The closest comparable tag for your distribution is [POP_RATIO] which works for detemining the chance percentages of castes being born, like weighting females slightly more over males as a example.
I was thinking more like the [ORIENTATION] tag, its not really used in the default races but it is there if you want it.
Dwarves are innately creative and industrially minded & proud, its part of their culture and personal identity and hence they make some of the finest quality goods in the DF world,
Dwarves that are a part of a goblin civ still have the innate ability to strange mood right? because the ability is creature based not culture based, also if its only a small chance 10, 20 or 30% then dwarves are still the most creative, its just that there are exceptional individuals of other races that can, on rare occasions, match a dwarven master crafter.
but there's little sense in imbuing every race to decrease the base mythic value of the artifact to just be a level above a functional masterpiece of the highest mortal caliber beyond artifacts that are summarily implied by possession and inspiration to be divine.
Well I personally do think of artifact as just being one step above masterwork aka legendary items, just with the limitation that its the crafters life's work or magnum opus so they only get the one, I also feel that just one is artificial but accept that as a limitation more easily then "only dwarves".
Then there is the fact that in many fantasy settings elves are known for their incredible artifacts and some of them have humans making them too so its not like dwarves have a monopoly on crafting in fantasy.
Also this kind of fidelity would be interesting once the myth arc gets in, if you set its to the max it would be interesting to see what combinations of strange mood tags the different creatures gen with, in those worlds there wont be any dwarves anyway so none of this dwarf based stuff should matter.
To be honest i wouldn't want animalpeople to be able to make artifacts either so the inclusion of other races feels a bit empty,
I personally would like to see the occasional animal person true artifact, I see no reason why a animal person who's tribe gets destroyed shouldn't be able to get a Macabre mood and make a amulet from the bones of their dead mate or child or get a fell mood where they want a specific persons (the killers) bones/skin for their artifact and quest for it, tracking the killer down so that they can make a loin cloth from their skin or something.
like other people have said there's always other achievements & objects to cherish and protect.
Do you mean for me as the player or for the creature?
If its me then sure there are other things, but I like options and don't really like dwarves, I always mod my games to play as humans, just like I always give elves and goblins max ages and remove the noeat/nodrink tags from goblins.
I personally look forward to when there is a reverse cave adaptation trait for humans and would like to have humans that only occasionally have strange moods, given that eventually humans and elves will be playable by default and that one simple change like [STRANGE_MOOD:ALL:100:SKILL] to only dwarves would result in no change to how the default game play but it would enable me to make humans that are are [STRANGE_MOOD:SECRETIVE:20:SKILL][STRANGE_MOODS:POSSESSED:20:PERSONAL] and other people to make what ever they want I see no reason not too.
If its the creature, well it seems artificial to say that no human could ever desire wanting to make an artifact, maybe very few want to and most of those that do want it fail but it should be possible.
I would also like to see a life goal "create magnum opus" and for it to quite literally mean that their goal is to make an artifact not just a master work, it is a much better match to the "rule the world" and "immortality", hell maybe even make that the condition for non dwarves to be eligible, every dwarf can make one but only non-dwarves who dedicate their live to it can make one.
That's just my opinion though.
Nothing wrong with that, but I think of it like this, Toady has said that he personally doesn't want a production line of +1 swords but that he's not against having the capacity for it in the game for those that do.
So let’s say that we have a dwarf that understood how to apply runes of fire to a sword to make flaming swords, then assuming that process doesn’t take twenty years – and that wouldn’t be practical because games rarely last that long, or if they do it’s a very dedicated process, it’s not something you can expect a regular kind of casual or even not casual player to do, just sit there and play out a twenty year fort – then you have to wonder ‘why can’t I just make a ton of flaming swords?’ And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, to have all the dwarves that come from this fortress have these swords with these fire runes on them or something, but it’s kind of a strange magical process if that’s what you’ve got going on ... it’s kind of depressing in a way if magic isn’t mysterious. But at the same time you do have armies of magically armed creatures; it’s not an unheard of thing, so you could be the ones doing that, it’s just something that I wouldn’t necessarily indulge in, especially as a default thing. I certainly don’t have any problem if you can amp up your init options or your world parameter options more likely to be like ‘yeah my dwarves can float, and fly on carpets, and make big guns that shoot fire guns ...’
link=http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_7_transcript_2.html
and in the (relativity) recent GDC myth gen video he make a jokes about rune stone factories when the myth gen made good conditions for one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8zwPdPvN10&feature=youtu.be&t=21m12sI'll also quote what I said in the OP.
The Idea is simply to add variations of the strange mood tag so that not all (Real) artifacts are of dwarfish make and make it so that creatures other then Dwarves can have appropriate strange moods, either by default or for modding purposes, here an example of how I imagine it.
My request for this was inspired by the fact that Toady doesn't mind adding modding only options and that this little feature fits into the artifacts Arc more then any other Arc, nor does he mind allowing players to have their worlds be very different from his own ideals.