Bay 12 Games Forum

I'd rather have more realism than dwarven wizards, which sounds pretty farfetched to me, as dwarves (I thought) were to fear magic or be suspicious of it, more than any other race, for it's association with elves...

Woah, hold on a second.  It depends where your referencing.  Most pre-tolkien lore has dwarves being magical creatures.  Even The Hobbit includes the ancient myth that all non-human creatures will turn invisible when humans come along.  Funny that this ability never comes into play, I believe Tolkien even mentions the origins of the human sport of golf.  The Hobbit was admittedly more like the works of C.S. Lewis than Tolkien's epics.

That depends largely on the wound, I believe metal shrapnel is not always 100% completely removed, and in the media the grandfather always has seems to have shrapnel wounds.  But yeah, children regenerate tissue at a faster rate than an elderly person, so they would heal faster and more completely.

Could you elaborate on your encounter that brought you to this assumption?

I honnestly never have had any of my dwarves combat a dragon.  Like I said all megabeasts have been killed with one or two stone traps.  Since the most recent encounter I have refused to use stone-fall traps, weapon traps, or cage traps for defense.  (I use cage traps sparsely to catch some mobs to play with)

Sorry, but for the sake of immersion and diversity I say let's allow dwarves to be dwarves, elves to be elves, and so on. Later on you'll probably have the option of playing as elves, humans or maybe even goblins in fortress mode anyhow. As it is, let's just allow dwarves to be dwarves - no skirts, lots of beard, etc. etc. etc.

Dwarves already make no distinction between male/female clothes, are by nature nudists, and all dwarves hold an immensely potent phobia

This topic has really changed from OP and really isn't about just recreational drugs.  At the same time, it now fits under alchemy or medical, and does't exactly need to be mentioned onn the eternal suggestions page.

If you can predict magic is going to fail in some random fashion the majority of the time, then it is still unpredictable for out intents and purposes.  I am with Maggarg. 

To add to the frustrastion (and the wonder) of magic, the A.I. should be the only party triggering the magic.  For example you might have a completely useless dwarf who doesn't do jack, and then all of a sudden he gets ambushed by a party of elves, he enters a martial stance, and unleashes lightning on all the elves (and consequntly lights the surrounding trees on fire).  You can't try and extract any use from the dwarf, but he will randomly save your fort every once in a while (or condem it).

I still heartily disagree with the idea of some semi-immortal dwarf wizard who turns out to be your most useful dwarf by a long shot.  Having a dwarf that will magically conjure food, defeat gobo seiges, trigger moods, dispel flood-water, and still be your best crafts-dwarf wouldn't be very fun.  The idea of the wizard being able to sense and control some invisible magic force that others are blind to raises the wizard to a level above other dwarves.

I don't get why we have so much focus on the wizards themselves, the mana/magic/energy/whatever should come from ancient and mysterious artifacts/runes/anything not a dwarf, with long running histories.  A wizard would be an average run of the mill dwarf who experiments with these artifacts/runes and consequently has an extremely high chance of dying a premature death compared to your nobles/woodcutters/Soapmaking recruits.

Wizards could be some kind of statesmen noble or whatever, but I disagree with giving a dwarf the ability to summon the magical energy through his body, or even having him migrate in.  The wizard should be 100% mortal in my opinion, and the only thing seperating him from his fellow dwarves is his experience in dealing with magic, not some super-natural abilities, such as being master of the elements.  They had better have better intellectual stats though, otherwise they won't last long.

Huh, were we to build boats it would make more sense to use cranes to move the boat..... actually cranes in general sound pretty cool.  A dockside crane that works in conjunction with the trading depo would be pretty beast.  A single crane operator could do the work of several hundred dwarf hauling trips