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[Bronze Dog]

Yeah, all this stuff is exciting. With the developing entity interactions, I'm scared and fascinated by the possibility of Dwarven !!POLITICAL SCIENCE!! being conducted on this forum.

[Zavvnao]

maybe in the far future of df, we can get something like this magma-like guy http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=234428

[Ribs]

Yeah, I would imagine titles would be pointless and you won't be able to do anything with them, just like "tribute" will be abstract. Still, if you can become the "leader" of a village you take by force, why not a "baron" of a fortress?

[Thundercraft]

Yeah, I would imagine titles would be pointless and you won't be able to do anything with them, just like "tribute" will be abstract. Still, if you can become the "leader" of a village you take by force, why not a "baron" of a fortress?

Pointless? Abstract? Aww! 

If you're a "baron", a (war)lord or a "leader" of some sort, then shouldn't you receive some sort of tax or tithe or something? I mean, you did have to "liberate" them from some occupying force or their former "oppressive" leader. And now - in theory - they're your responsibility to protect. Maybe if it's a really poor village they'll give you a share of the eggs their hens lay or something? At least you should get free meals and a room to stay in. On the other hand, taxes from a conquered dwarf fortress might be something worth protecting and fighting over. 

Okay... I'm not saying I expect it to work like that in the next release. But maybe one day?

[Trif]

Is it possible to claim a site for an allied civilization, e.g. expanding the dwarven motherland by defeating a goblin tower? Or do you have to be completely independent for now?

[Uristsonsonson]

I took being able to have tributes sent to other civs to imply that you can conquer them for your civ. I could be wrong tho'.

[LordBaal]

I know they are abstracted right now, but when you speak of tributes, what do you have in mind? Would you wait for an economic system to be in place to demand tribute in coinage? Or would it be more common to demand tribute in the form of minerals, objects or "people", like for example gold, weapons and inmigrants/warriors/slaves and coinage would be just yet another type of tribute if available? ... and for now, when you say is abstracted, what does it means?

[Footkerchief]

I know they are abstracted right now, but when you speak of tributes, what do you have in mind? Would you wait for an economic system to be in place to demand tribute in coinage? Or would it be more common to demand tribute in the form of minerals, objects or "people", like for example gold, weapons and inmigrants/warriors/slaves and coinage would be just yet another type of tribute if available?

Historically, all kinds of valuable and/or symbolic items were used as tribute.  I expect those all to be fair game in DF -- restricting it to currency would be boring as well as ahistorical.  Golden goblets came up:

Capntastic:   I definitely think that the social aspects of adventure mode, all that sort of stuff, will be interesting, especially when you get to the point where you are the leader of a group, then you can eventually shift over to a fortress style mode.
Toady:   We were thinking about what the goals are of these meeting hall people, they might be accumulating treasure or something like that, like getting tribute from people and then they'd have this little treasure room ... You could start working on that kind of thing yourself, who knows what people do with their little treasure rooms, they finance armies and things somehow but I don't know what you do with a golden goblet at the end of the day ... I guess you drink from it, or something. But these accumulation type goals lead to things like ruins that are a lot of fun to run around in and fight zombies and snatch their things ...

... and for now, when you say is abstracted, what does it means?

It means nothing changes hands, as with the world gen tribute relationships in the current release.  I don't think that'll change until we have caravans.

[LordBaal]

The monetary aspect comes from the value of things, in the case of the gold goblet you could yeah, use it for drinking, or perhaps melt it into something else. Eventually you might sell it, specially the case with things you can't re-use like a wool dress if you are raising an army for example (cue somebody in here dressing their generals in flower stamped dresses).

[Scoops Novel]

Will we be able to persuade our companions to retire with our adventurer, or at least "keep in touch"?

[Footkerchief]

Will we be able to persuade our companions to retire with our adventurer, or at least "keep in touch"?

Yes.  Adventurer retirement, like fortress retirement, is planned to be made much more flexible:

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

Rainseeker:   So now let's talk about how adventure mode is going to progress into more of a legacy mode, perhaps the adventurer decides that he wants to be a mighty warrior and so he explores and after a number of years he decides to perhaps retire and then maybe we talk about what happens after that? Is that what you're thinking?
Toady:   Yeah, it's a broad topic so we can just kind of bat some things around, so let's take that. So your adventurer retires, and the question first off is where do they retire? Right now you select a town and you retire there and then you become a person who stands around in that town, right? That's how it's going to be for quite a long time. The first thing that we're going to need ... there are a couple of things to kind of improve upon the quality of your retired characters - we can take that direction first - which is the creation of sites, which is on the dev log, just being able to select a location and either build your own site or rent or purchase a place to stay, so that you have a home base. Then with your retirement ... it would understand your character better, it would keep them in the right spot, you'd be able to find them again and talk to them. Then the other thing that we have up there is being able to create your own kind of adventurer entity, which I imagine would start ... an entity is just a civilization or group of people in this game, and being able to create your own entity means having ... it's either your band of merry people or it's your ruthless scumbags group of people, or some entity that you've joined, rather than created, and when it understands your character in those terms then it would also be able to plan their retirement a little better; that means having them AI driven and doing the right things. That's one form of legacy, just can your character persist properly when they retire?


Rainseeker:   So does that mean that I could create a new adventurer and go to the town where the old adventurer retired and meet him and possibly recruit him to my party?
Toady:   Yeah, you can actually do that right now.
Rainseeker:   Oh wow, I didn't realize that.
Toady:   Yeah. It's funny, you can fight them and cause all kinds of trouble having a Old West shootout with your old adventurers in the town and so on. So we've already kind of gotten started on that, so I think those two things I mentioned would help make the retired ... Right now they're like this weird window dressing, though, it's like ... they go there, they don't really fit in and the only way they fit in is that they do join the town that they retire in, so starting trouble with them starts trouble with everybody and so on, but having their own group would be interesting.

Now if your adventurer were to actually die then the nice part about the sites that you create is that they still exist and the entities that you create actually still exist. So, if you created, say, a group of bandits and you were going and taking things from towns and so on, and people disliked you and hunted you down and killed you - which is actually in the list of the dev goals for that, so it's not just something I'm saying - you'd then have that group of people, and once we get succession in, which is very soon - we're probably going to do succession before we finish the caravan arc because it's ... well it is actually part of the caravan arc, I think it's release 5 right now - but once we have succession then the group that you've created, named, and everything, and you've told them all to wear little blue hats or something - assuming you can secure those things and actually help your people wear stuff, you'd probably have to hand them out manually at first, like 'Here's your hat, here's your hat. Now put it on, put it on here' and they're like 'Okay!' - so that group would persist; whatever position you'd created for yourself, probably just like 'I'm the leader of the bandits' or whatever, because you have these entity positions right, with names and so on, like when you're fighting bandits yourself it's like 'Here's the ringleader; here's the boss' or whatever, it just gives them silly names, you'd be able to do the same thing and you'd have your little group with the leadership position, and when the leadership position is vacated, when you meet your untimely demise, then the leadership position would be filled; when we get to release 5, or whenever we do succession, which is going to be release 5 or sooner, right. So you have that, and then you've got this group that persists forever, or as long as it has a breathing member, or someone willing to resurrect it after everyone's gone. Then you'd leave that behind and that would be one of the first real feelings that you've created something rather than destroyed something, because right now you can kill all the beasts in the world and then the world has changed in that way; that's a way of leaving a mark, but it's a negative mark.


Rainseeker:   So would you be able to set goals for your organization, or similar?
Toady:   Well, the way that we have it set up on the dev page - and we haven't thought about this too much - is that you'd be able to assign little tasks for people and so on that they could do in your absence, but we haven't thought about, you know ... what is, and I don't even know if ... there's nothing really that says, that's anywhere, like what the overarching goal of your organization is. It's like the aggregate version of the personality rewrite, because the personality rewrite involves not just coming up with facets of the personality that are more interesting than the current ones, that allow you to tell better stories, but also new categories entirely of things, like what are the dreams of this dwarf, what are the dwarf's lifelong goals and that kind of thing. Then in adventure mode you don't quite have the same thing because you're playing, whereas your dwarves will have those things independent of your existence, but when you make an organization there's ... the two ways to think about it are, does my organization ... is the game going to try to guess what you're doing? It's like 'Well, they've killed their seventeenth person so obviously this is an organization bent on randomly killing people', or is it something that ... what will probably end up happening because the computer can never really be smart enough to tell, is that you just say what you're about, and if you completely violate the principles of what you're about then it'll probably start trying to come up with something on its own, it'd be like 'Well, you're supposed to be wandering around and helping the sick, but you keep killing them' and eventually it would decide that you're actually some kind of weird euthanasia organization or something. But that's all kind of wishful thinking; not the content that I just mentioned but just the ability that it would be able to do anything like that, but it's ...
Rainseeker:   'Hey man, I'm just preventing an epidemic, okay?'
Toady:   It's true, it's going to be dangerous when there are plagues, you'll have some difficult decisions to make. But that is the general idea of what kind of legacy you can leave behind, and that you'd be able to have an organization that made some kind of sense ... I mean at first you'd probably just be selecting from a list of ... like when you form the organization there are other people around because you don't just form it in your head, right? So you'd probably take your three or four adventuring companions that you'd picked up and say 'Alright, let's go rob wagons together!' and they're like 'Yay!' or some of them leave or one of them tries to kill you or something, but once they all agree that you are now an organization that goes and robs wagons together, which at first would probably just be as simple as selecting, you know, 'bandit' as your option or whatever ... Because that sort of organization already exists, right, you can just declare that 'I want to be a type of organization that already exists', it already understands how they work and so when the adventure is over either by retirement or death it would understand what to do with those guys, and then they'd fit right in; you'd get quests to kill yourself or whatever. Right now you can get a quest to kill yourself but only through the animosity between civilizations; if your adventurer is a notable killer of another civilization then retires back in a friendly town, and then you start at the aggrieved civilization you can get a quest to kill your adventurer, but they're still just window dressing over there. So that's that form of legacy, and then there's the familial legacy you can have, when we get to the relationship stuff you'll be able to leave behind little playable childrens and things. I suppose your spouse might be playable too, I wonder ... if you get killed it'd be fun to go on a vengeance quest or something as the aggrieved widow or widower.
Rainseeker:   So is it possible right now to play until you die of old age?
Toady:   Possible, technically, I suppose, but you'd have to be a patient person who sits and sleeps repeatedly until you die.
Capntastic:   But isn't there going to be the kind of time skip adventurer thing like you were talking about a while ago?
Toady:   Yeah, exactly ... I think the question was can you do it now? Now it would require patience, but definitely the idea was that you'd be able to skip years at a time if you want ...
Rainseeker:   Right, because it'd be kind of cool to train your kids, you know? Like make them awesome warriors too.
Toady:   Yeah, and then you could have your little team, and they could go on adventures with you and you could carry the smallest one and just run in there ... Especially if you're a dwarf, you just strap them on and jump into it.
Rainseeker:   Of course you could adopt, too, if you wanted to I guess.
Toady:   Well yeah, adoption is one of the things the game sorely needs, right? Because there's all of these orphans ...
Rainseeker:   They're everywhere.
Toady:   People should help each other out. So yeah ... it'd be something that would be fun in adventure mode too, because then you'd have your little orphan, or your little orphanage, I guess just tell them all to work on your farm or whatever.
Rainseeker:   You have an orphanage ... that'd be great.
Toady:   Yeah, so that's it. The only other thing - I wrote down a few things - the only other thing I had written down for the adventurer legacy are the things that can already happen but they could be focused on a little bit more; things like statues and artwork and people naming their kids after you, that kind of stuff, which we've touched upon, I think, before, and already happens to some extent, the statues and artwork. So there are a lot of ways to leave a ... I guess what I was trying to focus on this time was a creative impact on the world rather than a destructive impact, because obviously there's the legacy of slain dragons and so on, and then there's the creative impact of making new entities, new sites, having artwork created about you, having a family and leaving more people behind than you were yourself. Then I guess there's impacts of change ... more of, say, an army arc or trading thing where stuff moves around or changes ownership and I suppose you could also, when we get the crafting beyond ... Like right now I guess you could leave a legacy of sharpened stones, but you'll be able to do better than that in terms of leaving things behind.

[PigtailLlama]

So, if I understand this correctly, it should be possible to do the following with the upcoming version:

1. Claim a site ruled over by someone,

2. If said person denies my claim and states that I am a "silly person", with the new conversation and combat systems can A) duel to the death or B) pin and lift said person, and throw them into the nearest fire and watch them burn alive,

3. Rule with an iron fist and kill all who oppose me by way of law?

...Neat.

[Putnam]

Yeah, sounds about right. The main issue would be getting the fire running. Also, I don't think ruling with an iron fist in a way that's recognizable by the game is quite going to be possible next version.

[monk12]

So, if I understand this correctly, it should be possible to do the following with the upcoming version:

1. Claim a site ruled over by someone,

2. If said person denies my claim and states that I am a "silly person", with the new conversation and combat systems can A) duel to the death or B) pin and lift said person, and throw them into the nearest fire and watch them burn alive,

3. Rule with an iron fist and kill all who oppose me by way of law?

...Neat.

#3 is interesting to me.

What happens if you start mistreating the citizens of your new entity? Will they kick you out of the entity, or will they leave it, or will they just be like "well the King can do what he wants, I guess." Are they more tolerant of stealing in the name of the new site leader (considering it tribute or something?)

[lue]

With tributes running the town while you're away, will messengers ever find you to alert you to problems in that town, e.g. the guy you left it charge was killed and someone new controls the town? Or will you intrinsically know when your rule is affected?