Seriously, guys? FIVE ninjas? Write longer posts so I can respond more easily!
How does a semi-independent (semi independent, as in, run by its own members, but uses fortress resources and has its own space.) academy not interact with other mechanics? The whole personality thing was about mashing piles of mechanics together. And tuition caused interactions with a hypothetical economy (a broken one though. that's an entire other can of worms that we're going to solder closed for now.)
Actually, personality, itself, is a problem mechanic, related to the Errant Signal argument, but I'll leave that alone for now...
Semi-independent academies certainly would interact with existing mechanics, but that's not precisely what I'm going after.
Rather, what I'm talking about is strict definition of what a classroom contains, how it is declared, and how it is used. If, for example, you can only have a single academy teaching a capped set of topics, (which is the way that many games would handle such things,) such that players were forced to prioritize their "most powerful" teaching topics, forcing players to specify areas for furnishing in a pre-designated way, providing housing within its own compartmentalized space, and sealing it away from player control, you're functionally just creating a new noble housing requirement without having the player directly involved. This would be worse if we were talking about academies only being available if the fortress were declared an academy fortress from the outset. (Not that anyone is arguing things this strict, it's just the other end of the spectrum.)
Consider what happens with the military, for example. What if, instead of having a capacity to simply designate squads and training schedules and barracks, you needed to simply build a "workshop" where dwarves stood and gradually gained skills based upon the personality of a militia captain? While it would probably be less buggy, it wouldn't be as rich an experience as the full simulation DF goes through. Things like archery targets, drills, live-training, and even maybe-exploits like danger rooms, along with the backpacks and waterskins and allowing players to furnish barracks as they see fit make the military of the game more interesting than similar base-management games, which tend to just be stacking up groups of people with top-quality gear and knocking down HP bars with raw attrition.
Also, that Errant signal video seems to be more about how games like to manipulate the physical world with easy to formalize spacial relationships, and have difficulty with abstract concepts like conversation, emotion and Calvinball. What does that have to do with an academy of 14 dwarves and 1 hippy sharing a forge with a local weaponsmith with a thing for barrels?
Well, abstract concepts like conversation and emotion are already a part of DF, aren't they? That's part of the problem with personalities... To use an older argument about interface again,
Don't lie to yourself - the way that you see the game now significantly colors the way you actually think about or do things. Playing the game by Stonesense means caring about things far different from things you care about when you play the game normally.
I'm probably one of the very, very few players who actually builds multiple vertical shafts to compact my fortress vertically, rather than spreading out the fortress in a bunch of huge, clunky rectangle rooms specifically because players only view one floor at a time, and the digging tool favors rectangles. Central staircase designs are a direct artifact of the current interface.
If you change that interface, you change the way that players approach the game. How? You'll have no idea until after you do it.
We rely almost entirely upon hacks and micromanaged tweaks to make the game work in its current state - if we are ever going to get a game that works properly, Toady needs to start work on understanding how the player should be controlling their dwarves... And right now, Toady really doesn't have an earthly clue. He can't even give a committal answer on how much autonomy or direct control players even should have over dwarves in general.
[...]
The case of the eyelashes is an especially egregious case of a fetishism for simulation without practical interface - if nothing in the game interacts with that mechanic, if the player can never see it, if you can't even notice whether that mechanic is even there or not, why, exactly, is it there, eating up memory and processor time every single tick counting down to the next time when the hair will grow another millimeter? (And it was bugged, and nobody ever even knew it until memory hacks revealed it over a year after it was coded in! Toady never even bothered testing or figuring out a way for anyone else to test it.)
This is the perfect case example of what not thinking about the interface will produce - a perfectly useless mechanic that merely exists to eat processor time. That's why thinking about the interface at every step along the way is the only practical way to code a game.
Personalities and conversations are seriously problematic because they are invisible to the player under nearly all circumstances. Especially when you have 100 or 200 dwarves in a fort (plus guests with taverns!) are you REALLY going to keep track of the personalities of any but maybe your most favored dwarves?
Personalities can cause serious problems, as there was a "bug" people complained vociferously for a while where dwarven nurses/doctors that had specific personality traits (doesn't like helping others) would refuse to treat dwarves. Many players would (and will) simply wait for a dwarf with good doctor skills to immigrate rather than train one themselves, and if that would-be doctor happens to hate helping people, they'll never do it. Only, players don't check personalities, so they don't see this as the cause of the problem.
This is the problem with invisible mechanics - it is totally opaque to players what the problem is, and they will rightfully think it's just a buggy or broken game, rather than recognizing that the behavior is a feature they simply don't understand. (And honestly, the game IS broken if you can't understand it's mechanics when you are actively trying to understand them...)
By comparison, if you have Fun flooding your fortress because you forgot to plug a hole when building your plumbing, and never built a drain, well, you know
EXACTLY how you screwed up immediately, and further, you have just learned how to avoid that problem in the future.
Worse, conversations are, generally speaking, completely independent of all other mechanics. They occur based upon physical proximity of two dwarves, and that's it.
Hence, you have a system where personalities either don't do anything but make up bloat, or you have them confusing players by occasionally making their dwarves take massively detrimental behavior for no apparent reason or way for the player to fix the problem for lack of any good means of interacting with those mechanics other than to just start murdering their own dwarves if their personalities don't fall within pre-defined limits.
Compare this, again, to something like minecarts, where all the logic behind the carts is physically laid out in front of you on the screen in the form of the tracks they follow. In fact, the purposes of many megaprojects are simply to make things that normally rely upon unreliable dwarves rely upon much more easily-controlled mechanics. Minecarts and fluids like magma or mechanisms also interact in obvious, logical, predictable ways. There is a reason these are the things megaprojects are made of, since these are the things that operate in predictable places, interacting in physical space, and allow the greatest amount of emergent behavior.
So, to go back to your previous idea about headmasters having personalities that make them arbitrarily reject 20% of applicants, but maybe more if they're cruel or something... How does the player see this? How does the player know that one applicant was accepted because she was a pretty girl, and another was rejected for being an ugly guy if the player isn't constantly hovering over everything that headmaster does? (Because players won't.) Why would players care, so long as tuition is being paid, and they can't control the operations of the academy directly, anyway? What sorts of systems outside the academy, itself, would be impacted by whether a girl was "pretty" or not? If players can't tell it's happening, what's the point of it being there at all?
Sure, with the Academy needing rooms, space isn't shared. Does forcing students to dine in a communal fortress mead hall "add depth?" does making them use oft-used communal carpentry workshops "make the world come alive?
It's not like players NEED more money at this point (for a lot of previously mentioned reasons,) so why would they bother with an academy at all if they weren't going to enjoy the act of setting it up? Making a system that works is something players can enjoy for its own sake, so making academies micromanageable like its The Sims or something would make at least a portion of the playerbase happy, while simply setting up a system where you designate an arbitrary section of land for someone else's use for pay merely eats up FPS for cash you could have gotten elsewhere, anyway.
If there's something wrong with letting those students eat at the communal dining hall, make there be some sort of emergent gameplay reason it's the wrong answer. There are threads
talking about making tavern guests security threats, for example. Wouldn't THAT be a far more interesting reason to make sure that guest students are segregated from the general population, without forcing it arbitrarily upon the player? It asks players to engineer their own solution to the problem, rather than solve the problem for the player. (And players can come up with emergent gameplay answers that defy logic and are most of the fun of DF in the first place.)
What you're stating with bare bones academies with a dwarf simply showing a few local elves the works of carpentry, that's just a few apprenticeships, not an academy. And Apprenticeships are quite nice, too. I think academies should grow out of apprenticeships.
A hospital is just a zone that can be designated
anywhere with no furniture necessary. However, the requirements of different medical procedures, and simple optimization
encourage specific behaviors by the player. The player isn't
forced to make a thread dispenser for their surgeons or have explicit floorplans for their convalescent wards, but they are encouraged to make their hospitals in specific ways by the death rates of injured dwarves. For that matter, "
decontamination pools" are an emergent game strategy for dealing with syndrome-laden contaminants that wouldn't be available with stricter formal systems.
The thing is, this flexible system of hospitals is something where a proper hospital can be built if the player chooses, and can evolve naturally out of a basic hospital consisting of a table, a couple beds, and maybe a thread container.
What I'm saying with a "bare-bones mechanics" system is that you make what it takes to declare an educational space very minimal, but allow players to expand it by making certain functions only become available as the facilities for those functions are added. Players are then invited to make "proper academies" if they so choose, or to search for exploits, as DF players are wont to do. Something like letting a player invite random goblin-kidnapped dwarves who say they want to learn dwarven smelting for 50☼ a month spot all the traps and report them back to their goblin buddies for the next siege, or worse, hand the secrets of steel over to goblins, would create a far more Fun reason to get the player to think about segregating out their fortress than simply declaring you have to do so by arbitrary fiat.
Author
Topic: "Tavern-like" Academies (Read 11956 times)