I was looking through the dev notes and I noticed the large amount of randomisation involved and this got me thinking. Which is better: experiencing similar variations on a theme and then occasionally seeing something really cool and unusual, or seeing consistently strange worlds. My conclusion was the former.
I think that the rarity of exceptional events makes them more special. Think of it this way: how special is a legendary stonecrafter compared with a legendary armoursmith? I'd say a significant difference is their rarity (though the utility of armour is also a factor). I don't want thousands and thousands of creatures with interesting quirks, I want legends and heroes, which requires events which are normal and unexceptional events. I want the freaks to be rare, but by the same token, special.
It is therefore my conclusion to make every single randomised characteristic of the game normally distributed (except for things which are dependent on that dwarf's history). So Toady would set a mean height for dwarves, say, and a standard deviation. From this, you could calculate the likely heights of all the dwarves in an area. The same could be done for things like vision (a few rare people having hawk-like vision or some being blind), hair colour, skill, sanity, wisdom, number of arms, aggression and the like. This could also be applied to the world, with evil or magma proliferation being normally distributed.
A slightly more advanced variation on this theme would be culture specific normal distribution for the MEANS and STANDARD DEVIATIONS of certain characteristics, so some groups would be very similar and others vastly different in different characteristics. Northern dwarves, for example, could be taller than Southern dwarves but not as tall as the freaks up in the mountains who all grow to the height of humans.
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Topic: A way to deal with randomisation? (Read 334 times)