Never forget that Dwarf Fortress is primarily intended to be a simulation, not a game, as Toady stated on multiple occasions. Personalities might not be controllable by the player, but they are visible (even if it is hard to get a general overview) and they have an effect on the rest of the simulation, which is plenty enough to be a good mechanic, given what DF aspires to be. Conversations might be invisible, but they probably have an effect on other stuff, so they're not useless or bad.
Judging ideas based on how good of a game they might make is not a good idea. The question is whether they make a good simulation.
I haven't read much of the discussion. I'll just try to come up with an idea.
Well, if you've not read much of the discussion, then I'd first say that you shouldn't confuse some devil's advocacy for being against an idea. I am definitely for academies, I'm just pressing the other participants of this thread to be clearer in what it is they are trying to achieve, and follow through on the ramifications of their recommendations.
You need to have both a high-level abstract grasp of your goals and a low-level understanding of the implications that many of these mechanics will have. The problem I'm seeing, here, is that we have people saying they want classrooms in a high-level sense, but that requires the follow-up questions of what a classroom contains, how it functions, and how that will impact the player. If the low-level follow-through reveals you're not achieving your high-level goals, you need to change the low-level implementation to match your high-level goals.
With that said, while it's certainly true that DF is more performance art project than game these days, and I certainly use that line of argument myself, that doesn't mean that we, sitting in a suggestion forum with none of the power to implement any of this but likely the luxury of years to pound this stuff out in debate, shouldn't at least take the time to try to find a way to make a suggested mechanic that is
both good simulation
and good gameplay, as these are far from mutually exclusive. Apart from sending more cash, making sure we measure twice before Toady cuts once is practically the only meaningful contribution we even can make.
And if your response to someone looking at an idea critically is to come up with a way to amend the idea with a solution to those problems, well, that's the right answer.
(1)
I don't care how skill bonuses or stuff like that are implemented. Important is how that knowledge is distributed.
An academy is probably closed to the outside (or maybe that can be tied to the headmaster or whatever), meaning that people need to enroll with the academy before they get access to knowledge.
"Getting access" need not (and should not) be hard coded. We have a justice system for that purpose. Being caught in the academy library when you're not allowed to be there earns you a beating, jail time or whatever. Sneaking into lectures is a crime.
Maybe the academy could be a place for certain circles sworn to secrecy on certain topics.
The player can try to put knowledge (whether it be books or capable people) they don't want to become general knowledge into the academy. Securing the academy (and thus knowledge) becomes a task. We could even get players making dwarves professors to shut them up.
Well, technically, it's
not currently part of security/justice, although presumably it will be at some later date. The stealing of secrets and "campus" security are potentially very interesting challenges when you need to allow some in and keep the rest out. Much like how vampires made for a much more interesting set of defensive strategies, making enemies less blatantly announced makes the game more interesting, and gives the player reason to actually watch specific parts of their fortress.
That said, what is the benefit of different types of implementing enrollment strategies? Making the headmaster operate on their own, as Alfrodo suggested, has the problem of making the process invisible and uncontrollable to the player, and therefore something the player has no reason to care about. If we're talking about it in terms of being a potential security threat, then having the player asked to manually decide may be safer and involve the player more, but also potentially be a micromanagement annoyance. (That said, possibly a good idea as an option for the micromanagement-inclined and paranoid.)
I think having an entity-by-entity (read:civilization) security alert (possibly controlled by the under-utilized civilizations page) that tells your dwarves to treat members of different cultures with different levels of suspicion would be a good balancing act. (The option for manual acceptance/rejection by the player could be placed there, as well.) If you tell dwarves to be generally accepting of the local human civ, for example, then it might be up to an individual dwarf's biases whether they are trusting or hostile, but you could still say the stinkin' elves (with whom you only recently declared peace, and may well soon go to war with again,) are not to be trusted from a fort-wide level, and force your dwarves to be far more critical about the intentions of elven visitors, and have the guard follow them. Some of the most friendly and trusting dwarves might still be more friendly than they should be, but it would still give the player overall control, and security would give them a reason to care to exert that control.
I do just want to point out at this point, however, that the more that personality traits actually matter, the more that we really NEED Dwarf Therapist functionality in the base game, because it's far too difficult to actually SEE these traits using the game we're supposed to be playing to make serious decisions based upon what personalities certain dwarves have without the capacity to sort and compare dwarves on personality traits on the same screen.
(2)
You talk about how the player cannot influence personality. With the coming knowledge about philosophy this could be changed, if philosophical ideas are able to influence personalities. Having a philosophical faculty giving lectures gives the player the ability to form how the dwarves operate.
I really like this idea.
I worry that there may be something of a difference between values and personality traits, however, in that the latter, which seems to be far more important, are also the more intrinsic and less-changeable of the two, however.
Further, jokes aside, mind control techniques on dwarves, while potentially very useful, may also be immersion-breaking if they are too powerful. This is especially true since many traits are just plain
without qualification better than others. For example, there's no reason you'd want your dwarves to have high rage propensity when that's the most dangerous of stress reactions. There's no reason not to encourage your dwarves to diligence so they work at all hours and take less breaks.
Because of this, I'd presume that any sort of anger-management counseling classes would likely be something that took extremely long durations of time to actually take effect. (I'd also hope that some sort of
system for preventing players from ordering round-the-clock lessons was in place to make it more like a weekly group therapy session that dwarves go to between jobs, rather than an indoctrination camp they stay at until "done".)
(3)
This one just ties in with migrants and taverns and stuff. Have a well known academy and people interested in the topics discussed there come to your fortress.
That would require DF recognize what "smart" means, in the way that a player would appreciate, however...
If that means people who are "interested in" carpentry would come to your carpentry academy, and you define "interest" via skill levels they already have, why would a fortress spitting out legendary carpenters left and right need access to more grand master carpenters? (Although if those carpenters were, say, tigerperson carpenters, there might be some advantage in making it a decent way to bait interesting potential non-dwarf citizens to joining the fortress...)
If that means there are dwarves with little skill, but high (or low, as appropriate) scores of the base personality traits or attributes related to the skill, such that they have high potential for learning or becoming a "better legendary". (Although I'm not sure such a thing exists... has anyone done SCIENCE on this?) Still, this may not necessarily be anything a player is strictly interested in, especially since it would be such a long-game reward that most players wouldn't care. (Make a legendary teacher to train legendary students to make a prodigy show up that you can then turn into a legendary so you can get slightly more masterworks than you were already getting...)
(4)
Basically the same as (3), only different. I have no idea how, though.
This sort of thing would only be interesting if we were talking about a game where the player has much more "
Kingdom Mode" control. It's one of those "eternally some day" things in the devpages.
Recruiters trying to achieve long-term objectives might be quite interesting. The most obvious would be military recruiters trying to start mercenary companies or something, but I could certainly see something like an ambitious royal architect recruiting masons and architects to create giant aqueducts or grand roads or other worldmap-level projects.
Author
Topic: "Tavern-like" Academies (Read 11966 times)