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DF General Discussion / Impressions from a beginning player
« on: December 26, 2020, 04:27:21 pm »
Hi everybody, hope the impressions of a beginner player are not too out of topic.
There are a couple facets of Dwarf Fortress that consistently spoil my identitification with the game.
First, there is the problem of female dwarves. In the Lord of the ring and in almost all fantasy literature, art and comics I have read dwarves are almost exclusively male. Dwarv-esses nearly are mytical beings, almost as rare to be seen in the light of the day as dragons and chimeras. In the game, not only the genres are equally represented, but there is no functional distinction amongst them! It is pretty ludicrous to imagine Gimli with breasts. I would rather imagine female dwarves to be confined in the most impenetrable recesses of the fortress, to be singly married to dwarf aristocrats or otherwise impregnated according to some caste order of priority. The pregnancy should be extremely long (9 years instead of 9 months?) and the children ought to be cherished and treasured above all richesses of the earth.
The second problem is the automatic way migrants arriving to a new fortress are accepted. Granted, the players’ fortresses mostly are of recent foundation and so they tend to welcome immigration, but the impossibility to discriminate among the arrivals clashes against the tradition of exclusivity and seclusiveness that should distinguish dwarf culture. After a fortress reaches a certain point of development, there should be a way to turn away undesidered migrants, and even to broadcast to the outside world requests for certain specializations.
The game is great, but frankly, a military half-composed of women and fortresses swarming with irksome dwarf children spoil the mood somehow.
There are a couple facets of Dwarf Fortress that consistently spoil my identitification with the game.
First, there is the problem of female dwarves. In the Lord of the ring and in almost all fantasy literature, art and comics I have read dwarves are almost exclusively male. Dwarv-esses nearly are mytical beings, almost as rare to be seen in the light of the day as dragons and chimeras. In the game, not only the genres are equally represented, but there is no functional distinction amongst them! It is pretty ludicrous to imagine Gimli with breasts. I would rather imagine female dwarves to be confined in the most impenetrable recesses of the fortress, to be singly married to dwarf aristocrats or otherwise impregnated according to some caste order of priority. The pregnancy should be extremely long (9 years instead of 9 months?) and the children ought to be cherished and treasured above all richesses of the earth.
The second problem is the automatic way migrants arriving to a new fortress are accepted. Granted, the players’ fortresses mostly are of recent foundation and so they tend to welcome immigration, but the impossibility to discriminate among the arrivals clashes against the tradition of exclusivity and seclusiveness that should distinguish dwarf culture. After a fortress reaches a certain point of development, there should be a way to turn away undesidered migrants, and even to broadcast to the outside world requests for certain specializations.
The game is great, but frankly, a military half-composed of women and fortresses swarming with irksome dwarf children spoil the mood somehow.
