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[Jonathan S. Fox]

If I retire a dwarf adventurer in a dwarf hall, then I would like to be able to optionally select that dwarf to replace one of my generic starting seven dwarves for the next fortress dispatched by that dwarf civilization. If I have seven retired dwarves in the area, I'd like to be able to use them all. As it stands, naturally they would start with no craft skills; but they would come with whatever weapons and armor they retired with, and all the skills and stat gains they accumulated as an adventurer. This would make them quite a good guard for the fortress, and they would learn quickly.

It would be a more glorious career change for a retired adventurer to join a pioneer team to found a new city, push forward the future of dwarfkind, and with the new version, eventually be promoted to noble. To have an adventurer move up in the world is one of the major development goals, and it could all be done here without extensive work on developing the adventurer side, as all of these things are already in the dwarf fortress game -- you just need to be able to move an adventurer into the other mode. Of course, this is not to say that it should replace the ability of adventurers to stay in their own mode and do great things, but I would dearly love to manage a dwarf fortress with a few ex-adventurers in the founding group.

[Tamren]

I hope this would eventually be made seamless.

You go off on a grand adventure, one day find the perfect mountain to build a fortress. After killing some dragons you retire to a city. After getting bored of retirement, you drum up a party of dwarves, pool your savings to buy supplies and set off for the mountain.

Strike the earth!

[Jonathan S. Fox]

A glorious vision indeed, Tamren! It would add new depth of meaning to adventurer mode too, without requiring any new mechanics to be added -- suddenly now it's more important, as you can play to scout future fortress locations and train up future founders, or even travel to collect old artifacts and precious equipment from former sites to bring them to your new fortress.

[Armok]

I think this is a good idea. [/very short post   ]

[Toady One]

This is basically the idea with Bloat 182, though I haven't gotten close enough to it to decide on the mechanics.  You should certainly be able to organize an expedition from adventure mode, but I'm not so sure about picking out retired adventurers from during embark setup.  They might not be associated to your civ, and although they are your adventurers and should be able to do what you want, you'd also have to extricate yourself from your entity ties in adventure mode, and just removing that process might not be a good thing.  I guess it could simulate you suddenly cutting out from your responsibilities by having the appropriate things happen as if you had suddenly run away (if you had retired as a king, somebody might come to your fortress to encourage you to come back, that sort of thing).

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Hm, I was more thinking about how it could be done from the current state of development, where there is no (visible) development of an adventurer's status in society -- I can run my dwarf around doing tasks for the dwarf queen, but she doesn't give me rank and status, just complements me frequently and gives more work. From a role-playing perspective, I'd like to be able to settle down my self-appointed hero of the local string of dwarf cities (slain a colossus, a giant, numerous undead elite...) and join an expedition from that civilization in dwarf mode, then appoint that dwarf as a noble within dwarf mode, probably a military captain or guard captain if possible.

Once civilization associations are more prominent and visible in adventure mode, I can certainly see how that would present complications. Having the king run off with a couple of carpenters and farmers would certainly be awkward. One thought would be that you could restrict it by prohibiting retirees who are too connected. Regardless, your ties to different groups are invisible now, so I don't imagine it would be too destructive in the short term. One of the things I like about selecting retired adventurers during the embark setup is that it would add a tremendous amount of depth to adventurers, with what I imagine to be no more than a couple days of work at the extreme, though without knowing the internals I obviously can't say.

I'm thinking mainly of the short term here -- in a few years it might be obsolete, but right now adventure mode is very sparse, and forming a second connection between dwarf fortress mode and adventure mode such that adventurers can retire to help start fortresses (in addition to exploring their ruins) would give them immediate and much-needed emergent roleplaying and gameplay significance without requiring a major revision of game mechanics in either mode. Adding them to the existing embark screen would seem to be the most straightforward and least resistance approach to getting this sort of connection in place.

On the other hand, if it's not clear how this sort of thing will work in the long term, building the feature in as a sort of short-term hack now is inconvenient, particularly when that time could be spent working on something that will progress the long-term development. I don't know -- this is something that would be very nice and usable immediately, and I would certainly love to have it even in the current release, even more so with adventurers able to explore new locations, but I can understand why it could be seen as more of a distraction from the development flow standpoint.

In a more long-term look at Bloat 182, it sounds like most if not all of the prerequisites are in place in the new version, and it's just a matter of development priority (being that it's a bloat I imagine it's relatively low, though it is a very cool one that I would love to see worked on). I imagine it would work by allowing you to select any specific site that is known either due to its proximity to the civ or due to adventurers exploring the location.

As a side thought, eventually as the civilization your fortress is connected to begins to matter more, whether due to individual characters or larger scale politics, I'd like to be able to choose which dwarven kingdom to dispatch my team from, similar to how I can select one for my adventurers.

[Greiger]

I admit, it would be fun to have adventurers founding forts...especially if there not all the same race.  Thats Bill the human, he's the guard captain, theres Flowerbarf, the elf, she's the herbalist. I'm Urist, I run the place.

Of course Bill would constantly have a yellow head because he stood up before putting on his helmet, and Flowerbarf would tantrum every time the carpenter goes outside holding an axe. Sounds like fun waiting to happen.

[Tamren]

An easy solution is to port over some skills from fort mode to adventure mode. Namely those required for survival, cooking and the like, and a few utility such as mining and woodcutting. If you could mine as an adventurer you could play the part of a prospector.

So you set off on your adventuring career, kill some baddies and whatnot. Buy a pick from one of the mountainhomes, go out into the wilds and start digging some holes.

To do this you would need to enter a "sort of" fortress mode. In order to prevent confusion when prospecting you would be limited to the same area that a fortress built in that tile would be. From all the hermit fortresses weve seen, one dwarf can easily make simple items like wood doors and dirt ramps and such. Everything the dwarf needs to take a good look around. Once you find a nice site you do not retire a dwarf but you quit with the intention of starting a new fortress. So you would end the adventuring career, the world would recompute and such.

When you switch to fortress mode, the game automatically selects the tile you were prospecting. Your adventurer is brought back as the leader of your colonists, the money you have saved up is pooled with a random amount from each colonist you recruit so that you can buy supplies. Your party then sets out and arrives at the normal time just like starting a new fortress.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

It'll be a lot of fun once the non-combat skills are supported in adventure mode. You can do a whole hermit story while actually controlling your character. I foresee much more hunting once you can directly control the hunter. That will be so sweet.  

Edit: Oh, and crafting your own arrows, and other weapons. The hermit adventurer who delves deep into the mountain to forge their own masterwork gear out of steel. Sweetness!

[ October 22, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Sean Mirrsen]

Ye know, a sorta RTS control mode for the adventurer could be made, akin to Diablo 2...  It won't replace the usual direction-based movement entirely, since it's the best way to handle close combat and stuff, but with revamped ranged weapons and possible magic, the mouse controls will be very much required anyways.
An extension of that mode could be activated by whatever key is unused in the adv.mode now, and bring up the same order panel used in Fort mode, together with the realtime. In essence, whatever group you have loyal to you (that is you, hopefully, plus whomever you acquired on your adventure) becomes your brigade of dwarves then, and goes on executing the orders you give.
Pro's of this mode is that you can switch back to adventurer mode and just leave the site seamlessly, or personally participate in a siege. Con's is if you are killed, you can't, although you still can give orders to keep the fort up. The amount of time and effort on Toady's behalf that it would take to implement this mode is also a very possible 'con'...

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>As a side thought, eventually as the civilization your fortress is connected to begins to matter more, whether due to individual characters or larger scale politics, I'd like to be able to choose which dwarven kingdom to dispatch my team from, similar to how I can select one for my adventurers.</STRONG>

Response to my own suggestion:

05/27/2007: Added civilization selection to the new embark screen, handled reclaim in the new embark screen, allowed resizing of fort area from 144x144 to 768x768 (full map square) during embark (standard is 480x480), handled basic merging of sites if you select an existing one during embark, handled extension of inside features after dig designations, handled a range issue with river elevations, updated pits, pools and chasm to handle the new mountain tops