And to nullify Every single argument made after this: May I point out that people want realistic mining which produces 7 units of gravel per tile dug through, creating a massive time wasting CPU eating haul fest for the sake of REALISM...
If people are willing to grind the game to a halt for realism, then to be realistic, many raw materials MUST be destroyed in seemingly random crafting failures for low level crafters... Just as they are in real life... (except with metal)
Sorry just despise that suggestion too much... anyhow... there are already many tedious things in dwarf fortress...
So.. Basically... If I cant have my "BREAK STONES" designation because it it's not realistic for annoying mass piles of stones to be crushed to powder and disappear from the game...
Then demands are being made to implement a grueling, waste of time, tedious, mine one stone, haul gravel away, mine next stone, to make mining "Realistic"....
Then we have a CPU killing, massive game rewrite, that is supported by so many people.... What is this idea? That the atmosphere should be simulated so Forges underground need a chimney(Rather than just having it automatically build a little pipe to the surface and call it good)...
why is it that everyone is so hostile to a single freaking botched stone job making a single piece of stone unusable...
*Still cannot wrap my head around this logically.... Honestly I really don't care about materials being destroyed, but why is there such a hardcore realism camp until it comes to this? It's like a messed up cult or something...
(Goes to happy place to clear his head of all this)
Do all additions to the game have to make the easier and less chalenging than it already is?
That is not at all what I was saying. I was saying that that additions to the game should make it more enjoyable. They shouldn't make it more frustrating or tedious. You can't do much about a random chance of failure at all. That which you can do normally involves micromanagement, which is tedious.
Edit: Just going five pages into the "Dwarves Can Fail" thread, you can find several arguments against failure. Some have been mentioned here, some haven't. Here are some of them:
This is good idea, but there is problem - it could make building fortress a nightmare.
Yeah, exactly...I don't know about you, but I would like to spend less time with messing around with the fortress itself when the Army Arc will be functional. If something like this will get implemented, we will spend more time with building stuff in the fortress. So, I am against this suggestion...however if we would be able to turn off the feature...well I don't care about it in that case. 
Failure leading to material waste means more micromanagement, period. Right now it's possible to be okay with having a dabbling mason and a legendary one both working at the same buildings on the same tasks, if you're not worried about value of the output. But if you can lose material, then suddenly planning ahead becomes much harder. You have to make sure only certain dwarves use your more precious materials. If you know you need seven beds, you might need more wood than seven logs. How much more? Who knows? Better keep checking.
And let's say you have two pieces of wood, and you say "Make a bed. Make a bucket." Your carpenter fails to make a bed and ruins the wood. Either he automatically tries to make a bed again, thus rendering you bucketless (so you have to assign tasks in order of importance)...or he gives up on the bed, rendering you mysteriously bedless and not quite sure why. Oh, sure, it can generate a message on failure like it does on masterpieces, but that sounds like it'd get annoying fast.
[ . . . ]
You have to be able to plan ahead at least a little bit, and things like this seem like they'd take a lot away from that, making the game more micromanagey, which we really don't need. "Hey I have ten orthoclase so I can make a yellow wall ten squares long" is fun. "Hmm, I'd better use my best masons just in case they fail and ruin a piece of stone, or only make a wall eight squares long" is NOT fun. Failure isn't the same as losing.
I'm all in favor of lower-quality items that suck, but are still functional (even if giving an unhappy thought). Those aren't game breaking. Things like walls though, they should never fail.
Making the raw material tracking system more complicated would make keeping track of your raw materials more complicated.
I suggest that no matter how unskilled he is, no carpenter needs more than a single unit of wood logs to make an item. The final product can be as horrible as Toady wants to make it, but then at least, us wood importers will know the minimum number of beds we'll get out of a given shipment.
How bad can an inferior bed be, before it's worse than sleeping on the floor? I'm fairly sure I slept on one of those once, but even a total rookie shouldn't turn those out 100% of the time. These are dwarves, and they care about quality.
When it takes longer to walk down the street and pick up a rock than it does to create a museum quality carved rock, there's a problem
THIS
Seriously. All the failing is pointless. I kinda tried to point this out earlier on this thread, but when I saw there was no discussion, I decided that "okay everybody knows" and there is no need for further appointment.
FAIL exists in DF, you folk are just looking too hard. I know some of the following have been mentioned, but...
<LIST>
Sumary: in my eyes, there is a simple test to find out if a "possible failure" is a good idea - don't look at it from the failure half, look at it as "percentages of win".
see if as long as every FAIL can contain at least some percentage of WIN (except for the combat-type examples, because you can fall back on armor/shield/dodge skill for your attempt at WIN), then I am ok with it. If it is a goddamed WIN/FAIL dichotomy, then your dumbass peasants and soapmakers are well and truly screwed and I do not at all endorse the idea.
That's what quality levels are about right now, and expanding that would be cool. If a bad barrel could hold food but not booze? and maybe not keep out bugs as well? Ok. that's cool. If making a barrel badly means you get NOTHING, and lose the resource they started with? then your dwarf is undwarvenly and is secretly a kobold, because a metal barrel fail should give you a lump of metal to try again with. and with a entire tree to work with, there should be something left for your troubles.
I don't want to 70% of a beginning dwarfs work turn into total failure and waste, particularly if he's quite graceful and co-ordinated.
I'm not a great potter, and nothing I've made from clay could be considered fine or even salable, but I've never actually failed to create a vessel. Granted, clay is somewhat more forgiving than stone, but unless you're trying to craft delicate stoneware teacups, instead of tumblers and mugs, you'll probably end up with something that can hold liquids.
How could anyone who knows which end of a knife cuts, and is familiar with his own limitations, fail to make a cup from a single, short log? Just scoop the end out until you get 3/4 of the way down and you've got a drinking cup fit for a dwarf, even if you do occasionally get little wood bits floating off into your drink. If you've got the chops, you can make something a bit less unwieldy, or just smooth the thing up, but it's a perfectly good first try.
A poor bed should be as bad as sleeping on the floor, but not as bad as sleeping on the ground.
Have you ever watched Frontier House? It was a little reality show about three families who live for a couple of months as Montana homesteaders in the 1880s. It's pretty good. You can get it on Netflix.
I mention it because in that show the modern families had to learn all sorts of skills that were vital to surviving on the frontier, such as milking a cow, shaping wood in various ways, and cooking on a wood-burning stove. And the show didn't just toss the families into log cabins and expect them to learn those tasks by trial and error. There was a class before the show started, where various experts taught the families how to do those tasks.
My point is that knowledge and skill are very different. I as understand it, the implication of failing at a skill is that a dwarf who knows literally nothing about stone carving sits down with some stone and tools, and tries to figure it out by trial and error. And then he makes a total mess. It's projection: If we were dwarves at those workshops, then we would have to figure it out by trial and error. And we would make lots of messes.
But that's not how things really work. Most skills are far too difficult for anybody to learn by trial and error. First you have to gain the knowledge of how to do it correctly, and then you accumulate the skill to do it well. And the knowledge is easy to come by for tasks that are commonplace in your world.
For example, I assume that we all know how to type. If you bring a dwarf from the world of DF into our world, and you want him to learn to type, then you don't just lock him in a room with a computer and leave him there until he figures it out. Instead, you teach him how to type. You show him how to hold his fingers correctly, and how to reach off the home row correctly. Unless you've recently taught someone to type, then you probably don't think much about how people learn to type. It's such a ubiquitous skill in our world that the education phase seems like a non-event.
