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[Chromasphere]

Even that doesn't work, because dwarfs aren't a species that are morally inclined to hold slaves.

And I think the implication goes beyond the "right and wrong" of the act of enslaving another sentient species, also. I suspect that our dwarfs would find it distasteful to allow another species to do "perfectly good work a perfectly good dwarf could do."

I figure, whenever we get playable Goblins, that we'll also get a slavery/other species incorporation system. That would be a lot more interesting, atleast for me, and I'd consider it a lot better investment of coding time, to get slavery fixed, codewise, at that point in the process.

  Who says we all are playing with dwarves?


  Creating your own civ is extremely easy... and so many people have done just that, like myself, and these civs aren't always dwarven (I use a human type civ).  As a matter of fact, you can easily use the human civ already created by Toady.  In other words, just because we are playing Dwarf Fortress, doesn't mean we build forts only with dwarves.  So just because a feature isn't specifically viable or moral for a dwarf, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the game.  Of course, it just may be lower in the list of things to do. 

So posing an argument that it shouldn't be incorporated into the game because it isn't dwarven doesn't hold water with me. 

[darkflagrance]

The irony about the slavery tag is that we essentially already have it in the form of sentients like Tigermen that live in our forts as "pets".

Therefore, as an ethical term relative to gameplay, slavery is meaningless in dwarf fortress.

But it's not, as tigermen and other such pets which also happen to be sentients have never worked properly, and probably won't ever work properly until the issue of them being part of a foreign civ is addressed (whether that itself is relevant to slavery or something else entirely, like non-player-civ migrants or whatever).

I'm not arguing for slaves in the conventionally understood human sense of the term.

Even that doesn't work, because dwarfs aren't a species that are morally inclined to hold slaves.

And I think the implication goes beyond the "right and wrong" of the act of enslaving another sentient species, also. I suspect that our dwarfs would find it distasteful to allow another species to do "perfectly good work a perfectly good dwarf could do."

The real larger issue is the functionality applied to non-fort sentient beings, which is non-existent to the point of brokenness.

Examples of this are that sentients like Tigermen pets in the fort die of thirst quickly but have no way to drink water, or when trained as war animals/adopted as pets, follow their masters blindly to the point of starvation. Beyond that, we also have issues with loyalty cascades.

I'm merely trying to justify the enabling of functionality for sentients. In this way, we can avoid all the flavor arguments that surround the issue and only serve to muddy it up.

Allowing functions for sentients doesn't have to entail chain-gangs of goblins hauling rocks to your megaproject. It can start as simply as creating that recognition of non-player civs in the fortress, which 3 refers to.

This has many applications that would not be forbidden as slavery. For example we might be able to allow Tigermen "pets" to be assigned to dwarves as guardians and wield weapons while at the same time not causing them to die of thirst because they can't stop following their masters or having their war training break their sentience (both of these are bugs in the current game). Maybe tame werewolves could be enabled to do very basic things like bring water to thirsty dwarves or rescue crippled soldiers, thus acting as always on-call labor for dangerous or low-level tasks you wouldn't want to risk or waste valuable dwarves on.

Non-player race sentient functionality would also cover rebellions and uprisings, so sentient races bred at your fort might rebel if mistreated (leading to Fun!), and this could even be extended to dwarves themselves, allowing a faction of dwarves to break away and form a group of insurgents hostile to the player.

Other things this would cover would be allowing Dwarves to bring war animals or mounts, allowing the player to replicate the invasion forces of goblins mounted on beak dogs with trolls or humans mounted on War Lions accompanied by trained Giant Eagles.

These things are not mere bloats; they are part of the functionality eventually intended to be in the game.

After this functionality has been added to the game, slavery would be child's play to mod in. We don't have to add slavery on its own, but clearly it can be added incidentally as part of a wider number of changes that would make the game better and remove a lot of the bugginess and non-functionality that we presently experience.

[SirHoneyBadger]

  Who says we all are playing with dwarves?
 

Not me, if you'll please read what I wrote.

Infact, I suggested that whenever goblins are "fleshed out" as a Civ, that they absolutely should have slavery, or atleast incorporation of other species, in some form or other.

[bobsnewaddress]

lol I have added slaves in my most recent mod download now.
its in my Signature there are many new features such as slaves Bandits and expanded move sets for each weapon.

there are many other new things i think you would all appreciate as well.
makeing slaves is as simple as Duping the Crearure raws and adding [PET] and [TRAINABLE] have fun my darlings.

That's not really how it works at all. Last year the Modding forum had a thread going about trying to mod in slavery in the main game and while adding [Pet] and [Trainable] does allow you to purchase other creatures at embark it doesn't actually let non-Dwarf creatures perform labors, which is the whole point of slavery.

We did discover a strange behavior/bug which allowed you to purchase Dwarves on embark (at a cost of 1 each since they didn't have a Pet Value at the time) and THESE Dwarves would actually perform labors, could be assigned to the military, would marry non-slave dwarves and could even be trained as War/Hunting Peasants. We couldn't figure out how to butcher them for food though.

In any case we are still a long way from being able to purchase Tigermen and integrate them into Dwarf society or train caged Goblin prisoners into War Goblins which is a shame since that's basically all I'd need to be able to play this game forever without changes... well that and the ability to attack other Civ's and communicable diseases that may turn Dwarves berserk and spread through blood infection.

A man can dream.

[ZebioLizard2]

That's not really how it works at all. Last year the Modding forum had a thread going about trying to mod in slavery in the main game and while adding [Pet] and [Trainable] does allow you to purchase other creatures at embark it doesn't actually let non-Dwarf creatures perform labors, which is the whole point of slavery.

It doesn't allow robotic or any other type of species as well, a tag like slavery or "worker" or "servant" or even "helper" would really go a long way.