I thought I had plenty of context.
Quote from: Untrustedlife on Today at 04:46:06 pm
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Im also going to add that,goblin you should analyze the dev pages more, the Thief and Trader roles both mention property and buying and selling property, and hiring servants, etc etc etc. And the world economy. In fact, I am sorry but in the upcoming version (I emailed to toady to ask), toady told me that we will be able to RENT rooms at inns (this feature is in the unreleased version), though this isnt neccesarily capitalism, it is pretty close, and why wouldnt they? Selling rooms at an inn is a great way to gather wealth, and wealth DOES matter in df, this small scale trading was common in both feudal europe and feudal japan, and therefore, is common in feudal human civs in dwarf fortress. Why hire servants? because what you pay them has value, and they can use this value to get food, and having a servant shows status.
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One world can have a variety of social structures, for all intents and purposes dwarven society is differnet from human society and vice versa.
Feudal property was different then current private property, usually given to people by their lords (or in japans case daimyos), which is why it also mentions in the dev page that you may have to get info about struggling nobels to obtain property, and therefore status (status and property are synonymous in feudal societies for the most part (though it is skewed by a rigid social status (eg its possible to have lords who are in fact rather poor, but still own property, as what sometimes happened with samuris in feudal/tokugawa period japan) but its also possible to have rich merchants with alot of property but low social status (merchants were in fact at the bottom of the social structure in japan however, they owned alot, because they had alot of WEALTH))), its a very complex topic, but essentially what im saying is that in the future DF will likely have both feudal, and imperial and libertarion societies. However it is starting with feudal and feudal systems do involve transfer of wealth via trading and status via wealth/property.
EDIT:
Its closer to capitalism then you think.
You are right about the way the property under Feudalism worked.
The non-problem is that Feudalism (and hence Feudal property) depends upon a state of affairs that while pretty much universal historically due to the way that civilization developed from the previous hunter-gatherer state where they were scattered about the place. We have a loose group of peasant family groups all over the place and then we develop for whatever reason a specialised institution that taxes the peasantry that happen to live in an abstract area that they rule over. They have to tax the peasants because the institution does not itself produce surplus value, which means the total value of what it consumes exceeds the total value of what it produces. The peasants by contrast produce surplus values, which means the value of what they produce is greater than what they consume.
Dwarf society is supposed to be ruled by underground fortresses. However the non-problem is that the fortress unlike the historical palace produces surplus value, it has to because otherwise it would not be able to CREATE the other fortress and the hillocks/mountain halls that carry out the peasant function of growing stuff. Hence Feudalism does not come to exist and dwarf society is something else altogether that has never actually existed in reality. You
cannot understate the sheer importance of the fact that the government institution is self-sufficiant and does not need to collect taxes from any outside entity at all.
If you need to collect taxes you need to make sure that our taxpayers are too scattered and disorganised to resist being taxed. Or to put things more positively, we need to make government a 'marketable commodity' by making sure there is a 'government famine'
. You want to break whatever semblence of organised community exists down as much as possible among the peasants and reduce their ability to rebel/raise the market value of the goverment commodity. To a dwarf fortress however the more united, communal and organised it's hillocks are the stronger the fortress is, as since there is no conflict between the two sites their power combines to form a larger whole.
Why do you keep talking from a dwarven context? We are talking about the HUMAN feudal societies which are the societies the player will interact with the most in adventure mode.
Sure it will be treated differently in dwarven fortresses, but we are talking from the context of the HUMAN societies in dwarf fortress. You realize the scope of this game/simulation right? It isnt just dwarves, and its entirely possible for the dwarves and humans to have different social structures, hell they already do.
Humans do not behave like historical humans either. Not only do the dwarves not presently behave like historical medieval people, neither do the humans (or anybody else for that matter). The only real difference is that with humans (as with elves) the hamlets/forest retreats come first and then their trade generates a town/major forest retreat while the dwarves/goblins produce a fortress which then makes hillocks/dark pits/mountain halls around itself. The crucial element however is that the capital always produces surplus value, not which particular type of site came first.
Oh, you stalinists and your gulags. Let's crush those disgusting capitalists, right?
Would people who worked hard to save food simply accept the player's decision that they need to be sacrificed because he's decided that "these other specific dwarves deserve to live more than you do". Why? Are they the borg? Depending on their personalities, they would likely rebel
Let's say a craftsdwarf worked very hard on his profession. He's made many items on his own, and decided to sell them on the side in the market/fairs to several people or travelling merchants. He's aquired a lot of extra money/goods in the process. With his individual resources, he's decided to buy a few dozen barrels of wine over the years and stockpiled them in his cellar. Some of these wine barrels came from foregn merchants, even. From your perspective, the government should crack up his house and get those barrels away from him. Also, they should punish him for making illegal commercial transactions in the first place, the filthy hoarder. I see this as authoritarian and psychotic. You, on the other hand, seem to percieve this is justice.
Under the present economic order the craftdwarf has just sold surplus fortress items to the outsiders and then bought the fortress several barrels of wine. If he suffers from the illusion that somehow the items he sold did not belong to the fortress and the barrels of wine belong to him personally then nobody cares. The other dwarves will help themselves to the wine he bought without any real concern as to where it came from. He cannot wish the items to belong to him any more than King Canute could change the tides; if he personally tries to rebel he will simply be crushed underfoot by the fortress guard.
The government might punish him but not because he thinks the barrels he bought with fortress crafts are his (that is just crazy); they would instead punish him because he did things that he was no authorised to do. The Fortress Broker will at least have words with him for trading things without authorisation because the fortress has placed him in charge of the matter of trading fortress things with outsiders. Basically he does not get punished for private property, he gets punished for not doing what he is told. As I raised with Jester Hell earlier, there are four fundermental economic concerns that are clearly there in the present economic order has (but are clearly being solved off camera) and it is around these concerns that the economy arc should be developed I think. They are.
1. Getting beings to work at all.
2. Getting beings to work together.
3. Stopping powerful beings from hoarding stuff.
4. Stopping outsiders from walking out with more value than they contribute.
Your biscuit hoarder would potentially bean example of
No 3. problem. If he is nobody important then he can simply be hunted down and his biscuit horde reclaimed, but what if he *is* the Captain of the Guard? What if he is giving out hoarded biscuits to all the members of the fortress guard?
You craftstmen however is really an example of
No 2. problem. He certainly works hard for the fortress but his labours are not coordinated with the other members of the fortress, he is going around selling some fortress goods and buying others without anybody telling him too. The next dwarf then comes along and sells the wine in order to buy the fortress glass armour stands which the next dwarf trades in for cheese and so it goes on. They are all working hard, it is just that without any coordination their work is actually destructive.