New thought having to do with this. When toady adds more teaching and reading stuff in (I think he will because of the new skills in adventurer) how would dyslexia work then? Because I don't know what alphabet the dwarven language uses, but it might actually end up changing entire words instead of just letters. Being dyslexic I know that that is actually worse, because if it is just a wrong letter usually you can catch it, thinking its misspelled, but if it was a whole word you simply use it in context. So this would mean in adventurer mode, if you have dyslexia you might actually be even worse at reading books and such so that you get incorrect information out of them, which could lead to lots of 'Fun'.
What do you guys think?
Neat. Don't let a dyslexic adventurer read a magical tome.
Bearing in mind the progress of civilization in DF, they probably wouldn't be using up-to-date terms like "dyslexia" -- in this era, reading was a rare skill to have anyway and usually only held by societal elites and such, so I don't really see the point in implementing something like this, unless there will be the creation of the dwarven printing press to make universal literacy thinkable. I'm thinking that there wouldn't be "autism" or "ADHD," but that more generic words would be in use, such as "idiot" or "addled." Chaining up people with disabilities in the attic was more typical of families in the past, inhumane as this is. As for natal development: if we are going to get that in depth, than infant and maternal mortality would need to be implemented as well -- the near perfect record of births in this game is somewhat unreal. Miscarriages are already possible due to lack of food I think, so I'm thinking any stress would simply induce another miscarriage, rather than alter dwarven development -- who knows what kinds of hormones dwarves have?
All that being said, dwarfism did occur in ages past -- what would a dwarven dwarf look like?
First off, dwarves don't know what atoms are, yet they use atomsmashers. That's a poor example, but it's entirely possible for us to give some dwarves Asberger's Syndrome or ADHD without them understanding them.
Why do you assume the biochemistry of dwarves is so different from that of humans?
Given the above point, why would dwarves have dwarfism? Dropping that...very short limbs, a bit bigger than a kobold overall.
Another thing that this would require (and I don't know if anyone brought this up) would be head injury's that dwarves survive should lead to the possibility of disorders or changes in personality if bad enough. Though that begs the question of how often a dwarf survives a head wound bad enough to cause such problems, as well as needing to map out the brain of each dwarf, unless you want to give the dice gods power over something.
Still I am not a coder and don't know exactly how you would do that either, but this too seems like another thing that should happen.
This makes sense.
Presumably, dwarves would survive head wounds the same way humans do: Sometimes.
