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[rdeforest]

TL;DR: To merge Adventure and Fortress modes, use the relationship between a player's avatar and another unit to determine how much control the player has over the other unit.

I'm reading the DF Talk #22 transcript and I just got to:

Threetoe: The next question is from Baffle Jack and he asked "If the two main modes are heading in a similar direction, will they be combined so that you have the option to skip to where you're the leader of the fort or will a line be drawn between the modes or what?"

Toady:   So it's one of those things, again, that we've been thinking about for years... lots of suggestions... The original game has this idea of being able to have your reclaim party be formed during adventure mode and that kind of thing. And that's all still on the table. The tricky parts are kind of, we don't have any real framework for adventure mode administration yet. You can take over sites in adventure mode now, at least the human ones you can form your own little entity and become the leader of a site. But it doesn't really mean anything. And when you're in fort mode, we didn't want to allow kind of cheap stuff that would allow you to take a dwarf and jump him off a cliff if they're being annoying, by controlling them directly. We want to kind of respect their autonomy.

My suggestion (as already summarized above) is to make the player's control over a unit be a function of the relationship between the player's avatar and the unit. This means that at the start of a Fortress game the expedition leader would be the player's avatar. The player would have all the control we have in Adventure mode now, with additional features to provide the ability to control other units to varying degrees. The other six dwarves would start with a high enough degree of compliance with the leader that the player would have as much control over them as we do in Fortress mode. They would follow the leader's orders by default. If the player improved his relationships with them further she could gain even more control up to the point of taking them over. If they grew to dislike, distrust or just not care about the leader they would become more independent, even to the extreme of just being an NPC like current Adventure mode.

This means an expedition leader could build up a Metropolis of 200 dwarves all the while building a very strong relationship with her general, and then the player could take over the general and lead an army to glory.

It also means Toady's scenario of a player forcing a dwarf to throw itself into magma would require that that dwarf be utterly devoted to the player's avatar. I think that makes a pretty good story. It also has consequences. "Where's Urist?" "Queen Nashonthocit told him to throw himself into magma and he did." "Oh. That's... oh dear." There would be consequences for abusing relationships.

This proposal raises more questions than it answers. Amongst the many hurdles in the way of designing and implementing this gameplay are such elements as:

• This is a kind of abstract player/game relationship which has, to my knowledge, never been done (except maybe in DungeonKeeper). Explaining it to new players will be difficult, and most people will expect the game itself to do the explaining. (I suspect Peter Molyneux has been dreaming about something like this for years.)
• The user interface would have to provide a way for entities to describe complex things to each other like "carve out this part of the mountain" (mining) or "stay in these rooms" (burrows). It would need to have functional maps and books.
• How to fluidly represent what is seen and what is thought to exist? For example, in the current Adventure mode the game uses monochrome to display the avatar's memory of an obscured area. My proposal requires the ability to learn about geographic and architectural features from NPCs and written materials. My chief miner might come to me with an update to tell me the digging I requested is done and the accounting of mined materials is on the Manager's desk (assuming I'm not also the manager). I might want to 'color' the display of my knowledge based on where it came from, perhaps because one of my lieutenants has been lying to me.
• Time scale - this one's a doozy. The granularity in the current Adventure mode is much finer than Fortress mode. To accomplish my proposal, there would have to be some way for the player to adjust the time scale based on circumstances or simple preference. Kerbal Space Program lets the player adjust the time scale but limits them when a coarse scale would make the simulation dangerously inaccurate. I want to retain the degree of control I have during Adventure mode fights but not when I'm waiting for dozens of Fortress projects to finish and I don't have any detail work I need to do.
• This proposal opens up many complicated questions about the nature of relationships and how they impact people's willingness to do things for each other or their ability to accurately convey complex information. The Adams brothers' method of putting everything in terms of stories is probably once again the best approach. We will have to come up with all the best stories which involve transitions from individual to community scale and back and then figure out what parts would be the most fun for the player to interact with.

Dwarf Fortress is already a niche game. The functionality I propose will not widen the audience. However, the game has already inspired dozens of knock-offs which pick a subset of the game to improve on: Minecraft (Notch even said he was inspired by DwarfFortress), Terraria, Clockwork Empires, SpaceBase DF-9, Towns and many more I can't immediately recall. I defend my proposal's ambition by asserting that the community is smarter than it's given credit for and that it takes an ambitious project to break new ground in a field.

Strike the earth!

[pisskop]

ptw.  interesting idea, and Im on a phone so my response is limited.

but, we have to consider the timing of events amoung other things.  Armies being sent  out are good examples.  Do we pause or slow down the progress of events like that so the player can see and participate?  Ive seen one army arrive on site; goblins to a forest retreat.  between the goblins spreading out, their ethics for attacking neutrals, threat assessment, and wonky fear, I didnt know what was going on.  That skirmish was less than one minute fort-time too.

Point being, advenure mode doesnt give or display quite enough info, the reality of how hard it is to stage or find quick events, and even how an unscripted world would process your intervention are off.

Fortress mode, for its own, displays too much.  you arent omnipotent, but you are close.  Its too meta to take over any dwarves, even if you were a 'possession'.  Maybe a faux retirement where you could control a pre-set up dwarf?  Say an adventurer in good standing that signed up to migrate?

That, I think, is the best way to tie the two modes.  Via adventurer preperation (or even sponsership;  the adventurer sponsering the fort or vice versa).  At some point the liason could serve a real purpose, even performing functions like filtering migrants or letting sponsers choose the S7 from a list of (pregenned) characters?

[dwarf_reform]

I've always wanted a simple version of this, to the point that its why I named myself 'dwarf_reform' here In my mind DF wouldn't be complete til you could assume control of a fort-dwarf and experience your fort from eye-level..

As far as time dilation, or accounting for things that AI-dwarves can do that Adv-dwarves can't (like leading animals, or loading siege equipment, or reloading cage traps, using workshops, etc), I have no real ideas For now I'd be fine if you had access only to what the common adventurer can do currently, which is mostly military/combat related.. Getting to a point that you could chat with dwarves and influence their decisions or moods, or run your own workshop, plant a farm plot or go fishing, smooth and engrave a wall, or even get married.. All that would also be amazing, but I'm not that optimistic

I also want adv-mode characters to be able to do the grand majority of what fort-dwarves can (digging, building, planting, crafting), to be balanced

Dungeon Keeper, 1 and 2 Fantastic, fantastic games..