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[GreatWyrmGold]

Hm. When I think dungeon master, I imagine someone who designs and builds deadly places to put prisoners and criminals. Beast taming? Neat. Death traps? Even better. And so forth. Maybe animal tamers tame the wild beasts, smiths ake the chains and weapons, mechanics make the traps, and the dungeon master helps make it all come together in a way fun for adventure mode and deadly for gobbos. Or something like that.

[Uristocrat]

The design goal has been for some time is that all migrants have a history tracked in worldgen, this is a prerequisite for having a fortress live in a living world that interacts with it and evolves.
Spawning the DM complete with skills and made up life-history would be regressing and only cause him to be removed when, with the caravan and army arcs, the goal seems to be that every entity and resource will be tracked also during play.

I would consider making the DM an appointed noble just fine, personally.  I believe I already said that when I discussed the possibility of an appointed DM that acts like the chief medical dwarf, but for animal taming.

That said, given that we can already get historical figures like kings & queens to immigrate, there's nothing inherently unreasonable about an immigrant DM that's a part of the world's history.  There's no reason that DMs with suitable skills can't be selected from your civilization's members during worldgen or whatever.

[CursedBurger]

I would like to see a DM, if brought back, interact with captured sentients in some meaningful way, such as a POW exchange, ransom, slavery, interrogation, sending back to the mountainhome to be paraded around...

[SuicideJunkie]

Chief Taming Dwarf / DM sounds like a good idea to me.

Beyond being the go-to-dorf for handling the wildest animals, there are quite a few other things that dwarf could do:
 - Organize classes for inexperienced dwarves.  (like military demonstrations, but for animal training)
 - Have meetings with the traders that arrive at your fort, to trade training tips.  The meetings would be required to gain the benefit of your civ's knowledge level, and to boost the civ's knowledge in areas where you have experimented.
 - Give you details on the tamed-ness when viewing the animal.  "This is a dog.  His hair is black.  He is rambunctious.  He bites when annoyed.  He has a keen awareness of forbidden zones and dutifully avoids them."
 - Organize a training reinforcement schedule at their assigned office chair.  It could also allow you to request your trainers to maintain a certain level of training, much like the book keeper noble.

[Uristocrat]

Chief Taming Dwarf / DM sounds like a good idea to me.

Beyond being the go-to-dorf for handling the wildest animals, there are quite a few other things that dwarf could do:
 - Organize classes for inexperienced dwarves.  (like military demonstrations, but for animal training)
 - Have meetings with the traders that arrive at your fort, to trade training tips.  The meetings would be required to gain the benefit of your civ's knowledge level, and to boost the civ's knowledge in areas where you have experimented.
 - Give you details on the tamed-ness when viewing the animal.  "This is a dog.  His hair is black.  He is rambunctious.  He bites when annoyed.  He has a keen awareness of forbidden zones and dutifully avoids them."
 - Organize a training reinforcement schedule at their assigned office chair.  It could also allow you to request your trainers to maintain a certain level of training, much like the book keeper noble.

It looks like Toady is already working on the exporting knowledge part via the dwarven caravan, so that's cool.  I do wish the DM was back in the picture, though.  I guess an appointed noble would still be moddable, they just wouldn't do anything, which isn't really what I want to see.

[Icefire2314]

For rare happenings like dragon taming for which there is no general knowledge, you'll want to have somebody decent at the job, though I suppose you could practice with any spare dwarves you have to build your knowledge base a bit, he he he.

Fun.

[GreatWyrmGold]

It sounds like a great migrant trap. Imagine how many dwarven kills the dragon would rack up before someone was lucky enough to succeed. I can imagine how the dwarves would react.

"Okay, we just arrived at this fortress, and here are the notes on how people tried before; let's read through it. If we can't tame it, these guys won't let us out of this little locked room! Okay, smacking it on the nose with a deer lung won't do it. Smacking it on the nose with cat tallow won't do it. Smacking it...smacking it on the nose with food seems to be a bad idea. Cringing and cowering with a deer lung in your hand doesn't seem to work..."

[Fault]

I miss the dungeon master, the philosopher, the tax collector... the mechanics of nobility in the recent release, though more.. controllable, just seem to lack a bit of the flavour that early dwarf fortress had.

Especially the guild masters, getting a respective noble based on whichever industries you favoured or what your dwarves had discovered or endeavoured in felt like 'wow, the mountainhomes have really noticed what my fort's been doing!'.

But with bugged nobles and migrant floods now it's just like.. hit 80 dwarves, diplomat comes by and makes one of your dwarves suddenly shift from HELPFUL MEMBER OF THE WORKING PEOPLE to dickish upperclassman (who never appoints any of the positions he's supposed to!). It was reasonable to have a pompous immigrant make outlandish demands when you're forced to accomodate him. Compared to that, it just seems weird that someone who was previously perfectly fine with their room and board suddenly becomes miserable when they don't have enough chests and cabinets.

And in a way, the fluid nature of the nobility is making management more inconvenient. I'll get things like... one of the soldiers under the captain of the guard will suddenly be elected mayor, and then no one can 'find someone in charge to yell at' because he's too busy training and defending the fortress to mill about in his office. (Been a while since I've played 40d but I'm pretty sure nobles were previously excluded from the draft!)

But I guess for the most part I miss when nobles were cordoned-off and separate, they were something out of the player's control and that brough a unique challenge in keeping them (and the fortress) content. It was like you were constantly trying to wrestle control of your fortress away from them. That sector of the game just.. seems a little too easy now. I mean the hammerer doesn't even have any room requirements any more.

[Owlbread]

Chief Taming Dwarf / DM sounds like a good idea to me.

Beyond being the go-to-dorf for handling the wildest animals, there are quite a few other things that dwarf could do:
 - Organize classes for inexperienced dwarves.  (like military demonstrations, but for animal training)
 - Have meetings with the traders that arrive at your fort, to trade training tips.  The meetings would be required to gain the benefit of your civ's knowledge level, and to boost the civ's knowledge in areas where you have experimented.
 - Give you details on the tamed-ness when viewing the animal.  "This is a dog.  His hair is black.  He is rambunctious.  He bites when annoyed.  He has a keen awareness of forbidden zones and dutifully avoids them."
 - Organize a training reinforcement schedule at their assigned office chair.  It could also allow you to request your trainers to maintain a certain level of training, much like the book keeper noble.

I think that's a very good idea. Does anyone get the feeling though that "Dungeon Master" isn't the right title for such a noble? It seems more like a Beastmaster or something would be a better title. A dungeon master, to my mind, is someone who handles things like torture, prisoner-keeping and so on. Why not adopt that sort of a role for the Dungeon Master? He could even be a part of the fortress guard (makes the guard a bit more interesting). I suppose the hammerer is already the mad bastard executioner, unfortunately. Perhaps the Beastmaster is actually the head ranger, and can teach other rangers how to hunt as well as tame, track etc. He also manages things like the quota of animals that can be killed in a day, gives a list of how many of a particular species are left in the wild and so on. He'd be the guy you go to if there's a kill of a dwarf by an unusual animal that nobody recognises, too.

"Sentry, we have found the gnawed remains of Onul Mebantekkud, the carpenter, among the bushes!"

"I see. Send for the beastmaster."

That might work, I suppose. The DM is replaced by the Beastmaster and the Hammerer takes on the actual dungeon-based roles (punishment and so on). I like the idea of three seperate nobles but that's always hard for some people to swallow.

[NW_Kohaku]

If the whole point is to save the "flavor" of the noble, and not to have a specific function, I'd have to say that you should really go back to what it originally was...

The Dungeon Master was a wierd guy that came to your fortress "dreaming of treasure" in nothing but cloaks and gloves (which I took to mean odd bondage gear... My first DM, I named "Lady Zon", because her first name was Zon, and I figured she'd be the sort of person who'd demand everyone address her as "Lady" at all times.)

The dungeon master makes the most sense if you are actually, literally, building some sort of dungeon.  As in, you are going to protect your precious, precious gold by building a big maze with traps and beasties to protect it.  For that reason, the notion of having to hit cavern, or possibly even some sort of mysterious structure or cavern ruins that will go into the game later, might be the best way to go.

If exotic animals are the key feature of such a class, it might be an appointable/automatically self-appointed noble that rises up when you have a sufficiently trained looney dwarf with a sufficient enough "dungeon" for them to master.  If we are to keep the exotic animal type of key trait, it might mean domesticating enough sufficiently strange and monstrous (like giant lions and harpies or something) of a specific minimum number of non-mundane species and a large enough base menagerie, and enough animal-based kills to trigger Dungeon Master status. 

Having a dungeon master might not give them, individually, specific new powers, but positions in DF tend to give you, the player, new ways to see into the workings of the fortress, and it might give players more control over the behavior of creatures in general.  For example, while the Manager lets you assign jobs, and the Bookkeeper lets you view stocks, the Dungeon Master might give you specific breeding instructions, or a menu that gives you a better ability to train specific types of routines into your creatures, such as keeping "packs" of creatures together, or staying closer to your military dwarves, or the ability to reassign war dogs that you have assigned to dwarves previously.

[monk12]

The idea of the DM being this noble that wants a crazy dungeon to oversee is actually kinda neat- it also works with the whole "adventurers will explore this place later" aspect of DF. I don't know how you'd go about a non-irritating way of doing it, but it's a thought I had.

[NW_Kohaku]

Recording exotic beast kills (and possibly trap kills) might be the easiest way to do it - you just have to "prove" to the game that you are going to be fighting your enemies with non-axedwarf means of combat.

Giving the player some sort of zone designation that lets you mark areas as "dungeons" that you can build to funnel invading goblins through death traps, or the cavern critters into your sorting bins, you could rack up "dungeon kills" that could lead to varying levels of "dungeoness" that gives you perks in the form of higher Dungeon Master abilities and ranks to appoint. 

[Fault]

the notion about trap kills gives me an idea... if that's his forte, the dungeon master could be like a guild master position for mechanics! Like how you guys have ideas for a 'beast master' position to lead your rangers.

Designating areas as 'dungeon zones' is a good idea... keep everyone except trap maintenance guys from wandering in there. helping with siege engines would be a good function too... 'cause right now their implementation is a little awkward and innefficient.

maybe when you get a dungeon master, he could also create schedules for manning of siege engines, designate stone for use as ammo, or assign animals to the siege engines to haul them around like wagons..

[NW_Kohaku]

the notion about trap kills gives me an idea... if that's his forte, the dungeon master could be like a guild master position for mechanics! Like how you guys have ideas for a 'beast master' position to lead your rangers.

Designating areas as 'dungeon zones' is a good idea... keep everyone except trap maintenance guys from wandering in there. helping with siege engines would be a good function too... 'cause right now their implementation is a little awkward and innefficient.

maybe when you get a dungeon master, he could also create schedules for manning of siege engines, designate stone for use as ammo, or assign animals to the siege engines to haul them around like wagons..

There's a problem in making the job have too wide a set of abilities - why would a dungeon master have anything to do with siege craft? 

[Uristocrat]

Recording exotic beast kills (and possibly trap kills) might be the easiest way to do it - you just have to "prove" to the game that you are going to be fighting your enemies with non-axedwarf means of combat.

Giving the player some sort of zone designation that lets you mark areas as "dungeons" that you can build to funnel invading goblins through death traps, or the cavern critters into your sorting bins, you could rack up "dungeon kills" that could lead to varying levels of "dungeoness" that gives you perks in the form of higher Dungeon Master abilities and ranks to appoint.

I would love having a noble that demanded that I build them a dungeon and that I fill it with exotic beasts and treasure.