Well I've got this one friend that I sort of got to play it, but FUN frustrates him on an almost neurotic level. He definitely likes learning the details of these complex game systems, but hates experimenting with them when failure is a possibility.
It didn't help that we had some communication failure about using the designate menu when he was just starting. I -think- I wasn't so terrible as to not explain it, but I know him well enough that I should have expected him to not hear a lot of details with the way I did explain it.
I've got a suspicion that people you can get to play this game are also people that would stick it out/see it through if I were teaching them how to program (old/simple videogames.)
if they need a graphics pack to get into DF they're likely to quit sooner or later. I love the asc II but it just hurts my eyes to much, which is why I use ironhand.
That said, finding a font that isn't quite as harsh on the eyes can be about as big of a step up as those graphics packs.
Personally I tend to like having graphics for the different dwarf professions, as something about the color shades for the face all running around each other just kills my ability to visually track a specific dwarf, but beyond that I easily keep track of other species on a colored letter basis (except the rare cases where I'll have the same letter and forget which is green vs brown.)
I think that using graphics packs actually made me really bad about the sizes of creatures though. I almost need to having some game design creep in and slap me with an isolated box of flavor text that states the size relative to my active race/species.
LoL and shooters are like "Start match, kill somebody, die, kill, die times 100, end match". What's so entertaining about them? You just do the same things over and over.
It's sports but you don't have to run until your lungs hurt and it's soooorta not something those damn jocks that you hated would be into.
One of the less obvious draws to it is that you can develop a lot of skill at the game and then still play it without really having to invest a huge chunk of time, which is great for folks that have a full time job and a fair deal of children rearing duties to attend to.
How the hell do I explain fucking Dwarf Fortress to someone who has never played a video game that hasn't been on an iPhone?
If you've got awhile explain roguelikes in general (Squidi's 2 out of 3 metric still holds pretty true: something like ascii art, procedural generation, hard as nails or even downright unfair until you've learnt so much through countless deaths that you instantly assess the situation and know exactly what you should do. His third thing was a lot more pithy though.)
If you need something way shorter you could say "it's sort of like The Sims but they're alcoholics that build and live in a compound together, and have all of these quirky behaviors like drowning themselves when they try not to get attacked by fish. It's really bizarre but the scant few that get past that find out that it's super engaging."
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Topic: Stories of Times You Introduced Friends to Dwarf Fortress. (Read 15289 times)