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Author Topic: Adventure Mode Housing?  (Read 19701 times)

TheAdmiralty

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Adventure Mode Housing?
« on: September 07, 2015, 11:00:04 pm »

Evening, gentlemen.

Now, I did do a search through the forums on this, and could only turn up a few results from over two-to-three years ago, so I really hope I'm not missing a common topic around here.

I've always enjoyed adventure mode a lot more than most, but I've always felt there's been something missing.  For such a complete... well... simulation of everything else in the world, you as a character never really have the option of setting up a home or any sort of base of operations to call your own.  Now, I have no idea if this would even be possible given the current DF setup, but what sort of mechanics would it take for an adventurer, as an independent entity, to stake a claim to some chunk of property and construct pretty much anything on said property?  I see a few things that would take work here, the first being construction in adventure mode, the second being ownership/priveleges, but would this be at all a realistic thing to look for in the future?

I really do think it would be a massively worthwhile addition to DF, especially with the ability to move/assign both yourself, your party, and/or any other specific individuals to your property at their approval. There'd be a whole other pile of opportunities in terms of hired security, random attacks, and whatnot if this ever caught on.  I understand this is essentially putting a miniaturized fortress-mode into the adventurer world, but would this at all realistic?

Any thoughts?  Has this been talked about in recent history?
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Alfrodo

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #1 on: September 07, 2015, 11:13:29 pm »


I believe this is planned.

Quote
Dwarf Fortress is currently in an alpha development stage. There are still basic game features missing. The following goals need to be completed before alpha and beta are complete and version 1 will be released:

In fortress mode, the fortress needs to be able to grow into a capital that can interact with the outside world in various ways, including trade, diplomacy and war.
In adventure mode, the adventurer needs to be able to interact with all elements added.
The core and required components need to be implemented.

Sauce


Also, it is currently possible to take over a hamlet and settle there.  But I understand the difference.
« Last Edit: September 07, 2015, 11:15:15 pm by Alfrodo »
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TheAdmiralty

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #2 on: September 07, 2015, 11:50:00 pm »

I sure hope so - I can see so much potential were this to happen.  Good to see the implemented feature counter ticking up nonetheless.

Quote
Also, it is currently possible to take over a hamlet and settle there.  But I understand the difference.
  Hah... respectable, but yeah, just not quite the same.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #3 on: September 08, 2015, 01:59:41 am »

Check out DFtalk too, I'm sure he chats about the possibilities in there somewhere too (and it's a fine chunk of reading/listening to pass the time until the next release even if you don't find it.
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #4 on: September 23, 2015, 11:54:54 am »

Evening, gentlemen.

Now, I did do a search through the forums on this, and could only turn up a few results from over two-to-three years ago, so I really hope I'm not missing a common topic around here.

I've always enjoyed adventure mode a lot more than most, but I've always felt there's been something missing.  For such a complete... well... simulation of everything else in the world, you as a character never really have the option of setting up a home or any sort of base of operations to call your own.  Now, I have no idea if this would even be possible given the current DF setup, but what sort of mechanics would it take for an adventurer, as an independent entity, to stake a claim to some chunk of property and construct pretty much anything on said property?  I see a few things that would take work here, the first being construction in adventure mode, the second being ownership/priveleges, but would this be at all a realistic thing to look for in the future?

I really do think it would be a massively worthwhile addition to DF, especially with the ability to move/assign both yourself, your party, and/or any other specific individuals to your property at their approval. There'd be a whole other pile of opportunities in terms of hired security, random attacks, and whatnot if this ever caught on.  I understand this is essentially putting a miniaturized fortress-mode into the adventurer world, but would this at all realistic?

Any thoughts?  Has this been talked about in recent history?

I do not really understand the sentiment.  An adventurer always starts off, unless he is an outcast a full member of their site government and can sleep anywhere, as well as interact with anyone and has usefunct (he can use it but not carry it off) of all property on the site. 

Quote
Valuables and mansions

    Towns with large entity populations should have sections/quarters with varying residence quality etc.
    Mansions/villas out of the way as well
    Many high quality dwarf mode style items in these places
    Guards, servants and watch animals/pets associated to the owner wandering the premises
    Inns associated to roads and entity pop sprawl where you can stay and get information about the surroundings
    Overhearing conversations as you move about town

As we can see development of houses is definately planned.  It would be better for the player to be able to acquire houses for personal use a side-effect of everyone else getting houses for personal use, so the player can start off getting their own room like a regular fortress dwarf and then they could progress to obtaining a palatial room if they serve their fortresss well enough.  Anything more than that however and we start to end up with anachronism (something the game world is already full enough of); that is the appearance of things that do not make sense in the wider social context.

An individual getting a mansion given to them because they are famous/powerful/important is not anachronistic because it is consistant with how things work at the moment, barons and the like tend to get nicer rooms than the average dwarf.  An individual going off and building their own mansion however, *is* anachronistic simply because it involves something that clashes fundermentally with the present social arrangement built into the core game mechanics.  As you put it very well, it is putting a mini-fortress mode into adventure mode; except there is no mini to it, what you have done is actually replace fortress mode since you have now become the founding member of a whole new site government.

Who is going to build your mansion in the wilderness and who is going to staff and protect it?  Why would anyone agree to become your own personal servants, since you can offer them personally nothing that they are not getting 'at home', the only way you can get labourers is for a site goverment to 'loan' they to you.  Once you found people to build your mansion then why would they not simply take it over and make it their own home, with the full backing of their home site.  Your claim to the land is worth nothing unless it is recognised by somebody with an army and/or a legal system (aka the State) but no state is going to invent the whole concept of private land ownership just so unaccountable warlords can be made more unaccountable. 

Therefore we are essentially back to us being given mansions by site goverments in return for 'good service'. 
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Helari

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #5 on: September 23, 2015, 12:25:38 pm »

This really has nothing to do with "social context" but rather a lack of gameplay features.

What stops a peasant or even a group of peasants from building a palace is not that they don't have the formal position. The reason is that they don't have the building materials, the skill or the time and energy to produce the basic necessities they need to live while also building a palace.

There are many ways a player character could conceivably persuade, coerce or trick creatures into guarding or building his home, promises of reward, charisma or loyalty due to some sort of personal service for example.

Also the fact that certain creatures or factions wouldn't respect the claims of others shouldn't stop you from making those claims in the first place, creatures should just be able to try to take the stuff you've claimed. Nothing says that the player character might not be able to one day command his own group or even army or use magic that's more powerful than either.

Maybe the player could just build a palace or a castle himself. This would probably require laboring and building skills and a source for all the needed tools, materials and supplies to sustain the project while also taking extremely long (and facing problems like how to perform any tasks that should require multiple workers like processing and transporting large amounts of heavy building materials).

edit: I don't think this is feasible anytime soon though (or perhaps never but meaningful complexity seems to be one of the design goals of df or something), but i'd bet were going to get at least some sort of combination of the site claiming system and the adventurer ability to dig and build.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2015, 12:39:08 pm by Helari »
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #6 on: September 23, 2015, 03:10:21 pm »

This really has nothing to do with "social context" but rather a lack of gameplay features.

It has everything to do with social context.  To add features in that do not make sense in social context is certainly possible, it is called anachronism.  However for a game that is supposed to be a world-generator should tend towards internal consistancy, mechanics should not produce things that do not make sense given the world that is being generated. 

An example of functioning anachronism mechanics presently in the game is the way that caravans work.  They demand items of limitless quantity based upon a logic that is completely irrelavant to the actual social and economic context that the player is actually operating under.  They buy and sell items based upon a numerical value that is based upon a fixed commerical/cash value of different types of item, when in real terms such values are completely irrelavant to the actual society we play, except in regard to competing items of the same type.

Our dwarves would prefer to have a gold cup to a wooden cup but would never prefer to have a gold cup to a plump helmet if they were hungry.  The caravans however are happy to trade on a basis that is opposed to any logic that we would use, that is they consider the value of items of a different function according to the same value system.  They would sell their entire civilizations food supplies for a few of those cups. 

That is because in the anachronistic economic model we are using the parties are only trying to get as much money or lose as little money as possible.  Thus we are still converting all items into a single set of values that are minimum currency value, despite the fact that there is no currency being exchanged.  Yet in mechanical terms, outside of trading with caravans the 'dwarfbuck' value is actually only ever used in relation to an items total quality relative to other items of the same function but has no relevence between different types of item. 

What stops a peasant or even a group of peasants from building a palace is not that they don't have the formal position. The reason is that they don't have the building materials, the skill or the time and energy to produce the basic necessities they need to live while also building a palace.

Except that it is the peasants that collectively build the palace and produce the needed goods/supplies; it is not the ruler and his family that build the palace afterall. One group of peasants makes the goods needed to sustain the second group of peasants that build the palace, the ruler extracts the goods from the former group and then having secured those goods gives them to the second group in exchange for them building his palace.

In the social context of DF however there is no two groups of peasants linked by the ruler.  There is only one group of 'peasants' and nobody else, the ruler in so much as he is one is little more than the boss peasant.  The peasants would build the palace as one body and then the ruler would say "that is my palace because I am the ruler".  That is after-all absolutely how the nobles presently operate, owing to their social rank they essentially play the political system to get themselves assigned the nicest rooms and have a customary expectation for a room of a certain quality.  Key thing is that the rooms logically end up being position property rather than private property, so and so is baron and so he gets the baron's room. 

If he were replaced as baron then the new baron would simply take the old baron's room for himself and give him an ordinary dwarf hole; as in no sense is the possession of the room linked to the personality of the present baron, merely his office. 

There are many ways a player character could conceivably persuade, coerce or trick creatures into guarding or building his home, promises of reward, charisma or loyalty due to some sort of personal service for example.

There are very few ways available because the player does not have anything to offer the inhabitant of a DF settlement that his own site government cannot provide him.  The only way for him to get people to work on his home is obviously to offer them something that they do not already have.  The dwarves already have access to the entire wealth of their home site, which means there are only two ways an adventurer to persuade people to build him a home.  The first is to convince a bunch of dwarves from an existing site that he could offer them a better life than they presently have in their present site while the second is to leverage an existing site to give them a home. 

In the first example the adventurer has simply become the expedition leader of a new dwarf settlement; he does end up with a home, but so does everybody else; what we have here is simply fortress mode where the adventurer is the leader.  In the second example what you are doing is inserting yourself into the existing site as effectively a kind of de-facto baron, "I am powerful and important site goverment X, so you *should* house me," is what the adventurer is saying (likely with more subtlety but perhaps not).

The second case is interesting because we have the adventurer end's up, like the baron but living in the 'great warrior hero' home instead of the 'baron home'.  If somebody else comes along that does a better job of being a great adventurer than the present occupant, there is a pretty good chance the house will simply be given to the new hero and the old hero would get evicted. 

Also the fact that certain creatures or factions wouldn't respect the claims of others shouldn't stop you from making those claims in the first place, creatures should just be able to try to take the stuff you've claimed. Nothing says that the player character might not be able to one day command his own group or even army or use magic that's more powerful than either.

I was not merely talking about external parties coming to take your house away.  I was talking about how do stop your house, with all it's guards and servants from simply becoming a regular DF site with everything that implies.  We are talking about them turning it from "your" house into "their" house, potentially without them having to strike an actual blow against you; after all they have to do is redefine your "ownership" to be merely "ceremonial".  Of course you could turn your powerful magic onto these upstarts, but remember that they still belong to a civilization and that civilization will now avenge them, if only by it's people not being available to replace your old minions. 

In order for the civilization to have a reason back *your* side against your own staff, they have to have given the house to you in the first place given the social context of DF.  Otherwise they will have no objections to your house turning into a regular settlement.  Indeed since a settlement can provide more to their civilization than one house they may even encourage the process along as long as they think they can get away with it. 

Maybe the player could just build a palace or a castle himself. This would probably require laboring and building skills and a source for all the needed tools, materials and supplies to sustain the project while also taking extremely long (and facing problems like how to perform any tasks that should require multiple workers like processing and transporting large amounts of heavy building materials).

edit: I don't think this is feasible anytime soon though (or perhaps never but meaningful complexity seems to be one of the design goals of df or something), but i'd bet were going to get at least some sort of combination of the site claiming system and the adventurer ability to dig and build.

Of course if we introduce the ability to build in adventure mode then of course we can now build palaces for ourselves.  We can also carve our names into the mountainside or build a tower of babel. 
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Bumber

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #7 on: September 23, 2015, 06:11:27 pm »

There's no reason a wealthy adventurer couldn't privately finance the construction of a mansion hiring local carpenters, who then return to their site after completion. Then the adventurer hires some mercenaries to guard it or can quarter his comrades there. Maybe he offers outcasts and animal people safe haven and protection in the surrounding area in return for their fealty.

This differs from being given a site in that you're not subject to any government's whims.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2015, 06:14:18 pm by Bumber »
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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #8 on: September 23, 2015, 08:16:50 pm »

I think an important part is that you need power to build something, but you can gain power: money, status, etc., at least partially, in adv. mode.  Money: easy, sell/loot stuff.  Status is planned, in fact becoming a general/baron whatever is planned.  Just because you can't do something now doesn't mean you won't be able to later.  Sure, some peasant can't just build more than a hut, but a hut is fine for now.  Then, when you're a legendary wealthy hero, cities will be competing to have you live there: sure, you can find a way to get your own house.  Furthermore, you should be able to buy/rent a house, the former mostly for retiring.  There's a lot more possibility in the retiring concept.
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #9 on: September 24, 2015, 01:38:12 pm »

There's no reason a wealthy adventurer couldn't privately finance the construction of a mansion hiring local carpenters, who then return to their site after completion. Then the adventurer hires some mercenaries to guard it or can quarter his comrades there. Maybe he offers outcasts and animal people safe haven and protection in the surrounding area in return for their fealty.

This differs from being given a site in that you're not subject to any government's whims.

You cannot hire any local carpenters to build things because to do that there has to be unemployed carpenters lying about, the problem is that the institution of unemployment does not exist in the game society.  If there is nothing wooden needing making the site government will simply reassign the carpenters to do something else, which they are at liberty to do.  Hiring people then is a complete anachronism in the game, hiring requires unemployment; no unemployment and no hiring. If you were to convince a site's presently employed carpenters to build your stuff for a sufficiantly great personal reward, the site would logically forbid them from doing so because that would be stealing labour from the site and thus wealth.  You could give the site a cut, but that is basically paying rent to the site. 

The only way in the present social arrangment for the player to 'privately' have their own mansion is for a mansion to be built and staffed by an existing's site's own personel, meaning a site must give them a mansion of their own and because that entails a cost for the site, they would only do that if you were a member of the site of very good standing, you were able to pay them a very prodigous rent or they are so afraid of you they have to appease your wrath.

The alternative means to get a mansion is to convince or coerce a bunch of creatures (your animal people are an example of this) to leave their present site government and come form a new site government under the player.  In this case what you have basically done is created a new site under a particular starting scenario and the only way to have your own house is to also provide everybody else with a house.  So you are no longer in adventure mode and now in fortress mode with yourself as the ruler of the site government. 

So the only non-anachronistic means given the presnent social order to get housing not subject to the whims of an existing government is.

1. Live on your own in a log cabin in the wilderness.
2. Set up your own government.

I think an important part is that you need power to build something, but you can gain power: money, status, etc., at least partially, in adv. mode.  Money: easy, sell/loot stuff.  Status is planned, in fact becoming a general/baron whatever is planned.  Just because you can't do something now doesn't mean you won't be able to later.  Sure, some peasant can't just build more than a hut, but a hut is fine for now.  Then, when you're a legendary wealthy hero, cities will be competing to have you live there: sure, you can find a way to get your own house.  Furthermore, you should be able to buy/rent a house, the former mostly for retiring.  There's a lot more possibility in the retiring concept.

The amount of wealth an adventurer can realistically end up with up is inherantly rather limited by the annoying detail that all the wealth they have they have to carry on their backs.  We can acquire a lot of light, high value items but the reason why that works is because of the irrational, anachronistic economic system based upon it's arbitery numbers.  I might walk about with 100 gemstones in my backpack, but who necceserily even wants 100 gemstones; can you eat gemstones?  Power on the other hand is what the adventurer does potentially have, a good adv. can do things for sites and leverage them into giving him nice stuff, or an evil adv. can terrorise everybody until they give him nice stuff, in either case provided he mantains his bargaining power in relation to the site he can end up having wealth beyond what he carry on his back. 

Back the question of power later; the problem with a computer game or indeed any work of fiction is you *can* add in anachronistic mechanics or logics all you wish.  Do not expect them to work very well together however unless you can manage to create bridging mechanics/logics to unify them or can manage to keep them hermetically sealed off from eachother.  The eternal problem with DF suggestions is that the game is never going to be finished, so people will always be able to say that "well things are supposed to be/have X, but they just have not added in the right mechanics yet".  This includes mechanics that are quite anachronistic, but if enough other mechanics were added in as well then it would not be anachronistic because the nature of the game would have fundermentally changed (though this would potentially make a whole set of existing mechanics anachronistic since they would 'orphaned'). 

From what I can gather the devs want DF to be fundermentally three things at once.

1. A town-building game.
2. A RPG.
3. A world simulation. 

Rather than starting with lots of particular visions of how society *is* and then thinking what scenarios would occur given the society in question they have and what would not occur (how DF would look if GoblinCookie had made it) they have instead started off with a set up scenarios both in the RPG and TBG sense and then constructed their whole society piecemeal in order to produce the scenarios they want the player to experience.  The problem with their approach is that basically TBG and RPG societies are inherantly at war with eachother, let me explain.

A traditional RPG depends upon a basically dysfunctional, dystopian society; the more hellish the society actually would be for ordinery folk to live in, the better it is for an adventurer (at least until he ends up maimed, crippled or killed).  The whole subject is sort of discussed in TV Tropes under the heading Adventure friendly world.  Behind all the heroic gloss what the traditional RPG hero is is a jackel, a carrion beast growing fat and rich off the decay and ruin of the societies of his world.  Regardless of his personal alignment and motives, he needs racism, tyranny, chaos, intolerance, strife, poverty and crime to be rampant.  He tends as a matter of course to propogate those things, whether deliberately for his own gain or according to the logic of "swallow a spider to catch a fly".  The only good adventurer is the adventurer that kills those who are worse than he is and then immediately becomes something else. 

A traditional TBG however depends upon a basically functional, utopian society.  Ultimately everybody must at least potentially be made to obey orders, respect the law, work together, refrain from personal violence and behave themselves, provided that the right technical arrangements are made.  If there is lots of crime, disunity and violence then it must be because we have been doing something wrong, there must be something the player can do to put things right.  We cannot have it as in the Adventure Friendly World that there are crime and problems inherantly there simply because otherwise there would be nothing to do, without disempowering the player.  Everybody that is armed must be kept under strict discipline and control, we cannot have adventurers running around killing people at their discretion and their own possible role is as merceneries that are on the public payroll doing what they are told.

If Adventure Mode and Fortress Mode were different universes then the two would not clash.  The problem is the third element, the world simulation element is supposed to unite the two elements together as one universe potentially resulting in a heap of anachronisms as the two logics and mechanics, with their own attendant embedded political ideologies do not connect successfully.  This brings us back to the question of power.  To write the rules of society to favour the adventurer will inevitably mean reducing the power of the fortress government and vica versa.  Successful fusions between TBG and RPG that lack inherant anachronism invariably deprive one element of control/power; an example of a game that is a mixture of RPG and TBG is Majesty.  In this case power is essentially held by the RPG side, with the heroes doing as they will and you the player in your TBG capacity have a basically passive role, building buildings to serve the heroes who do as they will.  True to what I said before, the RPG dominated Majesty game is neccesarily dystopian, even if you win and destroy all the monster lairs on the map there is no way to get rid of the trolls, ratmen and graveyard undead, so they closest thing you can get to an orderly society is an endless bloodbath; yet you the town builder are strangely thankful for this because otherwise your RPG hero masters would have no money or xp.

The funny thing is that despite everything I have said at the moment there is very little anachronism between Adventure Mode and Fortress Mode societies because of how Dwarf Fortress is working as a sort of Anti-Majesty. DF Adventurers are not fortune seekers but essentially armed hermits that have turned their back on the power and wealth of their home site, they have no power and no home because they have turned their back on those things for some reason.  They have afterall long as they remain adventurers no prospect of ever being elected Mayor or being appointed to a position or even influencing a position holder through conversation, they have forfeited a bed and a roof over their head to sleep on the floor of some hamlet's mead hall.  In this context it makes sense that the site governments would actually offer a successful adventurer positions, power and houses in a bid to *bribe* them into becoming part of their society and no longer being truly an adventurer.  One could even see an adventurer actually rejecting the offer for the same reason they set out from their home site in the first place.
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Bumber

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #10 on: September 24, 2015, 02:47:19 pm »

There's no reason a wealthy adventurer couldn't privately finance the construction of a mansion hiring local carpenters, who then return to their site after completion. Then the adventurer hires some mercenaries to guard it or can quarter his comrades there. Maybe he offers outcasts and animal people safe haven and protection in the surrounding area in return for their fealty.

This differs from being given a site in that you're not subject to any government's whims.

You cannot hire any local carpenters to build things because to do that there has to be unemployed carpenters lying about, the problem is that the institution of unemployment does not exist in the game society.  If there is nothing wooden needing making the site government will simply reassign the carpenters to do something else, which they are at liberty to do.  Hiring people then is a complete anachronism in the game, hiring requires unemployment; no unemployment and no hiring. If you were to convince a site's presently employed carpenters to build your stuff for a sufficiantly great personal reward, the site would logically forbid them from doing so because that would be stealing labour from the site and thus wealth.  You could give the site a cut, but that is basically paying rent to the site.
No, they do not have to be unemployed. Guilds have existed since the 1200's and are planned. All you have to do is contract the guild to do the job for you. The site can't forbid them because the guild has their labor by the balls.

As to how the adventurer pays for the labor: Artifacts, lucrative trading, wealth held onto by a third party. He doesn't have to carry it around with him.
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Bumber

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #11 on: September 24, 2015, 03:00:07 pm »

Adventurer mode and Fort mode are not at odds. You forgot about Dre the gods. Armok in particular can't stand a boring world and will reforge it. The mountainhomes need their Perseus.
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #12 on: September 24, 2015, 04:21:29 pm »

No, they do not have to be unemployed. Guilds have existed since the 1200's and are planned. All you have to do is contract the guild to do the job for you. The site can't forbid them because the guild has their labor by the balls.

As to how the adventurer pays for the labor: Artifacts, lucrative trading, wealth held onto by a third party. He doesn't have to carry it around with him.

I was never talking about the physical building of the mansion Bumber.  If you have an artefact or something very valuable you could certainly get the regular site to build something for you in exchange for the artefact, no need for guilds for that.  It is really just a question of how much do they want what you are giving them against how much does the building cost in materials and labour. 

I was talking about the social institution of the mansion, that is the whole raft of servants, guards, maintanance and so on; without unemployment you cannot avoid being beholden to the whims of the external body to which said staff belong; you will always have to keep that body happy or else your mansion will end up falling into ruin. 

Adventurer mode and Fort mode are not at odds. You forgot about Dre the gods. Armok in particular can't stand a boring world and will reforge it. The mountainhomes need their Perseus.

I did not forget about that, in fact it was almost my conclusion.  The problem is that when we are thinking about how to develop the society and world, the kind of society and world that the adventurer is going to easily get personally powerful and rich is the exact opposite of the kind of the world that the fortress (and the ordinary dwarf) is generally going to prosper in. 

The ideal society for the adventurer is always a somewhat dystopian one.
The ideal society for the fortress is always a potentially utopian one. 
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Bumber

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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #13 on: September 24, 2015, 04:50:35 pm »

I was talking about the social institution of the mansion, that is the whole raft of servants, guards, maintanance and so on; without unemployment you cannot avoid being beholden to the whims of the external body to which said staff belong; you will always have to keep that body happy or else your mansion will end up falling into ruin.
Well, there is sort of unemployment. We have drunks, peasants, and the potential to migrate between sites. That and the previously mentioned animal people.

You probably only need at most 3 servants. 1-2 people skilled in maintenance, getting outside help for bigger issues. You might want ~4 guards, which you can hire, or you can instead rely on companions/underlings/undead present if it's your central base of mercenary/criminal/wizardly operations.
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Re: Adventure Mode Housing?
« Reply #14 on: September 24, 2015, 06:24:48 pm »

Well, there is sort of unemployment. We have drunks, peasants, and the potential to migrate between sites. That and the previously mentioned animal people.

You probably only need at most 3 servants. 1-2 people skilled in maintenance, getting outside help for bigger issues. You might want ~4 guards, which you can hire, or you can instead rely on companions/underlings/undead present if it's your central base of mercenary/criminal/wizardly operations.

Drunks are closest thing we have to the unemployed, but I think they are 'unemployed' because they are psychologically unfit to work and so they would not be of any more use in your mansion than they would be at their present location.  Peasants are not unemployed, they are merely without civilian skills that are tied to a profession name; a person can be employed to solely hauling stuff (90%+ of actual work really) and will always count as peasants since this does teach them any skills.  Additionally they may be demobilised soldiers who have spent their whole life fighting but have now recently left the army with no civilian skills, or even just deactivated soldiers that are actually in squads (they will use their civilian name).

People migrate based upon the wealth of the fortress, this makes sense.  Since everybody at the moment is basically as rich as the fortress they live in, it makes sense to move to a wealthy fortress where you think you will get a better life.  In order to get any migrants at all, a dwarven caravan must successfully leave the map and bring the news of how much wealth your fortress has managed to produce since the last autumn (or is the last time the caravan left in absolute divided by the number of years?).  This indicates very strongly that migration is entirely driven by pull factors and there are no push factors involved (like unemployment), since if there were then at least few desperate people would 'chance it' from nearby settlements even if they did not have any knowledge of local conditions. 

Guards have the exact same problem that servants have, all the guards in the world (like everyone else) are employed.  They have access to all the wealth of whatever settlement they are presently at and yet you would expect them to forfeit the opportunity to visit the site's tavern in order to come guard somebody's house.  As I have previously mentioned the only way that you can hope to get guards and servants is to essentially compete with a settlement, offering them the same amenities as the sites offer their people.  You might have priceless artefacts to hand out to your guards like sweets (if they are so common why are priceless?) but it is still a long and dangerous treck every day back to the tavern of the nearest site in order to partake in the dwarf's favourite activity regardless.  On the 300th day of guarding the mansion some giant dingo creeps up on our guard as he treks his way drunkenly back from the tavern and the guard suddenly realises that all the priceless artefacts in the world are no use to the dead. 

You cannot have your adventurer companions guard your house as you go on your life of adventure because they "didn't sign up for this!".  That leave us with the inevitable conclusion that the only way that an adventurer can have an independant home that is beyond his personal capacity to mantain is to establish a new site that offers the resident dwarves a quality of life competitive with that offered by it's rivals, set himself up as ruler of that site and build his own personal dwelling as part of that site. 
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