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[Romegypt]

I propose that you have to be at least novice to do a skill.

So, you couldn't just draft someone from scratch to be a carpenter. No one could pick it up like that. Dwarves should have to apprentice in ALL skills except for a few which I will mention shortly, to do them at all.

Skills that require no "skill" to do.
Farming
Engraving/smoothing
mining
Plant gathering
butchery
shearing/milking
cooking

These skill, almost anyone could do without much experience. The others required years of training. Plus, it's to easy to just pump out chairs or make everyone a good architect. It puts actual REAL value on skills, rather than just having the job done faster/slightly better.

What do you think?

[Orange Wizard]

I have no experience in stone carving, or shaping metal, but given the tools I'm fairly confident I could smack a rock into something vaguely resembling a chair, or a pointy metal stick. They wouldn't be very good, and it would take a while, but it's not impossible. These factors are already simulated in-game (a mild extend, to be fair) as item quality and time to complete the job.
And how did the first blacksmith learn his trade? From the first anvil?

I'm not sure if this "apprenticeship" mechanic would be entirely realistic.

[Deepblade]

This is kind of a bad suggestion. As Insanity pointed out, if you give someone the tools and materials they can make a chair. It might not be the best looking chair ever, but it'd function as a chair. If he can learn from his mistakes he'd probably think of better ways to make the chair each time. He'd also learn how to use the tools more efficiently, thus giving better results. All this happens over time until he has perfected his craft.

[ShadowHammer]

I can say from personal experience that you actually can just "pick it up like that". When I started woodcrafting, I just took a knife and cut pieces off of a chunk of wood until it looked vaguely like a person. I then tried again, several times, and after about a dozen successive attempts, I went from this:

Spoiler: Warning: terrible (click to show/hide)

to this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

without any training or previous skill.

edited for clarification

[Shazbot]

I do not have a problem with dwarves being able to teach others skills, but do not think skill level requirements to perform jobs is a good mechanic.

[FrankMcFuzz]

Excuse me? Cooking requires no skill? Sure, if all you have to work with is frozen processed food. But dwarven-conveyor-belt-food-processing doesn't exist, so there's no such thing as processed food. Sure, I can roughly guess how long I should cook a piece of meat or boil a mushroom stew; but I'd hate to be on the receiving end of a dish of someone with no skill cooking.

Don't even get me started on butchery.

People have had suggestions of "Certain levels of skills should give access to certain crafts" before, but I really disagree. It makes a fort that gets only wax workers and shearers a rather dull fortress. If I can fluke my way through making a door, I can definitely fumble out a floodgate or armour stand.

[Orange Wizard]

Excuse me? Cooking requires no skill? Sure, if all you have to work with is frozen processed food. But dwarven-conveyor-belt-food-processing doesn't exist, so there's no such thing as processed food. Sure, I can roughly guess how long I should cook a piece of meat or boil a mushroom stew; but I'd hate to be on the receiving end of a dish of someone with no skill cooking.

I think he meant that it should be possible to cook without any prior training, as opposed to things like metalcrafting or soapmaking.

[HenAi]

I like the idea, though in terms of playability, a hefty additional penalty to speed/quality and/or a certain chance of failing to produce anything would probably be better.
Though, if you had some way of influencing what kind of migrants you get, even a flat "can't do" or "will take 1 year of practice until the dwarf can produce anything" could work nicely.

[King Mir]

I think a better solution would be to make poor quality items actually poor, and give bad thoughts and debuffs. So your dabbling carpenter might be able to make something like a bed, but it wouldn't be comfortable to sleep in.

Another aproach is to make the low skill workers occasionally consume a resource without producing an item. You'd want to make it so that failing to create an item like that does not unqueue the item from the workshop however.

[Orange Wizard]

Another aproach is to make the low skill workers occasionally consume a resource without producing an item. You'd want to make it so that failing to create an item like that does not unqueue the item from the workshop however.

Urist McCarpenter cancels Make Bed: Low Self Esteem

[RenoFox]

Toady has stated that unskilled workers should produce lower quality items like "wobbly chair" or "unbalanced sword", but there's no such thing as too unskilled to get started. I think apprentice would work well to give children children something to do and grown up into more useful adults, but having your fortress completely lack a profession because no one is around to teach it wouldn't make sense.

[nanomage]

I really like the idead of unskilled workers sometimes producing inferior-quality items (worse than standard), but I'd also add the probability to totally ruin the reagents or to suffer an accident, injuring others/yourself, starting a fire or toppling a workshop. That should be incentive enough to promote giving skills to your dwarfs and putting them to work according t their skillsets, and in future it will incentivize players to use apprentice mechanics when they're in.
However, the idead of requiring a skill point to try and do something strikes me as a bad and constraining one, to be honest.

[snelg]

I really like the idead of unskilled workers sometimes producing inferior-quality items (worse than standard), but I'd also add the probability to totally ruin the reagents or to suffer an accident, injuring others/yourself, starting a fire or toppling a workshop. That should be incentive enough to promote giving skills to your dwarfs and putting them to work according t their skillsets, and in future it will incentivize players to use apprentice mechanics when they're in.
However, the idead of requiring a skill point to try and do something strikes me as a bad and constraining one, to be honest.

Like the ideas but hope the injuries would be minor, might even be useful as a source of training for the medical dwarves outside missing limbs and the like you get from invaders. Starting fires seems really dangerous until some kind of countermeasure exists and toppling workshops seem like it would add micromanagement without any advantage (queue disappears, workshop must be rebuilt).

I also like the idea of bad thoughts from crafting and using inferior items.

[Romegypt]

That's really cool shadowhammer!

Ok, but how about instead of not being able to do it, you never succeed? You get skill whilst doing it, and once your a novice you'll start succeeding. That way, it really wouldn't be bad to not ever get a metalworker, you just need him to make useless crap until he is a novice.

[nanomage]

I really like the idead of unskilled workers sometimes producing inferior-quality items (worse than standard), but I'd also add the probability to totally ruin the reagents or to suffer an accident, injuring others/yourself, starting a fire or toppling a workshop. That should be incentive enough to promote giving skills to your dwarfs and putting them to work according t their skillsets, and in future it will incentivize players to use apprentice mechanics when they're in.
However, the idead of requiring a skill point to try and do something strikes me as a bad and constraining one, to be honest.

Like the ideas but hope the injuries would be minor, might even be useful as a source of training for the medical dwarves outside missing limbs and the like you get from invaders. Starting fires seems really dangerous until some kind of countermeasure exists and toppling workshops seem like it would add micromanagement without any advantage (queue disappears, workshop must be rebuilt).

I also like the idea of bad thoughts from crafting and using inferior items.

burns, cuts, smashed fingers all look very feasible to me in newbie furnace operating, cooking, carpentry, masonry or metalsmithing. butchers should be more prone to cuts and different animal-inflicted injuries, lumberjacks to letting trees fall on themselves or other dwarves (I believe that's already in). Perhaps an unfortunate dabbling carpenter could amputate his own finger or two now and then, or a cook burn his beard.