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[Destroyer224]

If the progression indicator isn't reliable and is only there to trick you, then everyone will ignore it and we're back to not having an indicator. It's not a useful warning; it's not even an effective trick for new players, because as soon as Joe Newbie sees a strange mood, he'll go to the wiki and look it up, and one of the things it will say is "The text displayed in the dwarf's description may change over time. This isn't a reliable warning."

When I was talking about random switching, I meant something that happens once in several dozen times. Just common enough to spice things up every once in a while, but not nearly often enough to undermine the reliability of the indicator. Someone paying close attention could still spot the difference, but it can still throw a wrench in your plans of how you were going to handle (or not handle) the situation.

[Derakon]

In general, I find that nerfing is always easier than making something stronger. So I say leave it at the default "dwarf steadily proceeds through these N stages until they snap", and if need be, that can always become more unpredictable.

[Felblood]

Keeping things simple makes it easier to modify them, not making them strong.

5 stages is too many, it's too much to learn and too much to write, for a system that will need to be reduced. Why bother making all those, when the last three stages are the only ones anyone will care about?

Likewise, why bother with different symptoms for different insanities? I'm not sure, but I'm pretty confidant that your insanity isn't currently decided until you actually snap. Changing that is a lot of work for a fairly minimal effect that, as people have stated, shouldn't be that predictable, anyway. Urist McBorderline just needs to show some sort of symptom to indicate that he's getting close to the edge.

It's silly to say that this is too minor of an advantage to count, this makes infinitesimally easier something that is actually pretty easy once you figure it out. In point of fact, the added complexity will make it slightly harder for non-wiki newbies to figure out the system. The purpose of this is to make moods more interesting, and to give the player some information on how well he's doing. Simpler is better in every respect.

That said, these are crazy people, and it'd be nice to give them a little spice. So, I'd be cool to have your symptoms randomized, like the rest of the world.

Currently there are only four funny moods, and it'd be nice for them to gain a bit of variety. You could have your Fey mood with a side of facial twitch, or a Secretive mood with a bit of unintelligible mumbling.

If the symptom change at the end proves too confusing, have them gain a second symptom, instead of just switching their symptom out. You'd have to check against duplicates of the same symptom, though.

For extra Fun have the advanced symptoms overwrite the material requests, hurting players who have forgotten what that guy wanted in the first place.

[irmo]

When I was talking about random switching, I meant something that happens once in several dozen times. Just common enough to spice things up every once in a while, but not nearly often enough to undermine the reliability of the indicator.

See here and here on the subject of pseudo-fair highly improbable random disasters.

Having said that, I think some random variability in the length of each "stage" would make sense, as long as it's consistently variable within some range, rather than "one in 150 times, stages 2 and 3 get skipped entirely". That kind of thing that just leads to savescumming out of it when it happens.

[Felblood]

Not receiving information that we currently don't receive hardly counts as a "disaster". This is not the same thing as earthquakes or giant meteor strikes, but more along the lines of a goblin invasion. Setbacks occur from time to time, and you have to be ready for them, or recover from them.

Different people put different levels of security around funny dwarves, at different stages of the process, in case they snap, and I don't want to see those interesting gameplay decisions go away. That might qualify as a disaster, but even then I doubt it.

-and save scumming is only happens with people who savescum. If they want to do that to themselves, over a random event in a random world, it's not going to bother me any, but don't assume that everyone is going to do it.

Furthermore, giving people too much information about what type of negitive consequences they're looking at might lead to things as undwarven as people deliberately preventing the manufacture of artifacts. Clearly this cannot be allowed to happen.