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[gurthang]

Hi everybody, hope the impressions of a beginner player are not too out of topic.

There are a couple facets of Dwarf Fortress that consistently spoil my identitification with the game.

First, there is the problem of female dwarves. In the Lord of the ring and in almost all fantasy literature, art and comics I have read dwarves are almost exclusively male. Dwarv-esses nearly are mytical beings, almost as rare to be seen in the light of the day as dragons and chimeras. In the game, not only the genres are equally represented, but there is no functional distinction amongst them! It is pretty ludicrous to imagine Gimli with breasts. I would rather imagine female dwarves to be confined in the most impenetrable recesses of the fortress, to be singly married to dwarf aristocrats or otherwise impregnated according to some caste order of priority. The pregnancy should be extremely long (9 years instead of 9 months?) and the children ought to be cherished and treasured above all richesses of the earth.

The second problem is the automatic way migrants arriving to a new fortress are accepted. Granted, the players’ fortresses mostly are of recent foundation and so they tend to welcome immigration, but the impossibility to discriminate among the arrivals clashes against the tradition of exclusivity and seclusiveness that should distinguish dwarf culture. After a fortress reaches a certain point of development, there should be a way to turn away undesidered migrants, and even to broadcast to the outside world requests for certain specializations.

The game is  great, but frankly, a military half-composed of women and fortresses swarming with irksome dwarf children spoil the mood somehow.

[Ulfarr]

I'll give you the benefit of doubt and I'll assume that you aren't trolling with this. As you have seen DF doesn't confine itself in the tropes that you've mentioned and if anything it's only going to disregard them even more with each new update. So if that bothers you that much then I'm afraid that this isn't the game for you.

With the unpleasant part out of the way, I 'm happy to tell you that for the most part you can already play the game just like you want, with the tools that are available. If you want to keep your female dwarves and their children in your basement their secure quarters then you can use barrows to do it, without fiddling with any doors, locks or whatever. If you don't want female dwarves in the military then stop assigning them to a squad (I would suggest to use Dwarf therapist for that).

If you don't want to keep certain immigrants you can just expel them, or just barrow them outside or send them to explore the caverns. Alterantively you can just put the pop cap low enough to stop immigration altogether and only raise your pop when your dwarves give birth or by accepting petitions from your visitors.

As for the pregnancy period you could always make a suggestion here to become modable and while you are at it you can also suggest about requesting certain skilled workers.

[Starver]

Not wishing to dissuade you (OP, now I'm ninjaed) from your own headcanon, but bear in mind that this isn't specifically a Middle Earth simulator. It is a simulator of a world of its own. There are plenty of other differences.  Neither is the game Discworldian, though it does (inadvertently) greatly echo some parts of that genre's treatment, in its own distinctive spin on the "Female dwarves[1] are rarely/never seen" thing.

Pretty much every Dwarf 'version' over the better part of the last century has used LOTR/Hobbit as a handy hook for inspiration, but in many different ways. Warhammer, I think, just has female dwarves being much rarer and more precious.  I think it's mostly that absentee female dwarves are notably absentee in works (most of them) where the Bechdel Test has been retroactively failed in so many ways not limited to the dwarven races.  You can consider this an author-quirk. And DF's author quirks differently.

Pre-Tolkien German mythology has no problems with female dwarfs where the plot demands.

It's a not unknown opinion, though I hope you can get beyond this. I'm sure you'll find other mood-bending issues as well, but perhaps grow to love it anyway. And you can mod many things in and out of gameplay (or just enforce arbitrary self-rules on your little tribe), if you feel like you need to.


[1] Or "dwarfs". Even Tolkien regretted not going with that version, later on. I may mix and match which one I write accidentally.

[PatrikLundell]

@Starver: I make a distinction between "dwarfs" and "dwarves". The former are humans subjected to the various conditions that result in dwarfism, while the latter are members of a fantasy race.

@OP: As mentioned, Toady has made his own spin on fantasy races. DF elves aren't noble (except possibly in their own eyes) and have various practices that aren't particularly compatible with other versions of elves (and that can cause friction with other DF races).

DF dwarves have a somewhat longer life span than DF humans, but not extremely much longer (about 160 vs 110 or so), so an extremely long gestation period wouldn't make much sense. Also from a game play perspective, an extremely long gestation period would slow down the build up of fortresses that their players want to build from the starting 7 to a crawl. In fact, it might make it impossible to build such fortresses as marriage has to be done to someone within a certain age span, so not only would the children be old when they finally get into an age span where they can marry, but they'd also be limited to only a few kids of their own before they succumb to death of old age. That is in addition to the fact that violent death isn't exactly unheard of.

[Starver]

@Starver: I make a distinction between "dwarfs" and "dwarves". The former are humans subjected to the various conditions that result in dwarfism, while the latter are members of a fantasy race.

Aye, it's probably a good practice. Though as Discworld dwarfs are... well... "dwarfs", I have to switch spellings anyway for different fantasy treatments that I might commonly want to write about (in fairly equal measure, even if it's normally across different communities of fans).

So instead I rabidly go with Fortress dwarves to Discworldians and Disc dwarfs to Fortressites, when I'm not paying attention to myself...