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[expwnent]

There is a difference between setting restrictions on yourself and not trying. If you do not allow yourself to use danger rooms because you think they make the game too easy, it doesn't mean you're not trying.

Deliberately choosing an impossible set of restrictions is not even proper Fun. If you chose to lose, you did not lose.

[Alidus]

There is a difference between setting restrictions on yourself and not trying. If you do not allow yourself to use danger rooms because you think they make the game too easy, it doesn't mean you're not trying.

Deliberately choosing an impossible set of restrictions is not even proper Fun. If you chose to lose, you did not lose.

You can't lose then once experienced. 

It's like the damn Rice Changers in Shiren. They can turn any of your items into a riceball, including that pot full of expensive loot. After a while though you learn and they never get a chance to do this again, and if they do, it was surely your mistake. The actual challenge of Rice Changers is effectively gone forever once learned since if they get you after you know how to deal with them, it's your own fault.

[NW_Kohaku]

Two things:

First, you're somewhat overthinking this - Toady first started with the "Losing is Fun" tagline partly because there are no win conditions, only lose conditions, like most city-manager games (and people ask the same stupid questions they asked of SimCity, like "why do you play if you can't win?").  Further, you are meant to not only lose, but lose and then send an adventurer in to explore your fallen fortress later.  Creating successive fortresses that build upon the history of one another, or adventurers whose stories intersect and having ongoing worlds was part of the original appeal the game was meant to have, so losing in one game mode wasn't a reason to stop playing or boot up a new world.

Second, this game has no tutorial.  You were meant to learn through trial and error before the wiki showed up.  As in, you were supposed to learn about cave-ins when they kept happening to you when you build hallways too wide.  After losing to cave-ins or floods a few times, you learn how to deal with them. 

Because of this second version, I tend to prefer "Learning is Fun" to "Losing is Fun".  Because much of the fun of the game is in exploring its little realisms and coming to understand how its mechanisms work through interaction.  If you don't learn to understand how to respect water pressure and treat it with caution and understanding by taking the time to read up on the wiki... prepare to Learn the Fun way. 

And as a corollary, losing that way is Fun only when you understand what you did wrong.  Find out about the HFS the hard way, but learn to respect the cotton candy in the process?  You probably have fun.  Lose instantly because of a corrupt worldgen that dumps your dwarves in the magma as soon as you embark after spending an hour looking for the right embark spot and searching for a world with a rich history you'd enjoy?  Not Fun at all. 

Things that are completely random and beyond your control that just shit on your day is what makes real life unfun.  Things that you can learn to predict and defend against, even when there are serious random elements involved that keep them from being perfectly predictable are Fun, however. 

[Jelle]

It's only FUN if you did everything in your power to avoid it, employed all your accumelated knowledge and skill yet not nearly enough. That's when you know you've had fun. Intentionally messing up...eh maybe some may call it fun, I call it fail.

[Naryar]

Breaching hell, getting five forgotten beasts, four bronze colossuses and three zombie sieges all at the same time.

Of couse, the FPS rape due to 400 creatures on your map at the same time is only part of the fun.

Alternatively, conquering hell or flooding the world with magma.

[bitesh]

Kohaku:

Tells us we're overthinking it... writes 5 paragraghs about it.

[Iapetus]

Going straight to the circus could be fun if your miners are also soldiers, and pretty experienced at that, otherwise you know you're gonna get your ass handed to you. There's no point. I don't think you can normally embark with good enough dwarfs for that to be fun.

Back in 40d if you timed your abandon right you could reclaim with up to like 80 skilled soldiers and tear through just about anything that wiped your old fortress out and then more. Those fun times vanished with 2010 though.

Unless you lost a couple in the process, whereaupon all the rest tantrum (because they are all friends with each other), and you lose the entire rest of your reclaim army to the tantrum spiral.

[oven_baked]

DF is like Life. You WILL lose eventually, though starvation, madness, HFS, Invaders, vampire, idiocy, flooding, magma, Forgotten beasts...
Eventually one(or more) will get you (well as long as you don't give up due to FPS death.)
It's the awesome moments which are fun, these can come from FUN, but not necessary. Scrapping together a fort from the ashes or fighting off hell are fun, they can also be FUN, but it's not the impending doom that makes them fun.

[NW_Kohaku]

Kohaku:

Tells us we're overthinking it... writes 5 paragraghs about it.

Your point?

Perhaps I should have said that you were letting your thoughts about the notion of Fun from a narrowly defined and detailed-oriented view followed to their extreme conclusions cloud your perspective of what Fun was originally supposed to mean and how it has expanded since then. 

However, that isn't quite as pithy.

[bitesh]

... you were letting... were clouding... 

Not a sentence.

[NW_Kohaku]

... you were letting... were clouding... 

Not a sentence.

My apologies, I rewrote that sentence a few times and lost track of its structure.

I hope I did not overly offend your grammatic sensibilities. 

[bitesh]

Don't talk to me about offense when you're the one who was offended in the first place.

EDIT: Proofread your shit, and all that'll be averted.

[FistFacer]

Even fun can kill your dwarfys.

"Fun strikes dwarf miner in the head smashing the skull threw the brain"