What we have is a difference in perspective.
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But me, I'm more of a Timmy. I like to experience things that haven't been seen before, to try things that have never been tried and see what sort of fun results. Unfortunately, I'm running out of options here. I've crawled through the underground and seen pretty much all there is to see, dissected enough Forgotten Beasts to figure out the general algorithm that generates them, wandered around several Demonic Fortresses, and determined that Hell is really not a very exciting place.
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If I read that right, wanting to explore and see new things is more of a "Johnny" trait, while "Timmy" wants to do things like make a champion with 2000 kills and a skull throne and a magma moat.
If I'd classify myself, I'm somewhere between a Johnny and a Spike of those three. I've got an obvious competitive drive, but I'm more interested in understanding the concepts than I am in merely winning, and I'll play as the wizard (or the sniper in modern RPGs or the medic in FPS) in any game, just because I like hanging back and either supporting the team or planning more than tackling problems head-on, whether wizards are game-breakers or utterly nerfed in any given game. I'm someone who dismantles his brand new watch to figure out what makes it work, and then sets about trying to come up with ways to make a better watch. I spend more time modding the game or on the suggestion forums about the game than actually playing it, because I like thinking about the way the game works more than I actually like playing it. (And I find combat especially boring, and generally play mostly to design the archetecture, and even though I was talking about people who wouldn't even make clothes, I am someone who matches up every dwarf with a job that has to do with their preferences, will make sure that every dwarf is wearing masterwork clothing, and eating in a legendary dining room with waterfalls. I make at least one of everything, and I want to have a zoo with every kind of animal in the game in it.) Winning is boring, learning and understanding is fun.
This is why I hate the Wand of Wonder - it is just plain random, without purpose or meaning. There is nothing there to understand about it, crap just happens to you for no reason, and there's nothing you can learn about it, or do to change what happens. It has no purpose, and even if you can use it to make you win, you didn't do anything to earn your victory, no plan of yours came together, you just got lucky.
I make mention of the "no reason to make clothes" problem because it is a problem (in fact, one of the key problems) of the game that essentially the only parts of the game that really matter are the military and bare minimum survival - both of which are early-fort problems to solve. Having a reason to care about clothing your dwarves, or giving them better standard of living or similar such things, when there ISN'T a reason to care about it right now is the subject of my
Class Warfare thread, where I specifically talk about making problems that players have to solve by doing things like making sure your dwarves aren't all a bunch of filthy, disease-ridden nudists.
But that's beside the point...
Anyway, NOW you're starting to approach this from the perspective I'm talking about - you're talking about
what you want from the game, and not
what you think about when someone says "magic". This is the difference between a magic thread argument that goes nowhere because nobody can agree on whether the game should feel more like playing Warhammer or Discworld or something else, and a magic thread where people try to figure out how to change the game to give the player more of what they want. (Which was the main point of the last couple posts I made.)
Yes, that's right, now that I've genuinely thought about the question from the perspective an archetype different from my own, I realize why you were so appalled by my suggestions. Now, try and see things from my perspective; a playstyle based on gambling, self-imposed challenges, and exploring possibilities is just as legitimate as building the best fortress you can and amassing wealth through reliable, practical means.
I would answer this directly, but I think that my response to a subsequent post should come first, as it partially answers your challenge.
Magic doesn't necessarily have to be about production. What if instead, it took the form of subtly altering the parameters of the environment? There wouldn't be wizards flinging around spells, but rituals, events, or just random drifts in the flow of magic could result in properties being overlaid on the fortress.
To draw on the existing ideas of divine spheres, if your fortress worships a god of fire, works with lava a lot, or has a lot of things catch on fire, the land itself might become imbued with the essence of fire, altering the weather and lowering the point at which things catch on fire, but increasing the effectiveness of smelters and forges and making dwarves that like fire happier. If your fortress worships a god of death, or a lot of creatures die, the land might become imbued with the essence of death, making dwarves die more easily and undead appear more frequently, but making butchering more effective and dwarves that like death happier.
That kind of thing would be somewhat subtle but would also have the potential to be quite significant. Depending on how significant drift is, it could also serve as a source of the unpredictable disasters some people like. Perhaps altering a world gen parameter could affect how inherently magical the world is.
Now this is a model I think can be built up into something that actually solves the problems a player faces.
If, instead of having Dwarven Wizards, we have Dwarven Clerics who serve a fickle deity, who can dole out punishments or rewards based upon the faith and devotion they are given, we are talking about something less arbitrarily imposed upon the player than a wizard who is a walking accident factory. If keeping the god happy keeps the bad crap from happening, then there is at least a reaon behind such a thing, and a way to prevent it from happening.
It would also be better if whatever blessings you recieved were the blessings you asked for - you get a certain amount of "miracle capital" that you can spend on general things, like blessing the fields for abundant harvests, or blessing your dwarves with good health to ward off disease (when it starts to really get implimented), or else more direct divine intervention, like a prayer going, "Oh great Samyu Leljakzon, Angry Black of Man, we art sick of these motherf****** forgotten beasts in our motherf******* fort!" This could be used as a way of helping solve the problem of Dwarf Fortress being too much about disaster prevention, and not enough about disaster management; You just make the player have access to some direct, immediate solutions to their problems that are beyond their control. (Of course, then you need a miracle for holding back a wall of water long enough to wall off part of your fort if you start to flood it.)
As a price, not only would you have to keep the god(s) happy, but the more you ask them to do stuff, the more they demand in return, and the more unhappy they get if they don't get it. It's still "fair" - you still can keep the bad stuff from happening, at least most of the time (hopefully, they don't want slade sacrifices...), but if you don't want to deal with it, you can just run a largely agnostic/atheistic fort, and just try to keep the gods away entirely (unless enemy gods come knocking).
(Of course, it's also a plus that I've just recently been talking in a suggestion thread on
Physical Gods.)
Going back to KillerClowns...
Part of what I think is problematic is that I don't really know if people who say they want really random magic would actually
like being subjected to random magical effects if it actually happened. Opening HFS in the middle of your fort is basically just a "oh, whoops, you critfailed a random roll, your entire fort dies for no reason". Maybe it's a surprising twist the first time it happens, but it's not going to be surprising the next dozen times your fort crumbles because of the inevitable unlucky roll of the dice.
Even if it's not that bad, even if it's somewhat good, if it's just some random thing that happens to you, but which you can't really do much of anything with, besides clean up the mess, it doesn't seem like it really is more interesting than "Hunh, random creature A just got summoned. Oh well, dispatch the military to kill it." (And worse, if there's no real way to prepare for or mitigate the damage those things do, it can be a serious hazard.)
Maybe I'm only looking at this from my perspective of someone who wants to understand systems and work with them, but I much prefer something like having to satiate the demands of a different god who has different personalities each time I play than just having stuff rain down for no rhyme or reason.
I think maybe it's also worth talking a little about what I personally enjoy in a game, as well. (Aside from
complex farming systems that are designed to make fortresses into self-contained ecosystems, of course.)
I think a mechanic that I really enjoyed, and which I think may be worth replicating parts of in this game would be the crafting/alchemy mechanics of the
Gust games, especially
Mana Khemia. In that game, you have to make all your own equipment and consumables like potions and so on by finding recepies and crafting them. (And since the game is focused on crafting, your "level up" mechanics are based around finding and making every recepie at least once to gain hit points and such, so essentially everything revolves around the alchemy mechanic.)
You want better armor, you find the next recepie, and you craft it using the materials you find. Potions can be mass-brewed, but you have to get plenty of ingredients. Want a bigger potion? Well, you have to make it out of adding more things onto lower-level potions. Better armor is made out of weaker armor plus more things added on.
Because mid and high-level armor is made out of combining several lower armors, plus sometimes several intermediate items that have uses only in making more advanced equipment, which are themselves made out of something like a handful of spinacherbs or blue petals or legion steel, then you wind up having massive raw materials needs, and have to go out flower picking or mining or just plain shopping if it's something you can just outright buy. (And at the end of the game, I literally used 150 units of legion steel in one round of alchemy crafting... you can only carry 99 at a time.)
What makes it interesting (other than making "grinding" be about fishing minigames or flower picking rather than fighting) is that the equipment you make can have special properties that you can transfer from the raw ingredients to the finished product. Since properties on one item don't stack if you have more than one of them, really getting the most out of your equipment means you have to look at what combinations of items (most have substitutable ingredients) will enable passing on the properties you want, and even more complex is that every item that you craft whose only purpose is being used in further crafting have multiple properties that only appear when you craft them in certain "quality" ranges (and higher is not always better, especially later on, when you have to purposefully try to get to a range such as between 15% and 30% quality). Since objects can be crafted using the same intermediate objects in two lower pieces of equipment that get merged into a higher order of equipment, you can actually wind up dropping the quality of an intermediate object for one piece, then upping the quality again for another, and get both supposedly mutually exclusive properties on a single piece of equipment.
It's basically one giant puzzle of trying to find a way to fit all the properties you want on a given item, using only a set number of paths that have ever-lengthening complexity, until the final ultimate pieces of equipment actually have something like 12 layers of lower equipment or intermediate objects, and require over a hundred raw material items to craft just one set of uber armor. (And solving the puzzle in an optimal manner isn't neccessary by any stretch, it's just fun to solve it.)
So basically, this is the sort of thing I would hope to be able to see in a DF alchemy system, if not something as complex and time-intensive, at least something where it gives a player a compelling reason to really want to collect each and every last scrap of every random item they can get their hands on because it might be useful in some odd formula, and making it possible to create weird, wacky, and wonderful new products through careful consideration of how different properties interact. If we make a crafting system similar to Legend of Mana's, where adding different properties from different material extracts will interact with other properties from other material extracts in consistant, non-random ways, but ways that aren't revealed to the player until they perform trial and experiment, we can create a severely complex puzzle for the player to tackle. Many players may settle for just getting a mostly positive set of effects, or a weak effect that has no downside, but the opportunity exists for
This would probably work best procedurally randomizing the effects of all the different raw materials in the game (or at least, to make them fit within certain catagories, so that fire imp eyes don't cause ice effects... at least without triggering an inversion of their normal properties), so that there is no wiki and no real way to understand what effects different raw material or what rules exist on the formulas for interactions of properties until they have experimented for themselves.
(While I was typing, four new replies have been posted... heh...)
EDIT: Jeebus, how many words have I WRITTEN in this thread, already?!
EDIT2: Apparently, 6715 words, or 38,118 characters, not counting formatting or quotes. My Stonehall Alliance mod thread still kicks my input on this thread's ass in terms of verbosity so far...
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Topic: Technology Vs Magic (Read 6118 times)