Bay 12 Games Forum

I'd rather see golems as a necromancer's dedicated building destroyers
We could pretend they are masterwork statues with a part of The Secrets of Life and Death inscribed on their heads

Instead of spawning an amnesiac out of nowhere with no discernable backstory, have players assume control of a pre-existing character.

The pro: Your character will have an entire life's worth of history, a family, hometown, lovers, grudges and ties to a village and civilization.
The con: Might require indexing or databasing of all (or most of the) characters in the world and will likely be extremely CPU/RAM intensive.

Character creation would become a character selection. I'm not sure how the site-finder code works, but maybe it could be adapted into a character-finder without too much troubles.
We would for instance be able to search for a skilled dwarven mason. Afterwards we could specify more and more until we find that one character that's perfect for our playthrough.

Right now this wouldn't add much to adventure mode, as we can already create any character we want and backstory isn't important yet. But i believe that once exposition and the characters themselves are fleshed out some more, assuming control of a character instead of spawning amnesiacs will be a great addition to DF.

And the foundation is already laid: In the arena we are already able to take control of any creature.

Grapes and apples (like most fruits) contain plenty of sugar for fermentation. But if you're talking about beer, then yes. The yeasts for brewing beer get their sugar from hydrolysis of the starch in malted barley.
I'm willing to look past that because it would make the production beers too complicated to work properly.

But maybe there needs to be differentiated between a brewery and a distillery.
A brewery being where beers, wines and ciders are made, and a distillery where brewery products are concentrated into brandy, jenever, rum, vodka, etc.
Note that "concentrated" means something like "3 go in, 1 comes out".

Also, according to wikipedia: "The earliest evidence of the distillation of alcohol comes from the School of Salerno in southern Italy in the 12th century".
So hurrah for <1400s.

It's generally a bad idea to give more power to the Random Number God.
Dwarf Fort should stick with actual genetics.

I'd prefer to see
-"magic" as something only deities can preform and the mortals can only ask the deities for favors
 -Deities only being able to influence things in their respective spheres.
-A deity's power being proportional to the amount of worship it receives from around the world
 -This wouldn't have to end with deities. A vampire with a large enough cult following could gain special abilities as well.

or runic magic in any way, shape or form. Simply because it's dwarfy

But the two are hardly mutually exclusive

We should all read this Wikipedia entry on magic in games.
It really helps gain perspective on the different sorts of magic.

Once guilds and apprenticeship and stuff kick in a dwarf could take up apprenticeship with a (High/Grand)-Master until he has become Accomplished in his trade.
Then, everything up to Grand Master should be done through self learning, and after receiving a Master title they can take in apprentices themselves.
But most importantly: i believe that becoming Legendary in a trade should no longer happen through experience gain, but only through strange moods at Master+ level.
This would make Grand Master the experience-cap and make Legendary dwarves actually legendary.

my (2)-copper coins-
Whenever I have thought about magic in DF, I always pictured it as a cabal of wizards performing the spell casting labor in a room full of statues, slabs, barrels of blood, with the intent of causing it to rain trout, or to resurrect a legendary cheese maker..

Consider mages being able to produce a quantified amount of magic through the spell casting labor. This would be used to fuel their spells.
One-off effects (like teleporting a gobin's spine two squares away) would require charging, and lasting effects (like a trout-rain) might require constant fueling.

I can definitely see a floor full of necromancers chanting away to keep their hordes animated.