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[Ribs]

So, currently dwarves don't seem very aware of their professions. You can currently go to their labor preferences and make it so that they can only do a single job, but that still doesn't feel like you're making a dwarf behave like he's a professional at his job.

It would be interesting if there was a mechanic in the game that allowed you to mark a dwarf as a professional in one of the labor options they currently have, and more so if that turned out meaningful to their behavior in the game. Say, if you assigned a dwarf as a professional mason he would tend to spend the time that he's not on break hanging out near the mason workshops even if there's currently nothing for him to do there. Professional dwarves would inevitably end up talking to each other more, and the more skilled dwarves could treat the less skilled ones as apprentices and teach them in the same way the military dwarves train each other when conducting training sessions. They would eventually get more organized and influential and try to form their own little guilds. Could be a way of bringing that back...

Professionalizing a dwarf could have both positive and negative consequences, too. If you make a miller into a professional carpenter he might not like that you made him change his job. Maybe skilled enough dwarves would come to your fortress already specialized and expecting nothing short of working with what they already know. So if a professional weaponsmith came to your fortress and there was no work for him to do because you didn't set up a metal industry yet he would probably be "unsatisfied with work lately", but making him abandon his profession would make him even less content, and etc.

This has probably been brought up before in some way or another, but I felt compelled to throw some ideas around. What do you guys think?

[NW_Kohaku]

To a degree, this is planned to happen, although it isn't very fleshed out.  Look at "Fortress Subgroups" near the very bottom of the devpages.

In general, this is dangerous ground to tread, because players will get antsy about anything that abridges their ability to control every aspect of a dwarf's life.

[King Mir]

Yeah, not fond of having migrants be grumpy because they can't do their useless skills they came to the fort with.

[Ribs]

To a degree, this is planned to happen, although it isn't very fleshed out.  Look at "Fortress Subgroups" near the very bottom of the devpages.

In general, this is dangerous ground to tread, because players will get antsy about anything that abridges their ability to control every aspect of a dwarf's life.

Yeah, I know it's planned. And it's probably not something that will start being developed anytime soon, so I think there's no harm in trying to explore the concept a little before the developers get around to it. Not trying to get too pretentions with this thing.

But is it really that dangerous? I mean, one of the main features of the game revolves around the fact that you can't control your dwarves completely. They have their own personalities and preferences, and, from what I can gather, the goal is to make them even more individualistic and complex.

The main problem here is that right now the dwarves personalities aren't very interesting, but Toady seems very ambitious with his plans on re-writing the whole personality mechanic, so everything could change. I can understand why more conservative players worry about not being able to completely control every aspect of their dwarf's life, but I suspect that the direction of where the development of the game is going may leave us with even less direct control of our precious dwarves. I could be wrong, though. Did he say anything about it that may suggest otherwise? Thanks for the reply, man.

Yeah, not fond of having migrants be grumpy because they can't do their useless skills they came to the fort with.

Well, so a grand master pump operator could get a little grumpy if you forced him into carpentry. It kind of makes sense if you think about it... Then again he's going to get a little grumpy if you decided not to build a well in your fortress, or if there's not enough chairs, or maybe not enough rooms to go around. The game already penalizes you for a lot of things.

I can see how it could get annoying when dwarves with less popular professions come around your fortress looking for work, though...maybe he would have less expectations? I don't know. There are plans on reworking the migration system, so I guess there could be a couple of ways around that. In any case, I don't think that by making dwarves a little grumpy for a while would increase the general unhappines of your fortress too much. Only very qualified dwarves should expect to mantain their profession, but even they could adapt. Dwarves have very long lives, you know! He could have been a soldier for 10 years, then became a ranger for 20 more years and finally a woodcutter for 30. If by the time he gets to your fortress you decide to make him a fisherdwarf he wouldn't be grumpy for too long.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm not saying it's not something you should be able to talk about - it's something I talk about - I'm just saying it's something that is very controversial by nature. 

You should read this thread on hypothetical Dwarven Autonomy. 

Spoiler: And here's something of the most immediate interest: (click to show/hide)

Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.  I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system.  Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.

Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior?  Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability?  Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone?  While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.

At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons.  At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods.  Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults.  Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system.  For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.

On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation.  The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time.  If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws.  That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.

Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build.  It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected.  The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview.  If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed.  Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.

[Ribs]

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.  I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system.  Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.

This is very interesting to me, actually. A lot of real time strategy games don't really clarify who or what the player represents in the game. As if we're a vague mystical "force" that somehow represents the entire will of the fortress' population. it does make more sense to me that we actually represent the will or at least the actions of a minoritarian leadership.

Thanks for showing me all these threads on reworking dwarven society, by the way. I guess my sugestion is a little redundant.

[Babylon]

you are misusing the word professional a bit.  A professional is someone who gets paid for something.  We'll have professional dwarves if the economy ever comes back.