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[Ankhammarad]

They would take a decent amount of clay to make and maybe a priest. when built you can use Q to give them orders like a workshop.
They would be slow moving but could power things like millstones and pumps. 
They would act like a statue meaning you'd need wider hallways if you don't want your dwarfs getting blocked.

This might have to wait till magic is added, but give some suggestions.

[Jeoshua]

First of all, drop the whole "Disc World" thing from it.  Golems are straight from Jewish legend, not a modern book.  And as I recall, nothing was particularly special about Disc World's Golems.

Secondly, if they were in the game, they would be creatures one could build, not workshops.

Third, all creatures from butterflies to dragons take up one tile, and can be moved through.  This is not an intentionally coded behavior but a limitation of the engine.  They could be made to drop statues on death like bronze colossi already do.

[Patchy]

While I think it'd be cool to have golems/constructed guardians, it is probably something that'll have to wait for the magic arc before we see it. You can, however, mod in a golem creature now. You can't build it, but you could set them up so that you can import them from the mountain homes where they are constructed and activated.

[Starver]

Firstly "Discworld".  No space (or hyphen, as I've seen elsewhere), at least for the particular Discworld we're talking about.  (In contrast, those Discworld denizens who have any reason to know of our existence (i.e. the wizards who accidentally called us into existence) call our our world (both this planet and the entire universe) "Roundworld".)

A world and a mirror of worlds, and as mentioned, anything you see in Pratchett's work is going to have some form of inspiration from the real world (very little could ever arise in a vacuum).  Although his most ☼MASTERWORK☼ pieces of reference are often reversed/subverted/extended/combined or otherwise not as you'd expect, so the .303 bookworm, republican bee, ambiguous puzuma, quantum weather butterfly and vermine (even characters themselves such as Death) aren't just mere copies of the real world examples but have their own twists.  I would guess that DF players are also in the likely-to-read-Pratchett group.  (Although I'm not suggesting that all of us like him and his works, but I confess that I do.)

So you have three main problems when suggesting things from the Pratchettverse:

• There's probably an IRL source that's the original source of the more general concepts.
• DF is Toady's work and not Pratchett's, so putting explicitly Discworld-variety things in (while maybe possible as a fan-mod[1]) would be fair for neither Toady nor Pterry.
• Anything practical (or potentially so, in known future development arcs) you can derive from Discworld has probably been suggested before, anyway (and I've definitely seen golems suggested[3]).

Not wishing to shoot you down, but ideally you should search for the previous Golem thread(s), check out what's already been mentioned and if you still think there's something you can add then you've got the opportunity to either Necro that thread or start a thread like this with "I've read <thread-link>, <thread-link> and <thread-link>, and I would just like to discuss <new aspect>..."



FWIW, on the basis that this will actually be a new conversation on Golems, I'm wary that this is another "money for nothing" item.  It should need significant effort.  However you feel about the common glut of stone crafts, you certainly don't want it to be simple to create (or maintain) a whole load of golems.

Pump-powering golems should not be (like "Mister Pump" of Going Postal fame) be set in place and keep going, regardless of environment.  If the effort is not within the same order of magnitude of either setting up a mechanical power-feed of keeping a happy dwarf (or team of them) capable of manning the pump for as long as necessary, then the idea needs balancing so that it is.


[1] Pterry doesn't mind people making fanfics, and tolerates the likes of the Discworld MUD ("MUD? What MUD?"), and is not horribly possessive of his IP in these regards.  All as long as no money is made[2] and there's no possibility that he can be accused of stealing someone else's ideas.  Such that even "it would be nice if..." suggestions made in forums he has frequents in an on/off nature are discouraged most heavily by the regulars.  Still, a bit of netiquette helps in the firt place.

[2] And hoping that those who write their fanfiction (even slashfiction!) will go off and write their own things once they've finished with the derivative works.

[3] Searching the forums for the intended idea will pick up posts.  However friendly we are as a forum, here, people get tired of saying things like "Yeah, gunpowder's been discussed ad-nauseum", and the like.

[NW_Kohaku]

I would more generally say this - you should come up with ideas that you think are good ideas because they would be fun to play with in the game, not fun because they remind you of something else you enjoyed.

If it's only fun because it reminds you of something else you enjoyed, then all it can ever be is a reminder of the fun you had with something else.  And if you never read the Discworld novels (I don't know the percentages, but I'm sure a significant number of people who play this game haven't read Pratchett,) it won't be fun at all.

It's not necessarily bad to take inspiration from another source, but generally speaking, there's a difference between saying (and how something will be received) if you say, "We could really have fun doing X, and there is an example of this in Source Y, and if we use Z, we can incorporate X into the sort of mechanics already in our existing game," as opposed to, "I love Source Y, and Source Y had X, so we should be more like Source Y by having X, too!"

Honestly, I love Pratchett as much as the next guy, but every time I see Discworld in a suggestion title, I wince.  Discworld is a joke.  Pratchett didn't plan anything in Discworld out, he just went with what he thought was funny at the time, and then his fans basically wound up cajoling him to reverse-engineer a crazy sort of continuity and rationalization of the universe.  (And likewise, bearded females was a joke so that he could make a comment about dwarves not even being able to tell one another apart... there's no reason Toady has to base a work he takes seriously around a one-time joke...)

This goes double for Dungeons and Dragons. 

[Starver]

[...] Honestly, I love Pratchett as much as the next guy [...]

By posting this reply, as well as the one before, I've more or less guaranteed that (whichever way you read it) I am the next guy.  And I believe you are correct in that assumption.  And I agree with you.  As well as D&D, also add the "grandaddy of them all[1]" of LOTR.

(Sorry, keeping the derailing going a little longer, but I've more or less put my initial thoughts about the golem issue in my previous post.  All further thoughts I have really should await a proper context to allow me to reply to and place them into a legitimate conversation on the issue.)


[1] Well, in modern era.  There's an ancestry even to that, but then you start looking at (edit: "...the likes of..."[2]) Beowulf, which is not so widely known (except perhaps in some modern re-envisioning or other, like that CGI movie a few years back).

[2] Don't want to pollute the thread more, so just editing.  Needless to say that I didn't mean to say it was Beowulf alone, but merely trying to suggest older histories and tales.  Many of which (not including Beowulf, except maybe glancingly) from which Wagner got the Ring Cycle and from which there was an amount of influence upon LOTR.  There was something about Vikings on the radio, the other day, which discussed the changing (and largely modern, i.e. couple of centuries or so) opinions about who they were, what they did, why they did it, which involved discussion about how Wagner's interpretation of the epics of that area was a major influence to more recent thinking.  Ah yes, I remember now.  It was "The Film Programme", BBC Radio 4, Friday of last week (probably no longer available on Listen Again, as today's programme will supersede it), in a discussion regarding the upcoming Thor film.

[NW_Kohaku]

Technically, The Ring of Nibelung (the Wagner opera) was the inspiration for Lord of the Rings, and actually had a much more symbolic meaning in the nature of the conflict as one of logic/technology/law versus emotion/nature/chaos that plays on through into D&D, as well. 

And even THAT was inspired by plays and epic poems that were inspired by the older folklores and Norse myth, like Volsunga Saga.