Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[GreatWyrmGold]

Of course, what physiological reason is it? Is it that dwarves have a greater muscle density, conferring greater strength and stamina? Wait...that could also explain their skill at forging metal and such (which I imagine is somewhat tiring), masonry (ditto), and why they prefer weapons like the axe and hammer...especially if their muscles don't allow for as fine of muscle control, explaining why they use bows and not crossbows! And elves are weaker and more fragile, but have more muscle control, so they can use swords and bows with great finesse, but not too much strength! Humans are in between, so they can use both kinds of weapons...Awesome! I just answered my own question and some others, too! Now we need to apply this logic to animalpeople to justify their strengths, and apply that logic to see what else they'd be good at.

[Neonivek]

One issue GreatWyrmGold is the scaling up of weapons.

We are not giants but how do weapons work when you are giant?

Do blades still work? Peircing weapons? Blunt weapons?

If Bows are out of the picture what about powerful slings?

[NW_Kohaku]

Weapons are scaled based upon who makes them, but there is a minimum size for each weapon. 

Hence, a "Short sword" made by dwarves is used by anyone above a minimum size, even if you're dragon-sized, but it's just smaller and less effective than a "short sword" made by a dragon.

Conversely, if you had a dragon-sized civ creature, they would be able to produce short swords that dwarves could wield, would take the same 1 bar of steel to make, but weigh something like a ton, and be obscenely valuable on a scale that makes Large Steel Serrated Discs look tame. 

... In short, the current weapon system is basically as nonsensical as the current clothing system.

[Neonivek]

I mean... in real life

I'd expect that once we actually get giant cultures and races (or really small ones like Rat sized) that the weapons would be adjusted for their size so that a Pixie isn't going to use a Club because that would be useless.

[NW_Kohaku]

Of course, what physiological reason is it? Is it that dwarves have a greater muscle density, conferring greater strength and stamina? Wait...that could also explain their skill at forging metal and such (which I imagine is somewhat tiring), masonry (ditto), and why they prefer weapons like the axe and hammer...especially if their muscles don't allow for as fine of muscle control, explaining why they use bows and not crossbows! And elves are weaker and more fragile, but have more muscle control, so they can use swords and bows with great finesse, but not too much strength! Humans are in between, so they can use both kinds of weapons...Awesome! I just answered my own question and some others, too! Now we need to apply this logic to animalpeople to justify their strengths, and apply that logic to see what else they'd be good at.

Actually, no. 

Masonry is not about muscle mass.  Sure, you need a certain amount of it, but how good a job you do in laying down brick work or carving a smooth stone has much more to do with fine-tuned dexterity, knowledge of the working material, and trained hand-eye-coordination than brute force.

In short, there's no reason an elf wouldn't be as good at that, provided they are bulked up enough to meet the minimum strength requirements.  In fact, elven dexterity would probably make them better at it.

The reason why dwarves are less capable of bowmanship is simply their height at play - a longbow is something like 6 feet tall.  They favor powerful upper body strength, but also a relatively tall warrior.  Strength would help more with crossbow reloading, though. 

Really, I remember making a few comparisons between Dwarves and Neanderthals - Neanderthals were also shorter, hairier, stronger people than the humans they lived near.  They were slower because of their shorter legs, and much less capable in grasslands or at long-distance running, but they were powerful in melee, and lived in forests where they could ambush prey from close range.  "Prey" in this case were things like wooly mammoths that they attacked by jumping on its back and stabbing with a spear repeatedly while trying not to be gored by a giant enraged elephant-like creature.  (The comparisons to dwarves are obvious.)

Humans, meanwhile, tried doing that silly little "stand away from the giant dangerous beast and shoot arrows at it" thing.  Cowards. 

Skeletal remains of Neanderthals showed they had an extremely high rate of injury, especially goring by mammoth tusks, including plenty of fractured skulls that were jammed through the brain because of their extremely risky hunting practices.

So, going back, don't think of swords as somehow more "finesse" so that suddenly strength doesn't matter.  Get right down to it, and a cleaving-type sword is not all that much different from an axe. 

Further, we are talking about very general trends - what this would better be represented by would be making different attributes have more overt play in the skills that are used.  An exceptionally strong but clumsy elf, then, should be much like a dwarf, if we are just basing this straight off of attributes, right?

For this to make sense, you need to actually put attributes in a visible profile when you are assigning labors, however. 

[Splint]

One issue GreatWyrmGold is the scaling up of weapons.

We are not giants but how do weapons work when you are giant?

Do blades still work? Peircing weapons? Blunt weapons?

If Bows are out of the picture what about powerful slings?

Alright, since I like talking about weapons and the combat utilities the animal men would provide and such I'll stick around. I do still commend the spirited debate that went down.
Most weapons work the same, so long as the creature has hands to use them and they're the right size. Dwarves can't use alot of larger human weapons like 2 handers and great axes, and some polearms if of human make. Anything goblins wield however will just be simply crap version of what dwarves make.
And slings do seem like they'd be a more common tribal weapon than blowguns....

I figure I'll point out what I did gather from my cheating methods of dfusion and runesmith:
Tigermen make great soldiers, but poor manual laborers. They could use the crap humans brought. While they learned just as well as dwarves did, they took twice as long moving about, save for hauling.
Antmen were by far the best thing I brought, thier fearlessness and needs of only food and drink allowing them to outstrip dwarves in bulk tasks of farming/plantcollecting, mining and woodcutting, with them effectivly doing double the work a dwarf ever could in such tasks, and best of all, enjoying it (aside from the ones who got mauled by giant badgers, they were always satisfied with work.) The downside is that they won't run from agressive creatures (or can't outrun them) and they seem to get attached to oneanother much more quickly than dwarves or tigermen do. Thier small size (around a dorf's as I recall, but slimmer) also makes them very vulnerable without any armor, requiring numbers to make them effective fighters without it.

I also like the concept of having flying men to take the fight to the enemy if you've buttoned up and have an above ground defensive position for archers to fire from. While they disrupt and distract agressors, xbowmen can shoot them up or the main army be assembled. Any flying men who survive providing a hardened core of airborn assault troops/skirmishers.

While I appreciate the discussion regarding racial interactions and whatnot, I'm personally not interested in that and more like the combat applications the animalmen provide as either highly valuable or conversly, depending on the player, highly expendable troops. (except the antmen. best woodcutters evar.) Besides, I treated them the same as dwarves even if they didn't need sleep. help keep the little buggers apart. And, if a player chooses to induct animalmen soldiers into the fortress, making sure they live would encourage more recruits to join the fortress while horrific attirtion rates (and by that I mean actual battle deaths) would yield something like a "No -men were foolish enough to offer thier services here this season." like migrants, with animal tribes you've inducted having kin arrive in the early part of the seaon while migrants usually arrive in the mid season time. But also, the number of these animalmen dying in battle can help curb the population if they've been puming out the little shits like crazy.

[NW_Kohaku]

Finally, going back to the Owlbread/Splint stuff...

Part of the problem of "rerailing" this back to talking about how these multi-racial forts would work is that it would necessarily require we go back to the subject of cultural diplomatic relations.

If we are to talk about this in terms similar to that of, say, Colonialism, one of the ways in which the Europeans time and again managed to get the help of the various tribes of native peoples (including the African coastal tribes that would help in the capture of slaves for the slave trade) was that the Europeans simply played the already-existing animosities of these tribes against one another. 

In the case of those African tribes, the Europeans gave those tribes guns, with which they could win their wars, and take slaves to sell in exchange for more guns. They had a powerful incentive to continue once they started - the other tribes that were left in the area had guns and were looking for slaves to sell, too...

If we are going to model the reticence and affability of a given animal-people to trade, we should model not just a number recording how positive past relations have been with that tribe of animal-people, but also one that models an "existential pressure" from outside forces.  If the ant-people are slammed with FBs and constant crundle attacks and maybe even a hostile serpentman tribe nearby, they're going to be much more appreciative of those bronze and steel weapons and armor you can trade them. 

[Owlbread]

I myself depart from this thread, but I will take the opportunity to declare Kohaku a shameless, filthy elf apologist and an elf admirer. If he were my dwarf I'd have him in the volcano by now. As a more constructive conclusion for myself, I will say thus: it would be fun if we could at least find some use for the animal men tribes in the general areas of our fortresses, or indeed underground. I think we could do a lot more than just simply trading with them or fighting them, as may be possible with the upcoming "first contact" stuff. Allowing them to work for you in exchange for your protection is a good idea in my opinion, one example of that could be them fighting for us in armies or helping us do basic work. That's all I want, really, same as a few before me.

I myself depart from this thread, but I will take the opportunity to declare Kohaku a shameless, filthy elf apologist and an elf admirer. If he were my dwarf I'd have him in the volcano by now.

I love you, too.

Well, it's kind of easier to talk about elves and dwarves, since those are creatures that have actually specified attributes and personalities and cultures to compare, whereas all the other creatures just go by default.

Yes, I agree. They're a good contrast too.

[Splint]

So someone doesn't think having animmen mercs without the cultural crap would be right. We're all entitled to our opinions.

[NW_Kohaku]

I myself depart from this thread, but I will take the opportunity to declare Kohaku a shameless, filthy elf apologist and an elf admirer. If he were my dwarf I'd have him in the volcano by now.

I love you, too.

Well, it's kind of easier to talk about elves and dwarves, since those are creatures that have actually specified attributes and personalities and cultures to compare, whereas all the other creatures just go by default. 

[Splint]

I'm kinda shocked animal people aren't prone to theft to be honest. You know, for food and tools and what not.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, they basically have their ethics copy-pasted from kobolds as a place-holder, but they just don't have any sort of attention paid to them or individuality as a result.

The fact that there are now about a hundred extra flavors of crazy things like Peach-Faced Lovebird Men means that there is even less likelihood of there being serious individual characteristics to these cultures, barring some sort of modding campaign that we can show to Toady as a "please institute these changes in the raws" with personality traits and attributes and such.

[Splint]

Well they do have perrsonality traits and such, but no culture. regardless Istill find it odd that they wouldn't try to steal from at least early fortresses to try and get tools and such to give them an edge in the wild (Can you imagine being say, a mooseman having to fight a badgerman who got a hold of a pick or a sword when the most you got  was a crappy wooden training axe?)

I mean in all honesty, it's possible for anyone with some basic modding skills to make entities for all the individual animal men. Be a pain in the ass, but now that I think about it something like that sounds kinda cool... Damn you people made me wanna make a controllable animal man civ.

[NW_Kohaku]

Masked Lovebird Man Fortress Mode - Like dwarf fortress, but with many times more the romance and mystery.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Of course, what physiological reason is it? Is it that dwarves have a greater muscle density, conferring greater strength and stamina? Wait...that could also explain their skill at forging metal and such (which I imagine is somewhat tiring), masonry (ditto), and why they prefer weapons like the axe and hammer...especially if their muscles don't allow for as fine of muscle control, explaining why they use bows and not crossbows! And elves are weaker and more fragile, but have more muscle control, so they can use swords and bows with great finesse, but not too much strength! Humans are in between, so they can use both kinds of weapons...Awesome! I just answered my own question and some others, too! Now we need to apply this logic to animalpeople to justify their strengths, and apply that logic to see what else they'd be good at.

Actually, no. 
*snip*

The idea was to get some kind of logic for the stereotypes, not to try and use logic to figure out what the stereotypes would be. The logic is...more than a little shakey, but it's there, so the stereotypes aren't COMPLETELY arbitrary. And, speaking as someone who has never touched a real sword or used an axe as a weapon, although I've used axes in yardwork occasionally, axes don't require a lot of dexterity--if you get them swinging in the right direction, they'll go that wayno matter what you do afterwards--but swords are lighter, and could probably allow more use of a high amount of dexerity. So...swords don't neccisarily require more dexterity, nor axes more strength, but axes DO benifet more from strength than agility.

So someone doesn't think having animmen mercs without the cultural crap would be right. We're all entitled to our opinions.

It wouldn't be not right; it would merely lack much of the substance and vermilisitude such a topic could offer.