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[H.P. Urist]

Think about it. Your atom smasher kills ten dwarves and the sheriff busts in to the lever pulling room with a hard on for justice and Urist Pickles shits himself and then magma- it would add so much !FUN!

[utunnels]

I suppose that is because someone(you) tell them to pull the lever?
But this idea is interesting. When you want to get rid of two dorfs... you can let one kill the other then jail the murderer.

[Wooster]

From a coding point of view, probably because that level of cause and effect is very difficult to program a computer to recognise!

[Naryar]

Too hard to recognize, yes.

[LMeire]

Kill-counts are weird. I had a duke with a listed kill because at one point he socked a guy who later burned to death setting up a "garbage disposal", seven years after what Legends mode called the "mortal wound".

[Sutremaine]

...Did you mean 'threw a sock at him'? Because I only just realised you could have meant 'punched'.

Even if the game figured out that lever pull --> dead dwarves --> blame the lever puller, it'd be pretty simple to get around. You could have your atomsmasher either completely automated by a repeater, or made semi-automatic by having a pressure plate located where dwarves can't get at it but other units can. Traders, wild animals, enemies, expendable livestock... The player can always add another degree of separation.

Or get your duke, baron, count, or champion to pull the lever. Those positions are [PUNISHMENT_EXEMPTION].

[LMeire]

...Did you mean 'threw a sock at him'? Because I only just realised you could have meant 'punched'.
...

While I did mean 'punched', I don't know what exactly happened. I only noticed the oddity after poor Rafeb was already a pool of grease and a pickaxe, and Legends didn't tell me anything about what exactly the "mortal wound" was either- just that Lord Klix hit Rafeb, and then Rafeb died 7 years later in an unrelated fire while Klix's personal information screen listed him as a kill. I like to imagine the Duke covertly had him killed for discovering his personal stash while everyone else was stuck with limited rations- 'cause that's something I seriously did to keep my favorite Duke from leaving his rooms while everyone up top got violent.

[Charles2531]

From a coding point of view, probably because that level of cause and effect is very difficult to program a computer to recognise!

First-order cause and effect might not be hard. The bridge kills a dwarf. Check who pulled the lever and you have your murderer. It would probably only work for bridges and other methods for directly killing dwarves, as it would be pretty hard to retrace flooding to a dwarf opening the floodgates. Beyond first-order, everything becomes impractical. The game can't run through a giant Rube-Goldberg machine.

[NullForceOmega]

I'm gonna try to field this one:  "You are instructed to pull a lever, you have no way of knowing what it does, you pull the lever and hear a horrible agonized scream."  Does this make you a murderer?  Remember that murder requires intent, under all reasonable circumstances the game is considering, the dwarf does not have intent.  Now, to clarify, it is possible to make dwarves "aware" of the systems the lever is hooked up to, but that is not currently checked.  It also would not make sense for it to be used in many situations, unless the device the lever is hooked up to is directly intended for killing (spike repeaters), you won't have many systems that are clearly death-traps (floodgates, bridges, etc.).

[Charles2531]

I'm gonna try to field this one:  "You are instructed to pull a lever, you have no way of knowing what it does, you pull the lever and hear a horrible agonized scream."  Does this make you a murderer?  Remember that murder requires intent, under all reasonable circumstances the game is considering, the dwarf does not have intent.

You have to remember though; the dwarves may be dimwitted, but they are somewhat omniscient. Without having a chance to learn about it, they can know exactly every nook and cranny of any newly constructed part of the fortress and where to find everything in there. Obviously they must know what the lever does.

[Bumber]

I'm gonna try to field this one:  "You are instructed to pull a lever, you have no way of knowing what it does, you pull the lever and hear a horrible agonized scream."  Does this make you a murderer?  Remember that murder requires intent, under all reasonable circumstances the game is considering, the dwarf does not have intent.

You have to remember though; the dwarves may be dimwitted, but they are somewhat omniscient. Without having a chance to learn about it, they can know exactly every nook and cranny of any newly constructed part of the fortress and where to find everything in there. Obviously they must know what the lever does.

Yet they'll pull it even if it ends in their own death (and everyone they hold dear.) They know what it's attached to but they can't conceptualize the results.

[utunnels]

Well even if you can track, it could be an accident, nor murder.