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[NW_Kohaku]

This is Dwarf Fortress.  What is this "abstraction" you speak of?

Not doing things in the most detailed and complex, computationally brute-force way possible?  Are you an elf or something?

The whole of Fortress Mode is an abstraction of Adventurer mode.

That neither makes sense nor is a response to what I was saying.

Plenty of societies marry off their girls at 12-13.  Modern societies only invented the whole 16 thing because it allowed them to prolong the length of education.  The risks of childbirth have not been implemented yet but yes a somewhat increased risk of complications for under 16s could be implemented.

"Plenty of societies" allow marriage of 8-year-old girls, too, but that doesn't mean they're ready to be mothers.  For that matter, "plenty of societies" have essentially no healthcare (and may not even have midwives,) and have commensurately atrocious infant mortality rates and rates of death in childbirth. 

Dwarf Fortress, as it stands, implicates FULL adulthood when it designates a child an adult, and there is no physiological difference between 12 and 120, in spite of that whole "puberty" thing not yet occurring.  (Or at least, not supposed to occur yet in humans...)

Any sort of 12-year-olds-die-in-childbirth change would only make players want to prevent marriages before dwarves hit 16 years of age... which they currently have no direct methods of performing, aside from extremely micromanagement-heavy tricks like personal burrows.   Maybe if there was some weird option where you could pass a law about what age children can be married, but without there being other social laws one can pass, there's a question of why Toady would bother, especially to do something so creepy...

But anyway, a 12-year-old is not an adult, and if jobs are spread out by age, there's good reason a pre-teen can't be an architect that both designs and constructs bridges. 

And how do you expect players to recognize when they have attained those ages?

Growth is divorced from life stages.  Life stages exist solely as a means of dictating what jobs/actions are available, and being a label for players to easily see what age they are.  If you break up what ages jobs become available, there's no reason not to use a label that tells the player what jobs the child is capable of taking.

Because the children start doing the jobs?

Translation: We shouldn't use a feature that exists purely for the ability to alert players to a change in creature status to alert players to a change in creature status, so that players are forced to hover over a child they THINK is about the right age, and constantly check to see if their labors are not blocked off anymore.

You're right, why should DF start making sane, obvious choices that provide players with convenient information when we could hide that information for no good reason, instead?

They learn skills that will be useful when they grow up.  They also make your dwarves more productive, apprentices could also help their masters haul stuff too if hauling is the main issue. 

You mean they get free skills that vastly outpace the almost-exclusively "novice" level of a supposed journeyman worker from the rest of the gameworld before ever doing any actual work.  Woo, if we don't have limits to apprentices to a single master, sign me up to put every random kid on weaponsmith or armorsmith apprenticeship so that I can skip all that training with actual materials nonsense and wait for the moods to make 'em all legendary!

And again, hauling is the ONLY significant factor in job speed.  Especially if you're encouraging players to use only legendaries as masters for these apprentices, (which you are doing if you're linking apprentice skill gain to master skill,) they'll be finishing every task once they do have raw materials in 1 turn, anyway. 

[GoblinCookie]

"Plenty of societies" allow marriage of 8-year-old girls, too, but that doesn't mean they're ready to be mothers.  For that matter, "plenty of societies" have essentially no healthcare (and may not even have midwives,) and have commensurately atrocious infant mortality rates and rates of death in childbirth. 

Dwarf Fortress, as it stands, implicates FULL adulthood when it designates a child an adult, and there is no physiological difference between 12 and 120, in spite of that whole "puberty" thing not yet occurring.  (Or at least, not supposed to occur yet in humans...)

Any sort of 12-year-olds-die-in-childbirth change would only make players want to prevent marriages before dwarves hit 16 years of age... which they currently have no direct methods of performing, aside from extremely micromanagement-heavy tricks like personal burrows.   Maybe if there was some weird option where you could pass a law about what age children can be married, but without there being other social laws one can pass, there's a question of why Toady would bother, especially to do something so creepy...

But anyway, a 12-year-old is not an adult, and if jobs are spread out by age, there's good reason a pre-teen can't be an architect that both designs and constructs bridges. 

At the moment adulthood *is* puberty essentially.  Puberty is the only natural requirement for two individuals to have sex and produce children, which given the present Communist DF society is the only real technical requirement for marraige, they do not really have to be able to run an independant household or manage property portfolios. 

I would imagine that the 12 year old extra baby risk would generally be sorted out by having a legendery midwife.  If 12 year old's getting pregnant invariably kills them they would not have evolved that ability in the first place and it happens quite often despite our 4 years regimen of socially enforced celibacy the non-enforcement of which is considered 'creepy'. 

Translation: We shouldn't use a feature that exists purely for the ability to alert players to a change in creature status to alert players to a change in creature status, so that players are forced to hover over a child they THINK is about the right age, and constantly check to see if their labors are not blocked off anymore.

You're right, why should DF start making sane, obvious choices that provide players with convenient information when we could hide that information for no good reason, instead?

Nothing keeps us from potentially setting VPLs for a child for labours they cannot presently do.  We just make the labours a different colour to designate that they are not presently old enough to do them; there we have it. 

You mean they get free skills that vastly outpace the almost-exclusively "novice" level of a supposed journeyman worker from the rest of the gameworld before ever doing any actual work.  Woo, if we don't have limits to apprentices to a single master, sign me up to put every random kid on weaponsmith or armorsmith apprenticeship so that I can skip all that training with actual materials nonsense and wait for the moods to make 'em all legendary!

And again, hauling is the ONLY significant factor in job speed.  Especially if you're encouraging players to use only legendaries as masters for these apprentices, (which you are doing if you're linking apprentice skill gain to master skill,) they'll be finishing every task once they do have raw materials in 1 turn, anyway.

Obviously there is going to be a limit to apprentices that one dwarf can have.  If hauling is the only significant factor then have the apprentices help haul stuff for master as well as helping out at the bench (the latter however builds skill). 

They do not get "free skills", they gradually learn them over the course of years of game time, they also will not really be able to use them to to the full potentially for years. 

[Vattic]

I dunno I quite like the idea of some students surpassing their master. It's got a nice narrative ring to it and makes sense realistically.

We are talking about children, not grownups.

I can't remember which but during his apprenticeship of one great painter's master quit painting realising said pupil had already surpassed him. Could be a legend of course, but either way I like the idea of this rarely coming up and that's all I meant; Child prodigies being the common term.

[Reelya]

Humans have been using child labor since the year dot. It's actually very unhistorical to not allow any labor before the age of adulthood, that is a modern affectation. Child labor in America was only reduced after the introduction of enforced schooling. Which is a type of labor really. There has never been a period where masses of children were allowed to run around doing nothing at all.

It's pretty damn modern too, even up until the early 20th century every kid in America was expected to be either in education or doing some form of labor. Child labor laws only came in in America in 1938. But it explicitly excludes agriculture. About half a million children in the USA work in agriculture. So any sort of liberal big-city squeamishness about children working is entirely ridiculous and not in line with reality, even in the world's richest country, therefore doubly so from a medieval perspective.

Human rights organizations have documented child labor in USA. According to a 2009 petition by Human Rights Watch: "Hundreds of thousands of children are employed as farm workers in the United States, often working 10 or more hours a day. They are often exposed to dangerous pesticides, experience high rates of injury, and suffer fatalities at five times the rate of other working youth. Their long hours contribute to alarming drop-out rates. Government statistics show that barely half ever finish high school. According to the National Safety Council, agriculture is the second most dangerous occupation in the United States. However, current US child labor laws allow child farm workers to work longer hours, at younger ages, and under more hazardous conditions than other working youths. While children in other sectors must be 12 to be employed and cannot work more than 3 hours on a school day, in agriculture, children can work at age 12 for unlimited hours before and after school."

Here, Toady might have based the rules of Dwarf society on the modern American rules for child labor (as dwarf children only harvest crops). But that would seem to be an arbitrary ruling that's not in line with the "14th century" accuracy concept. Sure, the counter can be that it's fantasy, therefore anything is valid if it works, but that is then an auotmatic escape clause that makes any claim of historical accuracy moot: for historical things we like we quote historical accuracy, for things we want that aren't historical, we quote fantasy artistic license.

Anti-child labor laws only work in post-industrial societies where raw manpower has low value. Up until then, societies which utilize every scrap of manpower outcompete those which do not.

[Reelya]

BTW, the idea that everyone in medieval Europe got married at 12-13 is apparently not very historical at all. It was news to me. Under feudalism, serfs need the lords permission to marry. It wasn't a frontier free-for-all, marriage had to be economically viable within the heirarchical system before being allowed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age#History_and_social_attitudes

As the peasants and serfs lived and worked on farms that they rented from the lord of the manor, they also needed the permission of the lord to marry, couples therefore had to comply with the lord and wait until a small farm became available before they could marry and thus produce children; those who could and did delay marriage presumably were rewarded by the landlord and those who did not were presumably denied said reward. For example, Medieval England saw the marriage age as variable depending on economic circumstances, with couples delaying marriage until the early twenties when times were bad and falling to the late teens after the Black Death, when there were labor shortages; by appearances, marriage of adolescents was not the norm in England ...

Still, in most of Northwestern Europe, marriage at very early ages was rare. One thousand marriage certificates from 1619 to 1660 in the Archdiocese of Canterbury show that only one bride was 13 years of age, four were 15, twelve were 16, and seventeen were 17 years of age while the other 966 brides were at least 19 years of age at marriage. And the Church dictated that both the bride and groom must be at least 21 years of age to marry without the consent of their families; in the certificates, the most common age for the brides is 22 years. For the grooms 24 years is the most common age, with average ages of 24 years for the brides and 27 for the grooms.

American Women in the 20th century got married 3-4 years earlier on average than 17th century women. Age of first marriage in modern America only went over the 17th century average in 1993.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005061.html

[Vattic]

The article mentions the marriage certificates checked were from 1619 to 1660 where as the medieval period lasted from 401 to 1500. I wonder if there are adequate documents to really tell how things were far enough back. The same article says that the earlier you go the more common younger marriages were and that the church pushed the change (12th century law setting the age of consent at 7 is a strange law to have if people married so late).

[Reelya]

The idea of minimal age for marriage really doesn't tell you what the average age for marriage was. Almost all of what we know of extremely youthful brides came from noble marriages, which were more political than sexual, and it's almost a law of nature that the legal system bends over backwards to state that what the ruling class does, or theoretically may do, is legally ok, regardless of what the rest of society actually does.

Also remember that until recently the parents of the bride payed a dowry, so you would have actually wanted to get economic value out of your daughters through labor before actually marrying them off. Plus, if you married off a girl at 12 years old and she dies at 16 years old, not that uncommon back then, they you've avoided paying a dowry at all while getting a few years more work out of the daughter. So parents were in no specific rush to marry off their daughters, which is something the bride's family paid for.

There's also the fact that accepting a younger bride means they come with few skills. The groom's family is then responsible for educating the young woman, so making this an unattractive proposition compared to a slightly older wife who can at least cook for herself, and doesn't need to be taught how to do everything by the groom's mother.

Plus, the fact that onset of puberty used to be much later. e.g. in the 1860s average oset of puberty for girls was 16.6 years, vs 14.6 in 1920, and dropping to 10.5 years currently, due to better nutrition. So, if you'd accepted a juvenile bride back then, they'd be even more juvenile than juveniles now. So, no baby-making for several years together with the lack of skills, as well as a probable lower dowry paid. vs an older bride with more dowry, ready-to-go home skills and can make babies right away.

[Shazbot]

I've read from broadly respected economists that in the antebellum South girls were married as much as ten years younger on average than Yankees. Largely the same laws and language with both groups were Protestant immigrants from Britain, but Yankees were Anglo-Saxon Puritan or Pilgrim while Southerners were pre-Scottish Enlightenment Scots. Scots were living a much coarser, more uncertain existence in harsher weather with less laws and more violence. So this is very much a cultural thing.

Come to think of it, my wife had a pioneer-era dowry in the form of her "hope chest" of china, tablecloths and such things. Wow, the more you know.

I'd like to see dwarven courtship involve giving masterwork crafts to the other.