Bay 12 Games Forum

Magma by default has no pressure. Put it through a pump, and it has it in spades.

Or really, the assassins should be after an enemy. Oftentimes in Legends, you read about So-and-so become an enemy of such-and-such. Noble enemies are a big asset, and should be their target.

I had a few ideas, but I never got around to them.

1). Tobacco. Tobacco (Human smoking weed) is a rare aboveground plant. It is not edible, cookable, or brewable. Of course, one could wager the Dwarves smoke it, but there's no way to get them to carry pipes with tobacco pouches. So, tobacco can be processed into bags as a). trade good, b). "edible" chaw (Nicotine is an appetite suppressant; it can therefore be reasoned that it's replacing a meal. Lucky for us we won't have spit covered dwarves.) [Prestring:fragrant aroma]
2). Marijuana can be cooked or brewed into "green tea". This'd give the dwarves some happy thoughts. [Prefstring:makes food taste better].

Sadly, there's no [addictive] quality to a chemical, else I'd throw in opium. Have your fort go down in a tantrum spiral because you ran out of
heroin tonics! Or all your cocaine powder bags were snorted up by a champion. Man, the Fun that we could have...

Anyhow, just a thought to proceed with. Queue drug jokes... now.

*shudders, just shudders*

Third'd.

I'm glad Belteshazzar got the joke I was running with.

The issue at hand is that most games demand a think-tank to garner technologies, as opposed to a stroke of genius. What you propose is the same as most games that deal with technology: You tell them what you want researched, there's a definable tree so you can metagame the tree and figure out which discoveries yield different discoveries. Sort of like telling your scientists in Civilization to think until they get you gunpowder, and it's only 4000 BC. You know what they want, and there's a specific plot they have to take. Even with a tree, this makes researching rather linear, which doesn't fit in with Dwarf Fortress: This game is absurdly not linear.

In reality, most of the modern inventions that we use today weren't the product of think tanks or research labs that have a definitive goal; these are modern concepts. The President didn't ask Henry Ford to research Assembly Line Production so we can get Automobile; rather, he took an innovative approach to the industry. Investors didn't tell the original computer companies to research integrated chips and microprocessors; rather, someone had the idea and proposed it to the investors. Da Vinci was part of a think tank. Neither were the Greeks who built the Antikythera Mechanism.

There's a BBC production that describes how technologies came around. I wish I could tell you its name, because it is invaluable in this sort of discussion. A few major ones: The pocket watch, pendulum clock, water clock, and mechanical clocks all rely on the same physical properties. It took one person to realize that the energy released of a suspended spinning stone can also be expressed as a pendulum; that it can also be stored in a spring made it even more portable. The smelting of certain metals became even more prominent when a man realized that the clay vessels used in glass making heat up (by glowing white hot and reflecting thermal radiation back into the center) to far greater temperatures than thought possible. The movable type printing press was simply a realization that the Greek olive press can be useful for more than olives.

But that not being the point, the main disagreement here is that suggesting a think-tank like structure to propel the technology of your Dwarves doesn't fit the scheme of the game. We're looking at a pre-Renaissance, no scientific method using culture. Asking them to research something is about as futile as asking a dwarf to take from the nearest stone stockpile (rather than the more preferable Dwarvenly way, walking across the map and getting mauled by a Sasquatch.)

... or, what Meph said.