Has !!SCIENCE!! been done on leg removal of dwarfs? ... Can they dodge without legs? Legendary Crutch User Legendary Dodger would be... funny as hell.
Military training already maxes all relevant stats. Crutch walking brings no benefits to trained out dwarves. The crutch itself may be used as a weapon, but even a heavy crutch isn't in any way better than common weapons (even with the current broken system of handling impact damage).
Missing limbs makes a dwarf need less armour thus lighter. A fully trained crutch walker will go faster than a dwarf with two legs.
There was a separate thread where someone made an entire fighting force of one legged dwarfs. However it isn't easily applicable to children as you can't selectively remove their limbs as easily (armour and saw blade traps were used)
So if there's a dwarf missing a leg, would the weight of his legwear half or are legs one entity when armor is mapped?
Said dwarf would only wear one high boot. The legwear would weigh the same. I don't think that particular modification is really worth it, although doing it with vampires later on as a graduate education might be a viable option for people who don't care that much what the survival rate is. The accepted method was to cause controlled cave-ins to shove dwarves onto weapon traps, if I recall correctly. The traps would go off on the unconscious dwarf. Assuming the dwarf was entirely armored except for one body part, a trap with ten serrated discs would be quite likely to sever that body part. The trick was making sure that body part was the single desired part - one foot or leg, and no more. I think the success rate was less than 70%, possibly as low as 30%, but I'm just throwing out the general impression I got from reading the entire thread a year ago.
It'll take me a while to summarize everything that's been done up to this point, but I want to thank Staalo very much for doing all the hard work so far. Almost every issue has been solved, except discipline (and climbing), and I have a solid idea for how to fix that, although it does require an additional course in the academy. Now we're in the stage of refinement, and the goal will be to design a system that can accommodate any number of dwarven children over the entire lifespan of a fort once it has become seriously established. Modulation of the system is good, since not all forts will have access to every tool needed for the full curriculum - e.g. no necromancers, or no vampires.
The pros and cons of each step should be listed, and possible dangers elaborated. Basic setups can be specified. Eventually I'll put together a thread detailing the final outcome, with diagrams for common use. This will be the final word on making those booze-guzzling smallbeards useful, finally!