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[Carp McDwarfEater]

Imagine a fortress, sealed off from the surface as a result of a siege. There isn't much food left, as several farmers were killed. Almost everyone is miserable, and a tantrum spiral could occur any minute. The solution? Propaganda. Make up some crazy story about how the dwarves in FarAwayville only get one plump helmet a year for food. Suddenly your dwarves are a lot happier, and are grateful for what little food they have. 

Let's look at another situation. Say that as a result of war, you have a few elf prisoners locked up in little wooden cages. You could sure use some more soap for your hospital to treat wounded soldiers, but you'll need to burn some wood for ash. See where this is going? But before you can have your elf wood burners, you'll need to convince your dwarves that slavery is okay. How? Propaganda. Tell them some story about how elves buy kidnapped dwarves from the goblins and then force the poor kids to water every single tree in the forest, or risk getting sacrificed to the almighty woodpeckers. Suddenly, your dwarves will feel that it's only right that justice is served and the elves are forced to work.

Of course, there's always a chance that some over-educated dwarf will see through your lies and get angry, or potentially even go around and tell all his friends that your propaganda is all lies. There could be new crimes called "Attempting to Start an Uprising" or "Disloyalty" that could get those troublemakers put in jail, or given beatings.

Propaganda would be really cool to add to the game, because it could be a way to directly influence happiness, and even change your dwarf's ethics in some cases.

So what do you guys think?

[IT 000]

[Brace for footkerchief]

***On the topic of Slavery***

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Spoiler: tags (click to show/hide)

slavery slave slaves slaving slaver slavers

Please search before you post.

tl;dr

Dwarf ethics prohibit slaver.
   [ETHIC:SLAVERY:PUNISH_CAPITAL]


That said, I like the general idea of propaganda. However I can't think of a Fun way to implement it. The only real use it would have is either staving off bad thoughts from military training, or have it do some magical Command and Conquer type thing where it magically makes them work faster/harder/better for a few minutes. None of which promote Fun. Unless you have some crazed leader start a rebellion and such. But if we go down that road expect another howitzer of links.

[Carp McDwarfEater]

The three links that I looked at only talk about slavery, not propaganda. And I'm not even going to address your comment on dwarven ethics. Reread the original post.

[Jeoshua]

He's got you there.  [ETHICS:SLAVERY:x] exists, but [ETHICS:HUMAN_RIGHTS_VIOLATIONS:x] does not technically exist.

Because that's what this would be.  I hate to tempt Godwin's Law, but this kind of Propoganda is what made the rest of the world so fearful of WWII Germany, was attempted by the US at the same time, and was also used in Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Russia, and even modern China to this very day.

So there would need to be an ethic about this.  Utilizing it would make other entities very worried about the state of your civilization, and possibly wish to "free" your citizens.

[Carp McDwarfEater]

In my opinion Toady shouldn't have even given dwarves ethics, or if he did, they should've been random. Too many good ideas have been rejected because they supposedly go against the ethics, which are only in the raws. And in any case, why should the dwarves be angels? This is taking place in medieval times, and back then they had quite different morals from what we have today.

[Jeoshua]

I'd tend to agree on the point that ethics are different today than they once were.  But the way the ethics system is set up, dwarves are like that so they don't get attacked in worldgen by other races.  DF is pretty standard fantasy in that the Good Guys go to war against the Evil-Doers, while the dastardly Bad Guys just kind of make themselves a nuissance to the forces of good because they can.

If Dwarves were not good, they'd get attacked by everything, and wouldn't attack Goblins even tho they're being raided constantly.

[IT 000]

He's got you there.  [ETHICS:SLAVERY:x] exists, but [ETHICS:HUMAN_RIGHTS_VIOLATIONS:x] does not technically exist.

Slavery is just one ethic, here's all the ethics, ethics that are relevant to 'Human Rights Violations' are bolded.

   [ETHIC:KILL_ENTITY_MEMBER:PUNISH_CAPITAL]
   [ETHIC:KILL_NEUTRAL:ONLY_IF_SANCTIONED]
   [ETHIC:KILL_ENEMY:ACCEPTABLE]
   [ETHIC:KILL_ANIMAL:ACCEPTABLE]
   [ETHIC:KILL_PLANT:ACCEPTABLE]
   [ETHIC:TORTURE_AS_EXAMPLE:UNTHINKABLE]
   [ETHIC:TORTURE_FOR_INFORMATION:UNTHINKABLE]
   [ETHIC:TORTURE_FOR_FUN:UNTHINKABLE]
   [ETHIC:TORTURE_ANIMALS:UNTHINKABLE]
   [ETHIC:TREASON:PUNISH_CAPITAL]
   [ETHIC:OATH_BREAKING:PUNISH_CAPITAL]
   [ETHIC:LYING:PERSONAL_MATTER]
   [ETHIC:VANDALISM:PUNISH_SERIOUS]
   [ETHIC:TRESPASSING:PUNISH_SERIOUS]
   [ETHIC:THEFT:PUNISH_SERIOUS]
   [ETHIC:ASSAULT:PUNISH_SERIOUS]
   [ETHIC:SLAVERY:PUNISH_CAPITAL]
   [ETHIC:EAT_SAPIENT_OTHER:UNTHINKABLE]
   [ETHIC:EAT_SAPIENT_KILL:UNTHINKABLE]
   [ETHIC:MAKE_TROPHY_SAME_RACE:APPALLING]
   [ETHIC:MAKE_TROPHY_SAPIENT:SHUN]
   [ETHIC:MAKE_TROPHY_ANIMAL:ACCEPTABLE]

So while there is no 'rights violations' there's plenty of ethics to cover it.

The three links that I looked at only talk about slavery, not propaganda. And I'm not even going to address your comment on dwarven ethics. Reread the original post.

How can you not comment on dwarven ethics? Your dwarves come from areas that punished slavery, most have lived their entire lives there. Trying to change their mind on a subject would be like coming to America/Any European Country and saying how we should go back to slavery again. No amount of propaganda can change that and you'd get punished for it.

Anyways, this road is well traveled. See the links above.

[Jeoshua]

I do remember many discussions about people wanting to have a way to change ethics in-game.  They have all been shot down as unreasonable and untennable to the rest of the Dwarven community.  Basically you'd have branched out and become a different civilization, and would likely be at war with the "mother civ" if you did it due to the way the ethics system works.

So basically you can see this by making an entity that's exactly the same as the Dwarves, [CIV_CONTROLLABLE], and setting the ethics that you think you want those ethics to be.

Then generate a world and try to embark as them.  9 times out of 10, they'll be dead and gone, killed off by the "good" Dwarves.

[Carp McDwarfEater]

First off, in a medieval setting, the king and nobles have absolute power. They could have your house burned down because they didn't feel that your grass was long enough, and they still wouldn't get punished. Second off, the dwarves, being uneducated since they don't go to school, probably aren't lectured on how cruel slavery is. For the most part, they probably haven't even been exposed to it. If the high priest or some other revered noble says slavery is okay, and then the dwarves are genuinely fooled by the propaganda, they'd probably have no objections to enslaving dwarves.

In any case, the ethics shouldn't even be brought up. They are never even mentioned in the game. They're meaningless. I'm pretty sure that the current ethic system is only a placeholder, and that dwarves only have the ethics the way they do because if they didn't everybody would kill them, like Jeoshua said.

[Carp McDwarfEater]

@Jeoshua: Once the army arc comes out, I think Toady will handle breaking off from your civ, and civilizations with "Evil" ethics always being killed off by "good guys." I'm not suggesting that propaganda be added right now. It should wait until personality rewrites and the army arc are finished.

[Jeoshua]

I just had a thought that came from this.  Not about variable ethics (use that search term, you'll see my point about it getting shot down), but about Slavery itself.

There is a difference between the Slavery that Dwarves would find Unthinkable and the kind of Slavery you're thinking of.  That absolute power that King and Nobles of the middle ages had wasn't over slaves.  It was over Serfs.

The problem does indeed come from a difference in ethics between the middle ages and the modern era.  Serfs were not slaves.  They were not "owned property" or anything like that.  But when they lived under the rule of a nobleman, that noble was their Lord.  They could tell them what to plant, where to live, that they must give their daughter up to them for carnal relations on their wedding night before they were allowed to see the groom.  They wielded immense power over their subjects, but they did NOT own them.  It was more of a "my town, my rules" kind of thing. They were free to go off into the wilderness, or move to another place.

It's a fine point, really, but the ethics system does not model that at all.

[NW_Kohaku]

To answer the OP directly, I believe the idea of propaganda is a fine one, and one I would want to incorporate into a more thorough reinvention of the internal fortress dynamic. 

That is, however, just it: The internal fortress operations are simply not sophisticated enough right now for propaganda to work.  This needs to be a point in a much larger and more sweeping change that would probably only work after Personality Rewrites and Guild Politics are complete. 

[GreatWyrmGold]

Dwarf ethics prohibit slaver.
   [ETHIC:SLAVERY:PUNISH_CAPITAL]

Actually, IIRC, slavery isn't punished capitally in vanilla DF's dwarven justice system. It's simply unthinkable.

That said, I like the general idea of propaganda. However I can't think of a Fun way to implement it. The only real use it would have is either staving off bad thoughts from military training, or have it do some magical Command and Conquer type thing where it magically makes them work faster/harder/better for a few minutes. None of which promote Fun. Unless you have some crazed leader start a rebellion and such. But if we go down that road expect another howitzer of links.

Back in the old, midieval times, people didn't use much of what we'd call propaganda these days. Instead, lots of places had this idea of "divine right to rule." Basically, the theory was that the king was the king because God (or whatever supreme being existed in the local religion) had chosen him to be the king, so follow his God (or whomever)-given rule if you don't want Divine Retribution. I think that something like that might be a closer fit, and might give more Fun opportunities. Example: You want to build a giant gold statue, so you need to export a ton of stuff to get all that gold. To get the dwarves to work overtime, you convince them that this is the desire of, say, Obuk Silverstones the goddess of wealth and fortresses, via priests (a noble who helps keep happiness of religious dwarves up and allows access to this religious leadership stuff). When disaster comes, despite this and other excesses of Obuk's priests, the public sees this as the priests breaking a "promise" that they made, and they revolt against the leadership of the priests, possibly defacing their temples or monuments if they're unhappy enough.

[UHaulDwarf]

Imagine a fortress, sealed off from the surface as a result of a siege. There isn't much food left, as several farmers were killed. Almost everyone is miserable, and a tantrum spiral could occur any minute. The solution? Propaganda. Make up some crazy story about how the dwarves in FarAwayville only get one plump helmet a year for food. Suddenly your dwarves are a lot happier, and are grateful for what little food they have.

Dwarfs already have counselor that do whatever they do to calm other dwarfs down.

Let's look at another situation. Say that as a result of war, you have a few elf prisoners locked up in little wooden cages. You could sure use some more soap for your hospital to treat wounded soldiers, but you'll need to burn some wood for ash. See where this is going? But before you can have your elf wood burners, you'll need to convince your dwarves that slavery is okay. How? Propaganda. Tell them some story about how elves buy kidnapped dwarves from the goblins and then force the poor kids to water every single tree in the forest, or risk getting sacrificed to the almighty woodpeckers. Suddenly, your dwarves will feel that it's only right that justice is served and the elves are forced to work.

Slavery is unthinkable for dwarfs. One dwarf could not convince another dwarf that enslaving an elf would be ok, because no dwarf would think about enslaving anybody.
Only a non dwarf(maybe a vampire?) would try to tell a dwarf that some people are ok to enslave.

[Carp McDwarfEater]

Again with the ethics tags? As I said before, it's a meaningless line of text in the raws that is probably only there to make dwarves not die during world gen.

As of the latest version, I have yet to see a noble position called 'Counselor'. Besides, when the personality rewrites come, it will probably be much harder to keep your dwarfs happy.

And let's not even talk about slavery anymore. Everyone who commented on it said pretty much the exact same thing; we're getting nowhere. Besides, that wasn't the main idea of my suggestion, just a side thought.