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[PatrikLundell]

In a small fortress every dorf is needed. True, you get migrants who are legendary wax makers, or have no skills at all, but those are simply retrained into useful professions, offloading some of the tasks heaped onto the previous residents. Killing them in the hope of getting "better" migrants in the replacement wave isn't even effective from a crass min/max perspective, since the chances of getting migrants with the skills you want are low, and training doesn't take that long.
However, I have yet to get a psycho dorf who maims and kills others. In fact, I think I've had only one case of a dorf destroying furniture, kicking animals, and fight. Trying to keep the stress level down probably helps.
And I try to keep my dorfs clothed in masterworks clothing, with the inferior stuff hauled off by the garbage trucks, a.k.a. caravans. This, of course, requires additional dwarfpower...

[cochramd]

I think I'm more wrathful than sadistic since I never really set out to hurt something so much as kill it. Sure, I do (try to) arrange for some creatures to die some very painful deaths, but my priority is always to ensure their deaths. If you gave me an option that made them suffer but did nothing towards killing them, I would not take it. When I mass pit goblins, I do not drop them 1 z-level onto featherwood floors; I drop them dozens of z-levels onto menacing spikes! When I have my way, every uncaptured goblin is ripped to shreds by weapon traps all made from masterwork mechanisms and loaded with 10 masterwork adamantine large serrated discs each, and every captured goblin falls at least 30 z-levels onto 10 masterwork adamantine menacing spikes surrounded by magma which will disintegrate their corpses before there is any need to clean them up. The end product of my work will always be dead goblins; maimed and crippled goblins are produced only as intermediate steps to dead goblins.

Giant sponge shows up in my river, potentially blocking other, more interesting animals? I'll build a pair of towers to support a bridge 18 z-levels above him from which I will drop cinnabar boulders on that waste of flesh.

A useless and possibly dangerous animal wanders onto the map instead of a useful one? My military, armed with only masterworks, will kill it. They might kill it before it gets caged, or they might kill after it gets caged as a training exercise, but they will kill it (unless they die of old age first). Any useful animal who kills a fortress member will also be killed.....though in most cases, it only ends up being killed sooner than it would have been killed otherwise.

I use bone bolts for hunting to conserve metal, and am annoyed at how long it takes for my hunters to kill most animals. I think I'll try to figure out how to mod bones so that bone bolts are more lethal against unarmored targets but not armored ones.

Even though some of the more painful ways to die amuse me more, I don't really want things to suffer for the sake of suffering, I just want things to die.

[ZM5]

Gameplay-wise, I think it's the case of characters in game suddenly acting completely different and out of character when under the control of the player.

Dwarven ethics in the raws are obviously much different than what ends up happening in most well-known forts. Randomly genned forts are also, well, they're labyrinths, but they're not insane like having networks pumping magma to the surface in order to scorch the surrounding site or a temple to Armok where the blood of elves and other lesser races flows out of fountains.

In terms of player mentality, I think the game just has so many opportunities for creative sadism and it also doesn't reward acting "heroic" that much. Even then, you can do heroic things but still carry them out in sadistic ways, in adventure mode especially. Also the violence that is the result of being sadistic is just so...over the top and hilarious, that it in itself has its own pull. I guess you associate stuff like this, in the game anyway, with it being funny so you seek it out, despite how repugnant it may actually be on closer inspection.
Atleast that's my 2 dorf bux.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to stomp a baby until it vomits.

[MrRoboto75]

You can break any dwarf and make them "not care about anything anymore" with enough effort.  That said, they typically aren't naturally this way.

Although their main way of dealing with negative emotions is through violence, which often only begets more violence, until the whole fort is in riots.

Most of the sadism results from the player, but to be fair the combat in this game is graphic and relentless.

[Immortal-D]

Interesting points all around.  Answer me this; Minecraft.  I can mod the zombies to look like Elves.  I can install a 128x texture pack with dynamic shadows and full anti-aliasing effects.  The game looks genuinely gorgeous.  Then I can build a bridge atop a magma pit, controlled by a lever, and watch from my balcony as the 'Elves' attempt to attack me and are plunged to a fiery doom.  Why don't I gain anywhere near the amount of satisfaction as I would from the same actions in DF?

[Dunamisdeos]

Interesting points all around.  Answer me this; Minecraft.  I can mod the zombies to look like Elves.  I can install a 128x texture pack with dynamic shadows and full anti-aliasing effects.  The game looks genuinely gorgeous.  Then I can build a bridge atop a magma pit, controlled by a lever, and watch from my balcony as the 'Elves' attempt to attack me and are plunged to a fiery doom.  Why don't I gain anywhere near the amount of satisfaction as I would from the same actions in DF?

I sure would maybe it's because there is implied intent in DF. The Elves have a really stupid reason to be attacking you (from your dorfy perspective). They talk down to you at every opportunity. Attacking your is an implied choice on their part.

Zombies are just zombies. A better analogy might be if a posse of minecraft players wearing elf skins came to destroy your shit, and you dropped THEM into a magma pit.

[MrRoboto75]

Interesting points all around.  Answer me this; Minecraft.  I can mod the zombies to look like Elves.  I can install a 128x texture pack with dynamic shadows and full anti-aliasing effects.  The game looks genuinely gorgeous.  Then I can build a bridge atop a magma pit, controlled by a lever, and watch from my balcony as the 'Elves' attempt to attack me and are plunged to a fiery doom.  Why don't I gain anywhere near the amount of satisfaction as I would from the same actions in DF?

Because DF will tell you exactly how well the elves are melting in the magma, down to near clinical detail.  And corpses, blood, and miasma tend to persist rather than the elves poofing into neat little stacks of rotten meat.

Also minecraft zombies typically don't nag you for punching one too many trees, and bringing metric tonnes of semi useless cloth each month rather than cool caged lions and bears.  some of it is just release from their bullcrap.

[omega_dwarf]

Interesting points all around.  Answer me this; Minecraft.  I can mod the zombies to look like Elves.  I can install a 128x texture pack with dynamic shadows and full anti-aliasing effects.  The game looks genuinely gorgeous.  Then I can build a bridge atop a magma pit, controlled by a lever, and watch from my balcony as the 'Elves' attempt to attack me and are plunged to a fiery doom.  Why don't I gain anywhere near the amount of satisfaction as I would from the same actions in DF?

I sure would maybe it's because there is implied intent in DF. The Elves have a really stupid reason to be attacking you (from your dorfy perspective). They talk down to you at every opportunity. Attacking your is an implied choice on their part.

Zombies are just zombies. A better analogy might be if a posse of minecraft players wearing elf skins came to destroy your shit, and you dropped THEM into a magma pit.

Definitely. Minecraft mobs are "dumb." Clearly just props intended to be destroyed by the player, without any thought or ramification. When everything has a past and a reason (even a flimsy one, as is sometimes the case in DF), it gets much more personal, and sometimes more thought-provoking.

That being said, DF has been made in such a way that many people (myself included) choose not to do harm to sentients unless it's really war; it gives people some pause; there's room for interpretation; elves, in DF, are more than just mobs that poof into items - they were purposely designed to be that way. And goblins are still a bit above creepers that kamikaze into your base for no apparent reason. They attack because their race hates everyone, and they're cruel. (But then there are the interesting points of their immortality, kidnapped children gaining important positions in goblin society, a lack of genocide against other races in captured sites, etc.)

So props to Toady for recreating a lot more realism than you generally see in a game - and either accidentally revealing a dark part of players' minds or showing how incompatible most games (and gamers' attitudes, coming from them) are with real life.

[contheman]

I've actually often felt like dwarves have a strong bent away from the sadistic. Even in the example of the fell dwarf, look at all of the other dwarves reactions. They're Horrified! When your brave military marches out to defeat the oncoming goblin horde in glorious battle, the dwarves inside, whose very lives are being saved by their valorous brothers and sisters, don't throw a big victory party in their honor afterward. Rather, if they go outside to clean up the mess, like a bunch of bleeding-hearted liberals, they're going to be horrified and break down at seeing the corpses of the enemy piled up at their gate. Sometimes I'm surprised they haven't tried to sentence my militia commander for excessive use of force (cause I do have one who more often than not removes every appendage from his foes before finally decapitating them).

I think most of the sadism in DF comes from the player's side, but I'm not sure I can explain exactly where that comes from. @Zuglarkun is certainly on to something. I'm sure their is a whole body of philosophy that ponders the pull towards the sadistic and why it has such high "entertainment" value.

I swear to god that after at least 4 in-game years, almost everyone has some degree of PTSD.

[ZM5]

There's another theory I thought of - a lot of the sadism might come from the game giving a sense of being a "god" of your own world.

The best example would be the DF from Scratch thread - it was basically like the 7 days of creation from the Bible. Except with more molten glass for creature blood.

A lot of other people here like myself obviously create stuff as well to a lesser extent, oftentimes fiddling with it until it works properly - if its glitchy at first but you manage to fix it theres a rather large sense of satisfaction to it, like a mad scientist putting together a successful genetic abomination. Or well, more like a god managing to create an entire species just based off of creative vision. Really gives the feeling that you're in control of everything, that you're the master of your own domain; which obviously gives you the right to do anything you want to it.

Kill its inhabitants or save them, create creatures that are beneficial and cuddly or MurderDeathKillTron Mk. 40,000, make a hospitable world or one that is scorching hot and nearly unlivable. All of that you can do, depending if you find being "good" more entertaining or "evil" being the more amusing route. Though I assume for a lot of us it's a mix of both; I do oftentimes get satisfaction from people in adv mode calling me a legendary hero, but at the same time the thought of spilling someone's guts, severing them, then using them to beat their head in and chucking them with enough force at another person to break their ribs is incredibly amusing.