Bay 12 Games Forum

Also, I'd suggest that such monsters be incapable of travelling through adamantine (obviously) and perhaps metals and/or as well.

Yeah, the refusal to climb back down is the problematic part, at least until Urist tries to climb out of a 50 z level hole and loses his grip just shy of the top...

[x-posted with someone else] Wow, yeah. I like how this played out (is playing?) And good points all around.

It's a funny tension. On one hand, if you're going to bother to have actual food production be a part of the game, then of course it should be a meaningful thing beyond "slap down some farming zones and pay it no mind for the remainder of the fort's existence." At least, I dunno, require occasional fertilization or something?

On the other hand, this is Dwarf Fortress, not Sim Farm. Want to talk about boring games...*

Though, on another level, I have to say that there are times I really appreciate boredom. I don't know y'all, but IRL I'm not the kind of person who usually has the time and energy for a constant barrage of existential threats. I don't really want a game that requires that kind of attention because my life doesn't usually let me give things that kind of attention. Probably with this in mind, I always set up my fort so that turtling is an option.**

Though after that footnote...the boredom and stability can be its own challenge, maybe. Even in the old games, like Boatmurdered, if you read closely, they were very intentionally playing it like a role playing game and making decisions that made absolutely no sense from a strategy POV because it made a good story. This was not an incredibly hard game even then, I suspect. The players made it exciting themselves by taking these weird game mechanics and taking it as an inspiration to do crazy things. DF really is a game where you can make it be what you want. But you have to make it, mod it even if you've got that skillset (I don't.) Want to do BoatMurdered? Play like maniac, and insanity will ensue. Then read closely how it played out, and you've got a story that'll blow people's minds.

Heck, I play carefully and I have a few pretty good yarns, usually starting with a forgotten beast and ending with a massive tomb.

Increasing the pressure may spur creativity, but sometimes I think it could also stifle it. There's a reason most fantasy novelists don't write stories that accurately describe medieval life, because medieval life for most people was incredibly limited. You could spend your whole life working the same patch of land in the same little town...

Like a bunch of dorfs living in a hole in the ground, never venturing more than a few acres away from the entrance.

On another level, talking to my wife about this, had a little brainstorm.

Medieval life was boring because the pressure to survive required very strict patterns of behavior. Why do people spend 90% of their time shoveling dirt? Because the pressure to survive requires that. Threats don't always create creativity by themselves. Often they create boredom because you *have* to do the optimum thing to survive, or you die. And so keep doing the optimum thing until you die.

I do think that any game suffers from this, but I've seen it in DF a lot. Read the wiki, find solution, implement. Sometimes it takes some work, but it's doable, and if you ratchet up the pressure, you just get more and more routinized. Commercial games do this all the time. It's really disturbing when you notice yourself doing it. Carrots and sticks.

For real creativity, there needs to be an element of the unknown. The gap where you don't know what is going to happen frees you, under pressure, to explode into something incredible.

What DF lacks, I think, for some, is a sufficiently large unknown. Sieges are not that hard to figure out. Forgotten Beasts get closer, but even they can be routinized if you're sufficiently creative. That thing that shall not be named has been tamed, if you simply look up the appropriate board game. I do not know if any coded game, in the presence of the internet, will ever be able to overcome this shortcoming, but at least we may be able to play mindful of it.

Dude. That was a pretty cool thought process. Thanks, y'all, if only for that. Stuff like this is one reason I love this game.

* Actually, I think economics, in a big way, are a potential pressure source that isn't utilized much at all in DF. After the first few years, I can buy the entire trade caravan on goblin crap and manufactured rock crafts. Who on earth pays that much for clothing that was ripped off the mutilated corpse of a troll?

**And that said, if I ever had to turtle, I'd more likely quit out of boredom or frustration. Has anyone ever played a fort that was in turtle mode for very long? It sounds like a really perverse challenge fort. How long can you run an entirely internal operation where nothing happens but a pack of dorfs quietly going about their lives in relative peace and harmony? Hell with the dwarves, could you stay sane?

Here's my good old fort 'Bridgeesteems'. It has a some nice POI. My current fort is still a WIP, so I don't have that on the archive.

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-11435-bridgeesteems

That is rather nice, the mosaic and dome especially. I've been thinking of trying something like that myself.

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-12253-fountainnotch

Here's one I was kind of proud of. Go through the POIs in order and you'll get some tales as well.

"Winning is boring!", I think that slogan reflects the mindset of current DF players quite well.

I don't think the comparison with Sim City is fair. In that game, one can strive to reach the highest possible balance of the various indicators: health, education, traffic, pollution... and it's a difficult problem. In Dwarf Fortress, what do we get for designing the most efficient fortress? Well, we get more idle dwarves. That could mean a bigger military (maybe 80% of the population), and that does sound like a pretty good motivation to build an efficient fortress...

Actually, I find it to be a powerful disincentive toward efficiency. Efficiency is easy and boring, to me.

For instance, in my current fort, I could simply dig out a five by five square room and stick the trade depot in it. I dig a tunnel from the outside, clear, for traders. I dig a tunnel from the inside, entrapped, for the dorfs. Build enough traps and goblins won't be a problem anymore.

Or, dig out a huge circular room, about 30 urists across, with a raised dais in the middle for the depot. Channel down the remainder of the room, with drawbridges inside and outside that can be raised at need. Channel the entire room down several urists deep, dig intake and outtake tunnels, install floodgates and levers, and flood the room several urists deep. It's far less efficient, but visually pleasing and kind of neat to imagine. It's also, I think, on the fairly simple side of things far as engineering projects go.

And if you really want some fun later on, drain it out, then replace the pillar bases with supports. Hook them up to a lever. Drown some elves.

This is not an efficient or cost-effective way to design a trade depot, but I rather enjoy the process.

PS: I'm discussing this with my wife, and she points out that in other games, like NetHack, efficiency can be a great challenge. In DF, at least in my experience, it's only fun until you achieve it. And it makes DF a very different kind of game. Or maybe you have to work out what your goal is, and pursue that efficiently. Maybe building a 100 dorf army could be a goal, though...yeah, the game doesn't really have a use for that kind of behavior. You have to use your imagination or mod it somehow. Maybe sometime in the future Toady will make it possible for us to take the fight to the goblins. That would be a new kind of fun. Dwarf Fortress: Invasion Mode!

There are no win conditions in this game.

It's like simcity, you set your own conditions for "winning." It sounds like you and the guy in that quote both set the bar too low and are now disappointed in your own standards.

For the record, I'm speaking for a past self as identifying with the guy in the quote.

And yeah, it is a lot like a more complex version of SimCity. I used to play that one, and then you get to the point where you start throwing disasters at yourself because everything else is boring. Then you start over again.

Another thought: Maybe we should make boredom more dangerous? I was wondering if that's a sneaky side effect of the taverns...

Dwarves who are idle too long spend all their time getting drunk, then die of alcohol poisoning. And then you get tantrum spirals and gallows humor about alcoholism destroying families. There's a thought.

Stargus, I don't totally agree with you, but I think your point is very interesting, so I quoted you and ran with some thoughts of my own. Here's a courtesy link: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=155045.0

A few more thoughts of mine:

In Dwarf Fortress, the goblins aren't the biggest threat. The dwarves are their own worst enemies.

As development of the game has continued, the fortress has become less and less the focal point of the game. This could be a problem for fortress players, or players in general until the adventurer mode gets more fleshed out, or unless fortress mode takes a far broader scope (for instance, if becoming the mountainhome gives the player responsibility for the entire dwarven nation. Though at that point nit'd become a radically different game, more Sid Meiers Civ than Warcraft (not World thereof). one reason you're getting fewer sieges could be that the goblin civilization nearby has already been wiped out by your allies, which is a shame if you were looking for goblin invasions.

One thing about DF is that the game puts a huge burden on the player to take responsibility for their own fun. It's a very weak disciplinarian. I think, as it is now, the real existential threat in dwarf fortress is the player's own ambition, or lack thereof.

And I can see how someone might take that as an insult, so I hope you don't take it as such. It could also be seen as a very harsh criticism of the game itself.

And yeah, "Losing is Fun"...it's true, in a sense, but it's also false in many ways and could be improved on. I completely agree with you there.