

Plus there is the hybrid situation where if I lose I can possess characters in order to bring them to ruin, so as to allow me to escape from the consequences of my diplomatic mistakes in the actual game.  That makes your proposal also basically akin to adding reloading into the game; I win I win, if I lose I possess the hostile leader and have my enemies self-destruct.

For those who want to rampage unhindered. Those who want loyalty values could just select an option.

Maybe players should not always be given what they think they want, for their own good?

But won't my scenario qualify for a plot? If all else fails, Toady could make the possession of historical figs optional.

It is a plot based upon a mechanic that exists outside of the plot.  Making it part of the story makes a plot in the same way that a massacre is a battle, unless we give the locals some means to resist the player, along the lines IndigoFenix proposed.

I’ve never seen someone argue that all governments exist only by the constant threat of massacring their citizens. Sounds like it would make elections awkward since the old governments right to rule is being revoked in favour of the new government whoops they’re now mandated to kill everyone.

It's not so much a threat as a promise or a contract; nobody get's massacred in return for nobody getting overthrown, the 'threat' is mutual as it were, it is the development of a mutually undesirable state.  The citizens are generally threatened with various bad stuff, being massacred by the government but one of them, but the government is also threatened with being overthrown either by the citizens or by rival foreign governments.  It does not matter at all here whether the government is elected by the citizens or not, since rival governments exist and also there are citizens who would disrespect the election results.  If the government is bound by it's own principles to grant everyone certain rights, then whatever rights are granted 'on the basis of being human' creates a debt which the government is then bound to pay. 

Since you are owed them, you do not have to offer the government anything in order to demand the government give it to you, which means the government essentially does not have any basis to demand the citizens uphold it's authority; since any other government is also bound to give them the same rights, on the basis of being human.  So the government falls and the cycle continues until a government comes to power that violates enough rights to destroy the presumption of the citizenry.  Once the citizenry comes to believe that they have no inherent rights, it becomes possible for a stable and enduring government to emerge. 

Anything I owe you I cannot offer to you.  Granted the government can grant minimal rights like the right to live as human rights and withhold the 'right to live a life worth living' to those that respect it's authority.

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 26, 2018, 08:47:05 am

We have actually been talking about dwarven social lives all along.

Haha, what?

It really goes like this.  Dwarven Social Gatherings > Effect of oxygen on dwarven society > Need of humans for sunlight > Societal Effect of Goblins needing to be cruel.  So at no point did we ever stop talking about society.

So what? It's a public forum, I'm allowed to have opinions, especially when it's considering an idea (cruelty-dependent goblins) that I came up with.

In a thread that has already over-centralised onto ourselves, directing more discussion towards the black-hole of Six-Of-SpadesVSGoblinCookie is hardly a good idea. 

I'm going to be direct here, and just flat-out ask you if you have ANY intention at all of ever supporting this thesis in any way, besides simply stating it over and over. And over. And over and over and over and over. I keep coming up with alternate possibilities, modifiers, workarounds, completely plausible snapshots of a working goblin society, and you just keep sticking your fingers in your ears & saying "Nuh-uh, can't happen, 'cause I said so." Repetition and persistence are remarkably poor substitutes for a competent line of argument.

I have already supported the thesis with a wall of text, perhaps you could reread it?   

Again with the gross and unfounded assumptions about how the entire goblin population must behave in a certain way, and that they could never behave in any other way.

They are not gross and unfounded assumptions, they are the logical consequences of the cruelty-quota.  If all folks have to inflict a given amount of cruelty every month, this is a very big change and we cannot just assume things will go on as they would otherwise.

So, you're saying that goblins cannot be very cruel to one another . . .

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 24, 2018, 06:42:25 am

Everbody knows there *has* to be a whipping boy

Except, of course, when they can? I guess?

No, I am saying goblins cannot be required to inflict actual suffering on other beings to meet a quota, or rather that this being so has consequences you are stubbornly refusing to accept.  Goblins can certainly be cruel in an ordinary sense, that is a different ballpark because that can be constrained by social context and societal regulations.  A cruelty quota cannot really be constrained, it can only be sated at the expense of some outside group. 

While your deep and abiding concern for thread derails is duly noted, for our purposes it doesn't matter if animals suffer pain or not--what matters is that goblins think they do, making animals valid targets for cruelty.

We are talking about a situation where the suffering has to be real.  If imaginary suffering works, then we can simply have our goblins pretend to hurt dummies can't we?   

False. The situation of isolation first came up only in terms of civ-level interactions with other civs . . . or lack thereof, necessitating some form of internal conflict within the goblin civ itself. The discussion didn't even mention animals in any context, as you should know because you took part in it:

Quote from: SixOfSpades on July 06, 2018, 03:43:10 pm

Quote from: GoblinCookie on July 05, 2018, 08:50:48 am

. . . is genocide against goblins acceptable because if goblins are allowed to survive they will necessarily have to hurt other beings in order to survive and stay sane?

Other beings, yes, but not necessarily other races. An isolated goblin civ could happily keep itself occupied with gang wars and other forms of infighting. Even if it wasn't isolated, this civ could still keep its cruelty directed inwards if it was consciously trying to restrain its evil tendencies, or (more likely) to avoid pissing off a far more powerful neighbor.

  .  Restraining your evil tendancies makes no sense at all in the situation you are referring too, the goblins must hurt other beings, it has nothing to do with their personal evilness. 

Pardon my bluntness, but are you speaking from experience, or from out of your ass?

I prefer to call it common sense rather than speaking out of my ass.  If a person insults you unexpectedly then that will hurt you more than if a person tells you "hey I am going to insult you are 3.30 pm tommorow".  But if it was being roasted over a fire, then I doubt that foreknowledge would really make much difference; although it is difficult to test for ethical reasons.  Cruelty-quota goblin society tends towards a situation where everyone knows that everyone is going to have to hurt someone today, undermining the whole premise. 

Do not make the fundamental assumption that the tigerman has spent 20 credits in night school taking courses in Understanding Racial Differences 101 and Avoiding Hate Speech.

I was not talking to fictional tigermen, I was talking to you.  Things don't work that way objectively, what the tigerman subjectively believes is not what we are discussing. 

Yeah, because that doesn't go directly against literally every single depiction of goblins and orcs ever made.

Obviously, you made a major innovation to DF goblins and that innovation has consequences.  In all the other depictions goblins and orcs are cruel because that is what they are like, not because they have some quota for cruelty to meet for the month. 

Wait, what? "The tigermen will not realize the conflict"? "Lower risk of exposure"? I can't quite work out what you think you're saying here, but you seem to be suggesting that Goblin Bob is frequently being cruel to his tigermen "friends" . . . and somehow they don't know it's him?

Exposure here is the exposure that Goblin Bob is operating according to a cruelty-quota.  Also the more tigermen friends he has, the less often he has to mean to any of them, which means they are more likely to forgive him, provided he is lovely the rest of the time.

And the third obvious possibility, which I am sure has occurred you but which you have omitted for most mysterious reasons, is that they are too stubborn to recognize the viability of any possibility but the one which they have already decided must be true--especially when this new possibility is suggested by someone they dislike.

No, I am ommited it because they are the same thing!  You are no less an intellectual authoritarian if you declare *yourself* to be the authority and refuse to take notice of what anyone says because they are beneath you. 

In any case there is also a big problem in the world with "can't know, so I'm right".  This is where you start from a negative premise and then attack someone who positively knows something, relying upon the fact that they cannot be 100% sure in order to triumphantly declare "you don't actually *know* that", which allows you to then assert that actually the other side's position is really nonsense and actually you are right to dismiss.  When I said it was a big problem in the world, I meant it because that is basically how a global warming denier operates, they have no evidence or reasoning but instead pick holes in the position of the only people in a position to actually know (the climate scientists), to great effect in popular opinion unfortunately. 

If you really feel that your tortuous grasp of semantics is sufficient reason to disregard basic moral compassion . . . Well then, you are lost!

Human rights is not basic moral compassion, though a great deal of propaganda has gone into convincing you that.  Hear how often we have some bloody tyranny and we say it's got "bad human rights" instead of just saying they are bloody tyranny.  It is just a creed and one that is fundamentally flawed because none of it's proponents are ever willing to address the fundamental flaw in it, the conflation of law and morality, the "is so" and the "should be so".  Someone has in fact written a whole book on this problem. 

Human rights as a established thing basically go back to the French Revolution's, Rights of Man.  The consequence of their adoption was a huge self-destructive war which the French revolutionaries started because human rights de-legitimized all other sovereignties not based upon them, hence they were basically required to liberate the world by force.  The human rights concept tries to have it's cake and eat it, if it were to declare itself morality then it can be universal but it has no need for the whole paraphernalia of law that it aspires to have while if it were to declare itself law then it can no longer be considered universal.

Declaring a universal moral concept to be a law is practically tantamount to declaring yourself the Emperor of the Universe, which is why I am against the concept of human rights, it is not that I lack "moral compassion" but because I know what the logical consequences of such ideas are and have been in the past.

I already stated that "it's morally wrong to seek to forcibly impose one's own values upon another culture," four pages back, I'll thank you not to take this discussion back to where it was a week ago. Circular reasoning is bad enough, without an actual time loop.

I was saying your position is inconsistent.  In saying that other cultures have the legal right to violate human rights, you are in effect either denying their universality, or you denying that they are in fact law. 

I'm too bored to bother with knocking down the rest of your claims. GoblinCookie, this post of yours was largely a train wreck, jumping from one disjointed argument or incongruous digression to the next, with only repetition to hold it into some form of coherence. I'll just be happy that you will almost certainly never be in a position to impose your own ideas of morality, punishment, and evil upon others.

I am afraid you are out of luck; human rights are not only a dangerous concept, but they are also entirely a hypocritical dead-letter.  That means that figuratively speaking not only do I presently rule, but I have always ruled.  The reason why they are a dead-letter is that no government can actually adhere to them, all governments committed to such ideas are in fact lying and the reason for that is the factual basis of stable government is the very lack of any inherent legal rights pertaining to yourself simply by right of your humanity. 

It is like a pair of scales.  The government has no inherent right to rule and the citizen has no inherent right not be massacred.  Based upon this primeval balance a stable government can exist, the citizens agree to give the government the right to rule over them and the government grants the citizens the right not to be massacred.  All is well provided that everyone keeps their side of the bargain and the fact that both sides value their rights keeps them from violating the agreement, as with the termination of the agreement both sides would lose their respective rights.  Enter a hypothetical government that actually believes in human rights, now it has nothing to offer anyone since it is in effect inherently indebted to it's citizens to protect their rights to life.  Now there is no reason for the citizens to respect their right to rule, since regardless of how they behave they are still owed the right to live on account of being human.