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[Hartsteen]

Often it happens to me that I choose an unsuitable dwarf for a special task esp. military. The result is an unhappy dwarf who entered a conflict or experienced death.

Of course it is possible to go through the list of traits and select the dwarves with matching traits and preferences.

It would be easier if the recruitment process would be supported ingame by enlisting based on suitable traits: "Urist wants to join the army (as a sworddwarf/markdwarf...)!".

More broadly this idea could be coupled with all professions. Guilds could be used to select suitable dwarves for their labors: "Urist asks the Stoneworker Guild for a permission to be a mason."

[NW_Kohaku]

This is something I've long had a problem with, and I tried to come up with solutions to in the past.

My preferred solution is to just have job postings and have the dwarves themselves select the jobs they want to be posted in.  I talked about having a solution where you just set wages for different jobs that you adjust up and down to get different dwarves to take on different jobs as your priorities changed, but Toady said he wouldn't want something like Majesty's system.

For the time being, take up Dwarf Therapist, and screen dwarves for personality traits, then write down the list of dwarves you want and draft those.

[Hartsteen]

Thank you very much for the answer!

May I ask on what traits you focus on the most? I still haven't figured out which trait (and value) exactly leads to bad thoughts about being attacked, witnessing death and being in conflict.

[NW_Kohaku]

Sorry to have not checked this in a week.  This is the page on personality traits in the wiki.  Its "effects" are sadly only focused upon whether you get social skills, however...

Broadly speaking, the best defense against bad thoughts about seeing death or being in conflict is to just harden a soldier by getting them used to it until they "don't care about anything anymore".  This can be done most safely by having them witness dead animals while also having things like a good dining hall to balance out their negative thoughts until they are inured to grisly sights.  Nature as a trait (the "loves nature and animals" stuff) makes dwarves hate killing/butchering or caging animals, although I don't know if that relates to just seeing dead animals, if you happen to have set up some traps that shredded some cave critters or wildlife that you could send dwarves on patrol to view.  (Giving marksdwarves "live fire training" against caged creatures that are released into an exitless room surrounded by fortifications is a great way to both train marksdwarf and get them used to killing things, for example, and you can let down the drawbridge and let your melee recruits survey the damage on a patrol afterwards.)

Likewise, if you train dwarves up to being heroes (rank 11), they no longer complain about being on long patrols, and actually hate being taken off military duty.  I think that makes all negative thoughts related to just being in battle go away, although they still don't like being hurt.  Train a core military hard, and they'll get inured and you can send them out on perpetual patrol without worry, and then work on getting a rotation of militia in to start training up towards being hardcore.  Until they hit hero, they're best only taking on single month of training at a time before being released back into the general dwarf population.

As always, the best bet is just padding your thoughts with happy thoughts from legendary dining halls and preferably whatever preference a dwarf has most.  You might want to purposefully aim for a dwarf that has a preferred stone or something you have on-sight, so that you can make some doors in their personal room/barracks for them to get happy thoughts seeing.

Here's a couple threads on general stress management.

[Hartsteen]

No need to apologize! Thank you for your hints!

As it turned out the direct approach to let the dwarves train inside my corpse stockpile resulted in a massive wave of tantrums. Obviously that was not the best way.

Still I haven't found out which combination of traits exactly results in red-coloured bad thoughts of being in conflict and seeing creatures die. So I think there is no way but to expell my archers to prevent the looming tantrum spiral...

[NW_Kohaku]

Keep in mind that nobody likes miasma.  There's a reason you want to let them see but not be near any corpses.  An aboveground corpse stockpile can be a good idea, but you don't want to let any dwarves that are starting to get cave adapted up into the sun, either.  Miasma, being in the rain, and sun on cave adaptation are generally much worse thoughts than seeing a corpse.  You also need to ween them into this gradually, rather than just dumping gore all over fresh-faced innocents and telling them to toughen up.