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General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: March 30, 2016, 06:47:57 pm »
You'd think it would be like that, but once you start putting the blackboxes in things get more complicated.
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47
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: March 30, 2016, 06:29:33 pm »
You need the blackbox model to predict their actions and reactions, though.
48
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: March 30, 2016, 06:25:30 pm »You don't need to understand them completely, you only need to develop a reliable blackbox model of their thought process.Socializing is hard.Nah the socialising is the easy bit. It's trying to understand other people that's hard.
It'll get better.
49
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: March 30, 2016, 06:16:33 pm »What, that's all it took to make you want one? I had to flip through a few wikipedia articles on various massage types (Swedish, Thai, Indian Head, you know, the works) before wanting one.What is it about reading about massages that makes you really want a massage?you son of a bitch
now i want one
50
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: What's going on in your fort?
« on: March 30, 2016, 06:07:46 pm »
Dwarf Fortress: the game where you can lose at deliberately losing.
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General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: March 30, 2016, 06:00:10 pm »
What is it about reading about massages that makes you really want a massage? Also, damn, I need to work on my posture.
52
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you laugh today: 5221 laffs and counting
« on: March 30, 2016, 04:58:20 pm »"Phuket" isn't pronounced the way they think it is.Ironic, considering the thriving sex tourism industry contained within. I mean, every big city in Thailand has a thriving sex tourism industry, but still.
NNnnnnnnngh.
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General Discussion / Re: Things that made you laugh today: 5221 laffs and counting
« on: March 30, 2016, 04:22:05 pm »Dog was begging for my lunch, so I tossed her a scrap of lettuce. She snapped it up, spat it out, and gave me the most disgruntled look I've seen all month.It's not the lettuce she's interested in, FD.Spoiler: She's already forgotten about it, though. (click to show/hide)
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DF Suggestions / Re: Courting rituals
« on: March 30, 2016, 02:50:43 pm »I'd much rather see a tasteful innuendo myself.In adv mode, you would "zoom out", to show that time is going on (as well as certain activities). In fort mode, you would see two smilies alone together, and you might not know (unless you wanted to) whether they were playing cards, eating together, or making babies. (The job description could do something.)I can imagine a job label in Dwarf Therapist of [CENSORED]
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DF Suggestions / Re: Agriculture: A balance of simplicity and complexity
« on: March 30, 2016, 02:49:30 pm »I know it is a common line of thinking, it simply happens not to work intellectually speaking.People who make spelling errors in spite of spellchecking technology don't get to decide what works intellectually.
The rest of what you said is bullshit because settings where people understand magic to a scientific degree are a dime a dozen. For instance, in every official D&D setting there are wizards who understand magic the same way a chemist understands chemistry. Wizards can cast spells not because they are inherently magical in any way, but because they have studied magic so thoroughly that they understand exactly what they need to do to make magic happen on demand. In Eberron, magic is so well understood that it has been industrialized. Whether or not a phenomena in a fictional setting can be explained by the rules of that universe is irrelevant as to whether or not it's magic; that is determined whether or not it can be explained by the natural laws of our own universe and if the author said it was magic or superscience. Actually, I take that back. It relies entirely on whether or not the author says it's magic. A phenomena that is entirely explainable by science in our own universe could be magic in a fictional setting just because the author said so. Furthermore, while magic is by definition not mundane, that does not mean it must be uncommon in a fictional setting. I could write a setting where everyone could turn lead into gold just by wiggling their fingers at it, and how they were able to do this was completely understood. If I said it was magic, then you could argue otherwise until the heat death of the universe and still be wrong.
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General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: March 29, 2016, 08:57:09 pm »
Rice cookers are the best, because you can just throw the meat in as well and eat your vegetables raw and BAM! You've reduced your entire meal to a single cooking dish.
57
DF Suggestions / Re: Agriculture: A balance of simplicity and complexity
« on: March 28, 2016, 12:44:01 pm »The best non-magic explanation is magma. There's an entire magma sea. There are guaranteed passages generated between the cavern layers. Real organisms are known that can subsist off of volcanic vents. Creatures are capable of moving between cavern levels.True, but that severely limits where plants can grow, which not only effects where and how often you're going to find wildlife (animals will only wander so far and so often from their food sources) but also where dwarfs can grow crops. I'd be all for the existence of a select few underground plants that can only grow near magma (and of course can be turned into very high value booze and food), but not for all underground plants needing to be near magma to grow.
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DF Suggestions / Re: Dwarven Treadmills
« on: March 28, 2016, 12:19:12 pm »
They do, but on the other hand nobody bats an eye when it is only the elven residents who are assigned treadmill duty, not even the elves. Funny how that works.
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DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Face Palm moments you had
« on: March 28, 2016, 11:58:06 am »I like to keep my forts open to the caverns with a line of cage traps set to catch critters that wander too close, (I've caught many a crundle with them).And that is why you link the bridge before even breaching the cavern.
For safety measures I have a draw bridge set so I can quickly shut off access incase something trapavoid comes.
Well, suddenly I got an announcement, a forgotten beast had arrived. It was a giant feathered fire-breathing crab! My fort wasn't ready for this, so I quickly set the lever to be pulled with "Do it now!".
The crab was quickly closing in, a clothier just barely made it back across the bridge as a miner flicks the switch. We should be safe now, the beast was too far away.
But then... Wait. Why isn't anything happening? The bridge isn't moving! Why didn't it work?! And then I realized.... I forgot to connect the bridge with the lever.
That night the giant crab feasted on roast dwarf... *shakes head in shame*
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DF Suggestions / Re: Agriculture: A balance of simplicity and complexity
« on: March 28, 2016, 11:55:59 am »Magic is not an intellectually valid explanation for the basis of anything in the everyday natural world Waparius, even in fantasy. If the cavern ecosystem is based upon magic, then said magic is now the foundational basis for the 'natural' world and hence is not magic anymore but simply a regular energy source like the sun; so saying that the cavern ecosystem is based 'on magic' is saying nothing at all. In order to qualify as magic something supernatural has to be involved, that is something that is in violation of the laws of nature; if something about caverns causing them to generate energy then that is a law of nature not magic.
*AHEM*
Quote
Plants of one kind or another are the beginning of any food chain. By organizing inorganic materials and capturing the energy of sunlight, plants create food that all kinds of animals depend on. Since plants in the Underdark do not have access to sunlight, they must make foods by other means. Thus, most take very different forms than the green plants of the surface world.-Excerpt from Dungeons&Dragons Forgotten Realms Campaign Accessory: Underdark, pg 108
Most of the Underdark's plant life consists of a tremendous variety of fungi. Fungus normally requires some amount of detritus or decaying material to thrive. So where does the fungus find its food? The answer is simple: magic. The natural magical radiation of the Underdark and its various planar connections support many weird fungal growths, as well as lichens, mosses, and other simple plants, whose existence would otherwise be impossible. In effect, faerzress is the sunlight of the Underdark, forming the basis of the subterranean food chain. Underdark regions particularly rich in faerzress or planar energies have been known to support fantastic forests of pale, gnarled trees or crystalline plants. These growths are completely adapted to their lightless, hostile environment.
Surprisingly, however, green plants are not entirely absent from the Underdark. Some caverns illuminated by particularly bright radiant crystals can actually support green plants. Caves with this sort of dazzling illumination might be filled with grass; moss, ferns, creepers, or even small trees. Any such place is a treasure beyond price in the Underdark, and it is certain to be guarded by deadly spells, monstrous guardians, or both.
As you can see, it is no tradition for the ecosystems of caverns to be based on mundane means. The funny thing about fantasy universes is that magic itself is not separate from the laws of the universe but is in fact a subset of those laws. If someone proposes magic for the solution to a world-building problem in a fantasy setting, then you should be questioning the characteristics of the magic, what it specifically does and where it comes from before evaluating whether or not it is a good solution, not dismissing it out of hand. If you think "the caverns generate a magical energy source that is the basis of subterranean ecosystems" is not an "intellectually valid explanation" in a world where dragons can magically spew fire hotter than magma, giant bronze colossi (which Toady himself has described in the raws as "gigantic magic statues made of bronze") can magically move under their own power and ghosts magically rise up to haunt you if you don't give them a proper burial or memorial, then the nicest thing you can be called is a pseudo-intellectual.
What about thinking of the caverns as old fossil deposits (ala oil deposits in earth's crust). In DF, they've become so old that the fossil carbon has been eaten up by fungi etc. leaving behind cavities filled with a living, carbon-based ecosystem of fungi, cave spiders, crocs, etc.You still need energy to break down the hydrocarbons, and after playing several volcano embarks I can assure you that fossil fuels and magma are never found anywhere near each other in DF (and I very much suspect that this holds true in reality as well). You'd need to have a magic source of energy to justify a fossil fuel based ecosystem, so you might as well have the entire thing be magic.