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[Urist McSadist]

I just wish there was a benefit to having colosseums and putting skulls on pedestals.

[FantasticDorf]

I too like to collect skulls and totems out of slain enemies, but i often tend to load up and play as goblins instead through modding when i want to do this and always end up slightly inwardly dissapointed when they get terrified and grossed out with some of my more grotesque display pieces, and squeamish about killing, even though they absolutely adore opportunities to fight and spar and are bitterly cruel.

Though i think i can take a guess why this happens*, it'd be nice to have a cruelty cut off point with a bit more game impact. Cruel engineers making more effective weapon traps and relishing in their work would be a nice perk to having such a unlikeable individual around your fortress, with some other interactions leaning on positive and negative (you dont want cruel fortress guards to deliberately antagonize criminals and abuse their authority, or do you?).

• My best guess is that the 'combat staging' system isn't working properly in watching violence versus taking part in it, and when dwarves see unrelated creatures die, they misattribute it to a concern for their own safety always. Its a bit like watching a ancient roman gladiatorial bout, but the audience is screaming because they think the lion fighting the gladiator far off in the ring is going to attack them next.

[muldrake]

Dwarves should have different views about death and about corpses.  Avid warriors should actually get positive feelings from seeing a corpse they personally killed, at least from an obvious enemy and in noble combat.  Even normal dwarves shouldn't be upset by seeing a dead goblin unless they have never seen one before.  Or an elf for that matter.  Elves are filth.

Opinions should range from this to the other extreme of pacifist philosophies, where the holders of such views might be even more upset by corpses or violence than the norm.

There also ought to be rare sociopathic dwarves who actually enjoy death and violence, and some of these should be secretive serial killers, like vampires but without anything physically identifiable about them.  These should be even more rare than vampires, who usually give themselves away within a few killings.

[DwarfStar]

It seems like we have sociopathic dwarves already, although it's basically a bug that tantrum fist fights so often result in death. Maybe the reason they deal lethal blows in fist fights is already tied to some combination of THOUGHTLESSNESS or CRUELTY causing them to escalate to lethal combat.

As far as cold, calculating, super-rare murderous dwarves go, we do already have the fell mood. But that's an old system that predates personalities and the justice system. And the fact that a dwarf will never make another artifact kinda undercuts the insidiousness of the gameplay there. Perhaps fell moods should:

1. Be more likely in dwarves with sociopathic type traits: high CRUELTY for example
2. Be handled in game more like vampire attacks, where the user is not notified until another dwarf stumbles on the corpse
3. Be possible more than once by the same dwarf, forcing the user to try to figure out which dwarf is the culprit

For that matter, dwarves should probably murder each other, rarely, for reasons of personal dispute. Perhaps some dwarves might have a combination of traits that causes them to murder their former lovers, or their former lovers' new flings. And of course ambitious dwarves might once in a while accidentally pour some poison in the ear of the king, for the good of the kingdom, you know. Then, venom, to thy work.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

For that matter, dwarves should probably murder each other, rarely, for reasons of personal dispute. Perhaps some dwarves might have a combination of traits that causes them to murder their former lovers, or their former lovers' new flings. And of course ambitious dwarves might once in a while accidentally pour some poison in the ear of the king, for the good of the kingdom, you know. Then, venom, to thy work.

Doesn't this kind of thing already happen in worldgen? From there implementing it in fort mode shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

[FantasticDorf]

I don't really believe dwarves raised in the mountainhomes are as capable of evil as the player is or/may want them to be, maybe with a certain level of mental reassessment yielding a cruel personality it should be accomodated for but the pendulum of finding a balance of hurting your dwarves psyche enough to force growth without creating a mental breakdown is finnicky.

Its also difficult to create change in other ways, which is also why i recommend changing races when you want a change of attitude and pace, since trying to change dwarven minds requires skilled persuaders and bookwriters, skills that take much of a dwarf's lifetime to perfect, only to be undone when the next generation of dwarves grows up with the preset stereotypcal cultural ideas. Modding the raws or playing goblins (also modding raws in a way) is the fastest pernament route to it.

Its the same the DF-world over, every nation conforms to the stereotype, Toady should keep course with what they're doing on the memory system since its a good staple mechanic. If anything, a dwarven civilization having a full legislation and societal change due to the player's actions towards discord and cruelty could be best summed up as a loss of innocence. Good and noble goblins, content humans who never expand and spend all day sleeping, industrious nature hating elves, hyperviolent dwarves, its all a weird stepping stone into the future.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

I expect DF will have more freedom to drift from the generic fantasy stereotypes once mythgen enters the picture and even moreso once we have the framework of starting scenarios to work with. By then the personalities/values of certain races will probably become less universal and more informed by their own unique geneses, beliefs and history, all of which would of course vary significantly from world to world (and perhaps even between civilizations in the same world).