You should probably look for all the data you can find on Personality Rewrites, which are an upcoming aspect of the short term releases in the devlog.
Personality Rewrites are intended to focus specifically upon character goals, and making personalities more directly related to specific career choices.
This should probably be a good starting point:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60554.msg1377634#msg1377634Personalities come up in world gen, but they are kind of lacking, because the modern system is so non-judgmental, he he he. There isn't much of any intra-entity strife, so they aren't used for that anyway. So we're going to end up augmenting it with additional goals and "virtue/vice"-type stuff, and that should let us have people work out their ambitions in a consistent way, and then we should have more meat for the succession/schism stuff. I'm not sure about the future of the current personality facets. They are useful for things, but not so much for this. Freeing up some of the boring professions for entity pop people should also give us more room for personal ambition among the realized people (or appropriate people can be elevated from entity pops if they don't arise -- it's somewhat disappointing not to trace everybody back all the way to the beginning, but it's the only reasonable way at this point).
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60554.msg1943773#msg1943773I tried to find a DF Talk quote too, but the one I was thinking of might be in the one I still have to edit, so I'm confused. In any case, yeah, I think the current facets I've got are too wishy-washy. Instead of trying to use them as the basic axes and figuring out how something like "greed" might arise from them, it seems like using a new set which isn't focused on being non-judgmental will be more efficient. I'm not going over to a yes/no archetype/quirk/trait system. This will definitely include the foundations for crime, although initially we're thinking less about criminal dwarves and more about villains and their motivations in general for the army arc. My specific goal at first is just to capture a wider breadth of dispositions, since I had trouble writing world gen AI with the current facets. From there, I think adding personality effects to the game should be easier. I think goals and dreams are also a part of this. The "needs" rewrite is related to that, but we're still working that out.
So that kind of gets to an additional part of the overall personality rewrite which would be an emotion system. In adventure mode emotions are a tricky thing because you really don't want to get too far ahead of yourself there, getting into the players head, whereas if it's just doing some helpful bookkeeping for you with your favourite hobbies and stuff, that's actually a really good thing, but if it's actually trying to force you one way or another based on what it thinks you should be feeling, that's quite strange. But once you get to the other guys then emotions are a great thing. Right now we just have this slow descent into unhappiness and despair and psychotic breaks for the poor dwarves, and that sucks. They should be able to just snap, throw a tantrum, come back and be the happiest little dwarf that they could be, having worked out their issues, but it's kind of strange now how it's only long term despair and so on being tracked, rather than short term events.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=84398.msg2922258#msg2922258I see that the secret-based interactions have a hint as to what would motivate units to search them out in worldgen. Are there any others besides a fear of dying (as in necromancers) and if so, what are they?
Relatedly, for vampire- and werewolf-style divine-punishment thingies, are there any hint tags besides MAJOR_CURSE and, if so, what do they do?
Nah, that's it for goals. It's just a little thing that I needed to throttle things before the personality rewrite. The hints that I've needed so far are MAJOR_CURSE, ATTACK, GREETING, CLEAN_SELF and CLEAN_FRIEND. There aren't any beneficial vanilla interactions, but as I mentioned in the last answer I could throw in a kind of beneficial catch-all until I have time to work further on magic AI. It would be cool if there could just be a hint like "AS_NEEDED" or something that'll let it analyze the effects for beneficial/harmful effects or something, but I'm not sure what's going to work out. The more versatile the effects are, the harder it is for the computer to analyze them.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=84398.msg2629820;topicseen#msg2629820As the life of people becomes more complicated, this will be more natural, but right now they don't have lives. Once they have life goals etc. from the personality rewrite, we'll be at the starting point of one of our overarching conceptual goals, which is to allow you to pick out a person or family and help them indefinitely, as a sort of proof-of-dynamic-world thing, even if it is a strange thing to do. That still wouldn't necessarily get at the mundane side of life, but it would be related.
Generally, try to build off of what Toady is already planning to do.
I would say, however, if you want to have Urist McSoapmaker longingly look at the carpenter's workshop, and try to learn carpentry in their spare time, then maybe it would be best to start working on the mechanics of a labor system that allows dwarves to dynamically choose their own labors while still respecting player commands for labor force allocation.