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[smjjames]

Northstar, you do realize you're responding to a spambot, right?

At least it LOOKS like a spambot anyway.

[Veroule]

Thank you for implementing some the simple things that make such a HUGE difference. I am really appreciating having stones in alpha order and the magma safe indicator. The devil is in the details and you have got the keep the devil way down in his hole.

[Harken]

Conveniently, Virginia Hughes has a piece up, "When Grief is Traumatic": http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/11/07/when-grief-is-traumatic/, which includes, "Vicki is part of the 10 percent of grievers who have prolonged grief, also known as complicated grief or traumatic grief. Grieving is an intense, painful, and yet altogether healthy experience. What’s unhealthy is when the symptoms of grief — such as yearning for the dead, feeling anger about the loss, or a sense of being stuck — last for six months or more."

With enough time, most survivors mostly get over most things.  And in the pre-industrial world, something like a third of the children didn't live past the age of five, people died at home rather than in a hospital, and families prepared their own dead for burial.  Europeans displayed the bodies of executed criminals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbeting), and watched the blood sport of dogs fighting bears  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear-baiting) all the way up to the late Enlightenment.  Hence, people routinely saw not only dead animals, but also dead sentients and dead kin.  For that matter, my own junior high school biology class had a (real) human skeleton on a stand; it wasn't a source of stress, and I tUrNeD oUt jUsT fInE.

Yeah, there's no question that the grief/stress process in Dwarf Fortress is incredibly over-the-top.  In real life, people learned to DEAL with that kind of stress- death became a commonplace, and people lived all the time around it.  Even in the middle of the black plague, where many towns lost 80-90% of their population, you didn't usually see the survivors descend into madness/anarchy and go killing the remaining survivors off...

The fact is, the stress/tantrum "features" of Dwarf Fortress are the single most broken and unrealistic part of the game.  Anybody with even a basic understanding of sociology or psychology (I've taken a couple college courses in those subjects back in the day) will tell you as much...


Regards,
Northstar

P.S.  The *best* way to fix the balance, and make tantrum-spirals a non-thing (as they largely should be), would be to make it MUCH easier for Dwarves to acquire the "hardened" psychological states where they cease to care about anything bad that happens anymore.  A Dwarf that survived the loss of his mother, father, brother, and three cousins a 2-4 years ago shouldn't suddenly lose his marbles when he loses his little sister today- he should have learned to deal with death by now...

LOL, dude that's a spam post.

[Zarathustra30]

Why would National Geographic hire a spambot?

Anyway, this release is great, though I am disappointed that the immortality goal no longer shows up at all. My Mayor/Baron necromancer now just dreams of raising a family.

...perhaps she'll realize it if I let her into the catacombs...

[Wooster]

What are the features that mark it out as a spam post? Because from where I'm sitting, it adds more to the discussion than the suggestion that it's a spam post...

[szielins]

Given that by now, I'm sure someone's coded spambots to post denials that they're spambots... er... Shoot, I dunno, maybe a senryū?

   Impulse ramp stroller
   Urist paths to worn silk sock
   Magma mist blossoms

[MaximumZero]

Either way, hell of a first post, szielins. Welcome aboard the pain train.

[TD1]

Either way, hell of a first post, szielins. Welcome aboard the pain train.

+1

Welcome.

[4maskwolf]

Either way, hell of a first post, szielins. Welcome aboard the pain train.

+1

Welcome.

+1, welcome aboard my friend.

[NomeQueEuLembro]

Thanks, Toady!

Nice release!

[Harken]

Given that by now, I'm sure someone's coded spambots to post denials that they're spambots... er... Shoot, I dunno, maybe a senryū?

   Impulse ramp stroller
   Urist paths to worn silk sock
   Magma mist blossoms

Sorry Szielins, welcome aboard.

[Ancalagon_TB]

If that was a spambot - and I'm delighted it wasn't - it was more informative than a number of posters...

Next fort I will have to try this out, but I'm still working on a 4.13 one and I feel a new dwarven psychology deserves a new fort.  Getting psychology right is a daunting tasking - do we even understand it?

Thanks for the hard work Toady.

[Akhram]

P.S.  The *best* way to fix the balance, and make tantrum-spirals a non-thing (as they largely should be), would be to make it MUCH easier for Dwarves to acquire the "hardened" psychological states where they cease to care about anything bad that happens anymore.  A Dwarf that survived the loss of his mother, father, brother, and three cousins a 2-4 years ago shouldn't suddenly lose his marbles when he loses his little sister today- he should have learned to deal with death by now...

I don't think that's the right approach to it either. Tantrums are part of the DF world and avoiding them as long as you can is somewhat fun if you give it enough imagination. While you could in previous versions just build masterworks everywhere and get along the most distressing of the situations I belive most of us just avoided that kind of solution just because we could workaround in a more imaginative and funny way, like a guy I read once who made a glass dome over his dinning hall and threw the bodies of every dead enemy so their dwarves get the "don't care about anything anymore" trait.

So, what I was trying to say here is that psychology is a hell of a feature. That wasn't realistic because, well, lots of dwarves should have lost their minds with all that blood feast. Now we have another system which seems even more complicated, less stright forward for sure.

As for the example you wrote (the reason of this post) someone could just bury deep inside of them their feelings for a long time and then, something which doesn't look as bad trigger the bananas inside their brains. That's just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've seen people IRL go nuts that way.

Anyways it's a really really hard thing to virtualize in a realistic way. We'll see where this leads us.

[TD1]

But Dwarves are different from humans. A more violent race, and a more blood-soaked and booze-drenched one. Armok, God of Blood is their lord.

They should have a better tolerance than what is currently being seen...many of my Dwarves are pining away after their loved ones that didn't come to the fort with them, which makes insane Dwarves a guarantee. I like inventive methods of controlling the Dwarves, but not when there is next to no way of stopping a significant number go insane.

And yet, Dwarves aren't humans can also be used to say that Dwarves won't have the same psychology as humans, so anything is possible for them. I, too, am interested in how this path will end.

[Mustard Elemental]

The classic cave-in bug returns.
WITH A VENGEANCE