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[blizzerd]

this is a part i personally would add to the "culture" that toady wants to add later on, this wont work with dwarf fort as is now cause dwarves don't have any culture yet

anyway:

as time goes on in df, history is recorded

dragons are slain, mythical beasts rampage etc, and thats all cool and dandy

but thats not how it "could" or even "should" work

in my opinion, events should undergo the following 4 changes

1: events never recorded (2 isolated warriors fighting to the death and both die, for example) could just as well never have happened... that "record" should be removed out of the active history register

2: events no longer recorded in a society (ether written/etched, or mouth to mouth) is lost... and is removed out of the active record

3: every time an event is re-recorded by mouth to mouth or by "interpreting" an engraving or whatever, it mutates...

4: "event record" mutation amount is determined by the quality of the sender, the quality and quantity of the receivers, the "epic" scale of the event and the compared similarity with previously heard  records

---

some explaining for each point, but i think it will be hardly satisfactory for some

1: these events should not be discarded, and can be logged as non-history events, they should not or no longer mutate

2: if no-one knows the story in a world, then how could anyone make an engraving of it? or talk about it?

3: everyone lies... everyone exaderates, its practically impossible to tell a story 100% accurate if you do not read it from a piece of paper
it can have a 0% mutation, or a 99% mutation depending all the variables (is the dwarf just making up a story and as done with most fictional stories bases it on a muse? or does he actually try to tell the tale as he was told it a few years back? is he actually good at doing what he is trying to do? etc) but probably there should be aimed for an average of 5 to 10% per record "generation" (each time its told to the next)
noteworthy would be that engravings and written word themselves do not mutate, they can be a mutated interpretation, or they can be interpretable with added mutation, but the engrave itself will for all of its life tell the exact same story

4: sentient beings however will "mutate" the story each time they tell it, changing details in the story, eroding its base of truth gradually and changing it into what they desire and like or hate and despise to glorify or obscurify the story as it is being told over and over again... taking into account that several sources can tell the same story with different details splitting the story in versions and possibly even entire different stories

as stories are told and told again, and brought by caravans and trade relations to distant realms of the country they will mutate from fact into myth and legend
and really all this can be done with a very simple "rudimentary" simulator in world generation possibly adding no more then a max of 5 to 10% of generating time for actual civilisation generation and since all the stories in df are generated procedurally (not randomly) half of the code required is already in, ready to be used (just generate a base story, add "mutations" to the base story as the dwarves tell the story for the first time then build on top of the mutations for any dwarf hearing it 3th hand and telling it again, drop any generated mutations that are forgotten etc...

side note: i dont want this to be implemented before all the military arch is completed, and culture is added in more, since this would be a part of it

[NW_Kohaku]

Legends Mode as it exists right now needs to exist for the foreseeable future, however, as it is the only way for anyone to even know what happened during worldgen, if only for the purposes of debugging.

Right now, if you wipe away all the history, then does it really even matter that there once was a goblin civilization here, now that all the goblins are dead, their fortresses toppled, and nobody cares about the relics of the past?  Does the fact that dragons once existed really matter at all when they're all dead, and everyone who remembered them is also dead?

How will players or mod-makers ever know what is going on without something like Legends Mode?

[Wyrm]

Separate into "actual history" and "history as recorded and remembered"?

[Jeoshua]

I'd like to be able to talk to people about the time that that old dastardly Centaur attacked them.  "Oh I swear, he was 12 feet tall, with razor sharp fangs.  He had... uh, a trunk... yeah.... I fought him with my bare hands!"

Obviously lying and sucking at it.

Possibly people could sometimes report being attacked by a beast, and even have a procedurally generated description of the thing.  The beauty part of this is that if people would tell you there was something stalking the woods that had feathers and 8 legs, 4 curling horns and a trunk... you would think they were just talking about a Titan!

Which would be made even better is if these stories were interspersed with more normal conversation about the beast they fought that actually DID exist.  You might even get a quest from someone to kill something, and not know whether or not they were just seeing boogiemen outside at night

[NW_Kohaku]

Separate into "actual history" and "history as recorded and remembered"?

Yeah, basically.

You can occasionally see comments from Toady that comment on villagers "and their amazingly good memory" of events that happened a thousand years before they were born, so I think that Toady wants to get around to this eventually.

I just hope that "Legends Mode Classic" continues to exist in some sort of init or worldgen option into the future, for the sake of letting players understand what sort of impacts their mods have on worldgen.  Much like HFS or night creatures, in some mods, you can change enough of the world that things just don't look like vanilla at all, anymore, and you want to have the ability to actually know how the world actually worked out.

[Jeoshua]

Maybe he should make use of the Memory stat as it already exists in the game.  Basically make a roll on their Memory or some kind of History skill to see how much of the story they remember, and depending on some other of their personality traits like Creativity and Truthfulness, maybe they embellish just a wee bit, with some procedurally generated nonsense.  If they're particularly Truthful, they would probably tell you just "I don't know". This nonsense wouldn't be input as "unlocked" in Legends mode, tho, so you would have to talk to alot of people about the same area or battle before you had the true story of what happened.

[NW_Kohaku]

People aren't necessarily lying when they talk about these things, however.  If a bear towered over someone, and they turned around to see a giant paw bearing down on them, knocking them unconscious, then when they woke up (presuming someone else chased the bear away before it killed the guy) they might think the bear was 12 feet tall, since from their perspective it looked huge.

Being truthful only means that they aren't purposefully trying to lie, but that doesn't mean they, themselves are perfectly objective observers. 

In the events that occurred 100 years ago, as well, they might be truthfully reporting what was told to them... when what was told to them was a lie.

[Jeoshua]

I say to use Truthfulness because it measures how likely the person is to embellish what they know vs telling you they're not sure.

[blizzerd]

Separate into "actual history" and "history as recorded and remembered"?

im sorry i was not clear, my english is limited

this is how it should be, remembered and recorded, and the stuff that the game logs for amusement and debugging (i called it taking out of active records)

[Jeoshua]

There is already a distinction between historical figures and general population.  As well, many wars are declared "unimportant".  Maybe this distinction should follow more into adventure mode legends?

Because all history is already "history as recorded" and only records the names and events of people the game has deemed interesting.

[harborpirate]

People aren't necessarily lying when they talk about these things, however.  If a bear towered over someone, and they turned around to see a giant paw bearing down on them, knocking them unconscious, then when they woke up (presuming someone else chased the bear away before it killed the guy) they might think the bear was 12 feet tall, since from their perspective it looked huge.

Being truthful only means that they aren't purposefully trying to lie, but that doesn't mean they, themselves are perfectly objective observers. 

In the events that occurred 100 years ago, as well, they might be truthfully reporting what was told to them... when what was told to them was a lie.

From the perspective of the player, these are the same. It doesn't matter whether the character that you're speaking to is purposely embellishing the tale or that they were fooled by some trick of circumstance.

Either way, I'd be in favor of a "written history" that reflected a modified version of the actual record. (I agree that the actual record will still need to be kept, for a variety of reasons) Some events that never happened would get added, some events would be completely forgotten, kill counts would be exaggerated, etc.

I'd also be in favor of embellishment of monster descriptions by townspeople in adventure mode, to obscure whether they were giving you a true description or not. That could add a nice element of discovery for the player, wherein you could go around asking about this creature and find the commonalities to get an idea of the truth before you went and actually hunt it down.

[kylefiredemon]

Legends Mode as it exists right now needs to exist for the foreseeable future, however, as it is the only way for anyone to even know what happened during worldgen, if only for the purposes of debugging.

Right now, if you wipe away all the history, then does it really even matter that there once was a goblin civilization here, now that all the goblins are dead, their fortresses toppled, and nobody cares about the relics of the past?  Does the fact that dragons once existed really matter at all when they're all dead, and everyone who remembered them is also dead?

How will players or mod-makers ever know what is going on without something like Legends Mode?

The way to solve would be to have Archeologists of different races mess around with the ruins. Hey we could have some show up at an abandoned fort!

[NW_Kohaku]

Legends Mode as it exists right now needs to exist for the foreseeable future, however, as it is the only way for anyone to even know what happened during worldgen, if only for the purposes of debugging.

Right now, if you wipe away all the history, then does it really even matter that there once was a goblin civilization here, now that all the goblins are dead, their fortresses toppled, and nobody cares about the relics of the past?  Does the fact that dragons once existed really matter at all when they're all dead, and everyone who remembered them is also dead?

How will players or mod-makers ever know what is going on without something like Legends Mode?

The way to solve would be to have Archeologists of different races mess around with the ruins. Hey we could have some show up at an abandoned fort!

If you created a modded race, and then started up the game, only to find out that the modded race you created is dead, would you want to spend several game years building chains of fortresses or sending an adventurer over the whole region just to hope to find some shred of evidence of the creature that once existed, so that you can find out why it isn't here, anymore?

Or do you just want to know what went wrong so that you can correct it, and make your mod better right away?

[Jeoshua]

[quote author=NW_Kohaku link=topic=83925.msg2247274#msg2247274
If you created a modded race, and then started up the game, only to find out that the modded race you created is dead, would you want to spend several game years building chains of fortresses or sending an adventurer over the whole region just to hope to find some shred of evidence of the creature that once existed, so that you can find out why it isn't here, anymore?
[/quote]

Yes, I would.  If I haven't set "Reveal All History" to True, then I shouldn't be able to know this kind of information without taking extreme measures.  However, if all history is revealed by this setting, it would be factual information that I would be able to rely upon.

Legends mode, after having history revealed, should be immutable and true fact.  Unrevealed history should be dark, and the hints you get in game obscured and distorted.