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[Vester]

That could lead to really odd situations.

Theoretically I could pause my game while the other person lets it run. In extreme cases you could end up with decade long fortresses trading with first-year fortresses even though both started at the same time.

That's an exaggeration though.

[Starver]

Simple. Have no pause menus when another player is at your fortress. You can still access everything except nothing pauses.

That's a different game.  At the moment it's micromanagement, to whatever degree you wish.  You can spend three or four hours on a raw map forbidding and unforbidding, laying out the entire digging zones (and whatever building zones you can access/currently have materials for), rearranging employment assignments and stockpiles and zoning etc so as to let it run its course, and/or you can react to every new material produced/extracted/mined/traded for when available to another few hours of player for every gametime hour (which would be highly dependant upon processor speed[1]).

If you force no-pausing, then switching your multiple training units to active duty (and assigning them new stations) while wanting to run through your civilians to ensure they are tasked (or re-tasked) to safe-zone employement only, inclusive of identifying resources in the danger zone and forbidding them, while ensuring that the defensive levers are pulled in sequence is going to produce a different result.

You might as well make it a "Noble mode" hybrid of real-time Adventure-mode style of play as a noble character who has to travel around to say "dig this here, produce this there, you there can have that spare wardog, I forbid you to wear that worn shoe", no longer the (within some resource and physical constraints) omniscient and omnipotent entity that you are now, competing against chance and unexpected arrivals and creatures outside your control wandering across your domain to their own purpose.

Consider it a difference between Management Games and full on God Games, give or take, with either an effective Fog Of War (And Peace) or a limit to simultaneous actions/area of effect rather than just the resource/influence limit.

[1] Actually, using distributed computing to share the processing (especially pathing) across a set of players' machines to make best use of idle time/processing power, and simultaneously smooth out any (unpaused) difference in playing speed might be a good use of multi-player...  Stuff like that would have a low ratio of 'definition data' travelling between machines compared to the equivalent 'data value' of what is calculated, and could be organised to reduce redundancy of data processing with a decent system behind it.  But would anyone really want to reduce their own game's responsiveness (and remove the ability to take a break or fully take stock of the situation) just because they have a better processor and they're doing someone else's machines calculations?

Although a SETI@Home-style worldgen network could do a lot of interestingly intricate stuff.

[Phazorx]

It is interesting to see where you are taking this, but that is counter-productive to what i meant by initial post.

Building analogies and scenarios in the shape of "what issues can come up if DF would be like WoW..." is not what i wad suggesting. I explicitly try to avoid these areas and stay in the realm of possible. Of course pausing in real time strategy game when i comes to MP is not acceptable, of course adventurer mode in MP will suffer from many logical and technological issues, of course roaming as adventurer into someone's construction site does not really make sense and introduces whole bunch of issues stating with "why?"...

Yet it still feasible and possible for fortresses to coexist in same universe and share information and some items. It is also possible to explore that world as a single player adventure, find forgotten and abandoned fortresses and meet unforeseen challenges. And it i lso possible to create history and legends of that world all together w/o needing to turn this int full blown MMO.

This game was never meant to evolve this way, and i don't see why Toady would want to consider this angle... but certain aspects of in-game community can become greatly beneficial and enhance the game play, without turning it into another fantasy MMO game.

so i'll try to stop this by answering a few:

Imagine two players meeting under adventure mode...

no, they don't ever meet, adventure games like rogue are single player experience. DF is not going to become what MUDs once were.

... and under Fortress mode though nominally 'realtime', what happens when Player A advances upon Player-B's fortress

no one advances anywhere, it is a settlement management game, you deal with your dwarfs and he deals with his

I think the multiplayer system comes up against the barrier of the 'ticks' for each player going at different speeds....

combat mode would take place somewhere unrelated to player's settlements and should only be about squad management and tactics, amount of activity will be severely cut down and the situation should not even approach typical DF resource consumption. That being said synchronization amongst players is still to be achieved and there are different methods for doing so, including very low yield ones as far as coding and maintenance goes.

... if I'm playing the dig deeper mod and try to trade a blackmetal chestplate to a player who is running vanilla, his version of DF won't know what to do as neither blackmetal nor chestplates are in the vanilla raws.

Some object compatibility can be granted within proposed trading mechanism, where objects can be interchanged based on functionality, but aside of that - what XVIII century engineer would do given a '69 mustang carburettor... or modern average John Doe with clepsydra? If it appears to be "an alien object of indescribable shape made from unknown material"  and can be only used as fancy looking paperweight within your civilization - may be you are better of bartering something else that you find useful? I remind that trading service as I described it only meant to expand existing functionality and create additional options.