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[AceSV]

This discussion has been held before, but I don't see a particularly recent one, as in, after a bunch of US states legalized marijuana, recent. 

Off the top of my head, tobacco, cannabis, caffeine, coca, opium and shrooms would be reasonably obtainable medieval substances that dwarves could use.  I'm not suggesting to depict the kind of super drugs that we have in the modern world.  Most of these plants, including tobacco, have been bred or engineered to produce stronger effects than they would have in the middle ages.  The medieval equivalents should not be much stronger than alcohol (keeping in mind, alcohol can be pretty bad if you're not a dwarf)  Opium is strong, but was difficult to produce in abuseable quantity before 1400.  Caffeine of course doesn't grow on trees, exactly, the player would have to obtain and distill substances like coffee, tea, cocoa, kola or guarana to get at it.  Which I guess is also true of opium, I'm less familiar with that one. 

If I remember my war-on-drugs indoctrination propaganda correctly, shrooms are dangerous because they are wild and can have very different levels of hallucinogen per individual, but that feels like a dwarfy or at least rogue-likey caveat.  NetHack had a fun hallucinating syndrome that could be triggered by eating yellow mode, which I could definitely imagine having different levels depending on the severity of shroom.  One of the dangers of hallucinating in NetHack was that it could lead to accidental murders, and I could see shroom abuse causing dwarves to go into temporary Berzerk or Insane status or maybe even shroom induced weird moods.  So the player can either balance letting dwarves use the shrooms for happy thoughts against the occasional bad trip, or try to ban shrooms and prevent dwarves from jumping on them like they were socks. 

Speaking of which, it could be interesting to allow the player to put bans or quotas on the import or production of various substances, or limit their use to medical, religious, trade or recreation.  Dwarves that are addicted to a certain substance (maybe dwarves with an addictive personality, or a lot of stress) could try to steal some drugs from stockpiles or visitors could try to smuggle in contraband.  Assuming that the Dwarven Economy will not be revived for the purpose of contraband, maybe smugglers could appear like thieves or ambushes, a dwarf addict grabs an item of appropriate value  and brings it to the smuggler, the smuggler leaves with the item and the player gets a message "a smuggler has made off with a (whatever it was)".  Alternatively, the dwarf picks up a random item to trade for drugs and the smuggler provides the dwarf with a quantity of drugs based on the value of the item.  Tavern visitors could throw a wrench into the drug war as well. 

I had previously suggested aphrodisiacs, maybe those could function as a type of drug. 

Alfrodo suggested that DF substances like Golden Salve, Mog Juice and Liquid Fire could be treated as drugs.  In the Volsunga Saga, Sigurd roasts a dragon heart to eat, and the fumes give him the ability to speak with birds, and the birds convince him to kill his ally Regin.  Sounds to me a lot like the conversation about shrooms, so perhaps the blood or extracts of megabeasts could have hallucinatory effects. 

[Vattic]

This discussion has been held before, but I don't see a particularly recent one, as in, after a bunch of US states legalized marijuana, recent. 

It has multiple times no less and the last only a year ago. If you are going to ignore the posting guidelines on this board you should at least link to the previous discussions as they contain interesting information. If you had something new to add you can bump those old threads. Repeating the same discussions over and over can't be much help for Toady.

Previously most recent thread on it.
Largest thread on it. This one is especially worth checking as it has a massive list of ideas the poster collected into the OP as the discussion developed.

[AceSV]

Ah, okay thanks.  I was searching for drug names specifically, I guess I should have just searched for drugs. 

You're right, that's some good info, but maybe more in-depth than I think it needs to be.  I'll give it a full read later. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Toady has also explicitly put tea trees and coffee trees into the game.  I can't imagine he did so without at some point intending to make the only things those trees are known for also part of the game...

The only reason we don't have beneficial syndromes yet, as I recall one post of Toady's is that it's difficult to code in proper behavior.

Spoiler: Toady quote (click to show/hide)

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.

Hence, presumably, we'll have magical plants that can be brewed into potions or whatever, and presumably at least some of them can make dwarves high.  (See also, this thread.)