Print

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

[CaptainLambcake]

i was gonna say that you necroed but this is a good thread that should be kept near the top

[Urist Mc Dwarf]

My idead is each thought lasts for different amounts of time and delivers a steadily deacreaseing change. So your son be murdered is initially canceled about by the waterfall but then you get unhappy again because your sons death lasts longer than waterfalls

[Deepblade]

Only if you don't have a perpetual waterfall installed in your dining hall.

Perhaps for loved one and close friend death the negative modifier never truly goes away, like with real life. Eventually it'd fade down to a almost inconsequential number. But, a Dwarf who keeps losing close friends may become rather closed off to new friendships.

[Cobbler89]

I just hope that the stupid things that tend to happen because of the current incomplete/placeholder systems will still be possible, just no longer all-but-default, in whatever complete system goes in eventually. My main reason for this is that a lot of these weird things -- being pulled out of depression over a spouse's death by a lovely view of a waterfall -- can and do happen in real life, just less frequently and, well, with all the other pyschological factors involved being just right too. Of course, in real life you could also go the reverse way: you supress your anger and sadness at your wife's death until the next time you see a pretty thing, at which point you're reminded of her, the reminder gets past your mental filters against direct thoughts of her deadness, and you break down sobbing. And from there you can go into the depression phase or skip to the now that I'm not surpressing it I can deal and eventually get over it. All sorts of ways a more detailed psychology can go, many of them just as wacky on the whole as the current limited dwarven psychology. So in the end it's not so much that it currently lacks realism as that it currently lacks detail; with any luck the detailed version will be just as crazy because, well, real life is.

(Feel free to count how many times I repeated myself in that paragraph. This is not one of those nights when I am going to spend more time editting than writing. My NaNoWriMo friends would be proud, but I'm still waiting for the next generation of the WriPhone instead.)

[GreatWyrmGold]

After all, one of the authoritative descriptions was that dwarves are "strange creatures who balance out at 'happy' because on one hand their wife was eaten by elephants and on the other they just ate in a REALLY NICE dining room."

That's a snarky comment based on game realities. By that kind of logic, Toady should have made elephants into mass-murdering predators with iron hooves and flaming tusks.

Yes yes I realize that this topic is a year old, but one of the best ways to stop a topic from having multiple threads devoted to it is to keep it near the top. This is something that many people will be interested in and I see it as something that newcomers(like my self should have easy access to. To take some of the sting away, I'll add a little of my cynicism to it.

It's fine. The Suggestions Subforum specifically allows nerco'ing of old threads instead of making new ones.

While a complex psychological system is desirable, you need to be careful to not have to many interconnected complex systems or else we'll run into to a simple set of realities: chaos is the predominate force in the universe and in the end everything returns to nothing. Any system that is added to the game needs to be kept to manageable levels of chaos that let people feel like they're in control. The current suggestions in the thread are not just a good starting point, they are also near the limit of what most people could handle giving all of the other existing and planned factors in the game. Of course, horror really needs to be more broadly setup as fear so that we can have a proper, easy to follow scale from "this creeps me out" to "Oh dear God, we're all going to die!!! Such a thing has of course been discussed and fear and morale systems are planned as well as better handling joy/sorrow.

Oh yeah I almost forgot. We's be needs'n da' real Gnomies so's we's can have some REAL havoc in the world. Oh and no thief is feared like a sticky fingered Halfling, especial if they have an enchanted ruby......

Overdone and unneeded. Call me a heathen, but there is non-Tolkienian/Gygaxian fantasy in the world.

And, yeah, the psych system needs work, but it needs to be overhauled, not fiddled. Anything else is just a half-fix, and Toady doesn't halfway fix his (alpha) game anymore than you would jump halfway across a ditch.

[Urist Mcfortwrecker]

I think if this is implemented, then we would also need a dwarf psychiatrist to deal with it, this would also help keep bad reactions manageable, as a highly skilled psychiatrist could make dwarves feel very "normal" (or as normal as dwarves get), or, even more dwarfy, a room where emotions can be released in a controlled manner, so that they break chairs instead of dwarven faces.

[Urist Mc Dwarf]

also, to balance out doesm't feel anything anymore, a dwarf who gets certain tragic thought s will

not gain in social skills
only additonal relationshops are grudges
cannot console
 happy thoughts cause less happiness

[Waparius]

Psychiatry's a little modern for this game - I'd rather that dwarves get help with their issues from religion, family and friends where appropriate. "Urist McVictim has been feeling grief-stricken recently. He lost a child recently. He cried on a friend's shoulder recently. He drank to a child's memory recently."

General "happiness" could help a dwarf deal with stress, grief and horror in an indirect fashion as well as more direct measures - while it should be less likely that Urist McVictim is alright with the loss of his first-born because his bedroom is engraved, it should help a little bit, especially as time goes on.

 Ideally the things that help dwarves get happier should be related directly to their personality traits - dwarves who enjoy nature should be able to deal with stress or whatever by going and taking breaks where they can see natural terrain, whether that's outside, in caverns, or near windows or other decent viewpoints that look out on them. (Fortifications probably shouldn't be as good for that sort of thing). Dwarves who appreciate tradition could do the same by attending religious ceremonies; sociable dwarves could throw or attend parties and so on. It would be a neat incentive to have a bunch of different meeting-hall-type rooms if some dwarves respond better to statue gardens and others to wells or meeting area zones next to the river. (How much do these sort of things already influence dwarven happiness, anyway?)