Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ribs]

A previous thread regarding adventure mode housing devolved into a long discussion about the dwarven economy. Toady locked the thread because people (including me) were being impolite.

Here we'll attempt to discuss the introduction of laws regarding private or public property in both adventure and dwarf mode. Let's keep it civil this time, comrades.

[Ribs]

For the sake of continuity, here's a "polite" version of my last post from the previous discussion, where me and GoblinCookie go into a metaphysical discussion on the very concept of adding private property into the game. GoblinCookie's words are put in quotations while mine are not.

They naturally have no desire to cut the fortress into little pieces and those making the decisions are undermining their own power/control by privatising the fortress to any extent at all.  Without private property, culture is what the fortress makes it, since nobody has the right to produce culture that undermines the official fortress culture; if those running the fortress have no wish to see private property exist, consequently no works promoting private property are allowed to be made. 

Decentralisation of power happens voluntarily in several instances. The story of the dwarf and his wine casket is a good exemple of that. It's actually very simple: the player, who represents a government entity within the fortress can only do so much in terms of orders to keep the dwarves productive.  But if the dwarves have the incentive of private ownership, they may go out of their way to work on their own and accumulate wealth by themselves. You may even tax their efforts, making even more "public" money in the fortress. The reason why a state would voluntarily allow a private business to exist may very well be that said business is more efficient being private, and therefore more profitable to the state because the state has the ability to impose taxes on private businesses.

Laws are supposed to have foundations, they are not simply supposed to 'just be there'.  If it is supposed to be the case that private property god simply decreed that private property exist, well why is anybody worshipping the private property god anyway given that nobody important can see any value in it?

You also seem to think that private property in a society like DF would be anachronistic. This is simply not the case; people have discussed the idea of private property for a long, long time. It's been a part of human culture for thousands of years. It goes beyond what your authoritarian, marxist view of how the world should or shouldn't work:

The ancient authors speculated about the relation between property and virtue, a natural subject for discussion since justifying private property raises serious questions about the legitimacy of self-interested activity. Plato (Republic, 462b-c) argued that collective ownership was necessary to promote common pursuit of the common interest, and to avoid the social divisiveness that would occur ‘when some grieve exceedingly and others rejoice at the same happenings.’ Aristotle responded by arguing that private ownership promotes virtues like prudence and responsibility: ‘[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1263a).

Dwarf fortresses are lively places where people are allowed to philosophise about higher concepts. Concepts like privete property can easily become popular ideas, and popular ideas can in turn become law. And you keep repeating "why would a player pass these laws". You assume dwarves will always be sheep.

First of all, it may not entirely up to them (the player). Some things could be out of player control. If most dwarves want something, a mayor may be inclined to pass that law to reflect on the wishes of the population. This could very well be how the game will go about certain laws. But supposing the player has complete power over which laws pass and which don't. Dwaves could see the player not passing the laws that they want or passing laws they don't want as arbitrary and unfair, and may become unhappy or even revolt. So that could be one of your incentivesfor doing so. If private property is a very popular concept, you may have a lot of trouble in keeping it away from your dwarves. You may even desire to kill those pesky intellectuals that keep corrupting the youth with these thoughts.

Also, it will probably be the other way around, considering where the development is going. Private property laws will probably be "the standard" to some degree, and most dwarven civs will probably have it by default. Considering how dwarves owned shops in the old economy, I wouldn't be surprised if Toady attempts to give them the ability to own private businesses again when he gets around to making the new economy.

[Helari]

pls stop this quasi-economic debate about if ascii dorfs are communist or not, by now this doesn't even belong in the suggestions forum anymore.

edit: at least move this dumb bs

[Ribs]

pls stop this quasi-economic debate about if ascii dorfs are communist or not, by now this doesn't even belong in the suggestions forum anymore.

edit: at least move this dumb bs

It's an inevitable discussion.

I'm at least trying to contain the discussion in a single thread.

[callisto8413]

First, shouldn't this thread be moved to another part of the forum?

Second, don't you have to define private property first?  If I remember right, there is a difference between Private Property and Possessions within Marxist thought.  That your shirt is your possession.  Your house is Private Property.  Or something like that.  There has to be a line between what you can't take away from a Dwarf and what you can due to the process of the law or the rights of the Nobles.  Don't we have to define what is Private Property and what would be State (or Public) Property. 

Also what happens if Guilds are brought back into the game?  What do they "own" or do they have "shareholders"?   

Sorry if I am tossing a monkey wrench into the debate but I sometimes feel that certain terms need to be nailed down.

(Also when I say Dwarf I just really mean NPC, as we are also talking about Elves, Humans, and Goblins)

 

[Ribs]

First, shouldn't this thread be moved to another part of the forum?

Maybe, yeah. The reason why I decided to do it is because some people tend to turn any suggestion that relates to the economy into a  social-economic discussion. So I decided to make a thread to at least let some of the people who have this tendency (I'm also guilty of this) have a place to vent.

Also, while maybe more suited to other part of the forum, a thread about the merits and demerits of having private property in the game still belongs in the real of the "suggestion forums", I think.

Second, don't you have to define private property first?  If I remember right, there is a difference between Private Property and Possessions within Marxist thought.  That your shirt is your possession.  Your house is Private Property. Or something like that.  There has to be a line between what you can't take away from a Dwarf and what you can due to the process of the law or the rights of the Nobles.  Don't we have to define what is Private Property and what would be State (or Public) Property. 

Also what happens if Guilds are brought back into the game?  What do they "own" or do they have "shareholders"?   

Sorry if I am tossing a monkey wrench into the debate but I sometimes feel that certain terms need to be nailed down.

(Also when I say Dwarf I just really mean NPC, as we are also talking about Elves, Humans, and Goblins)

Yes, that's a good point. In the previous thread, some argued that even things like them saving a few biscuits their your quarters (something dwarves do right now) should be ilegal, because hoarding goods=capitalism=bad for the fortress. In my opinion, the limit for what should or shouldn't be allowed as private property should be delimited by law. In the game, hopefully, we'll be able to set up societies with a great variety of laws to accomodate this.

Private property is something that you own and can't normally be taken away from you according to the law. Currently, that only applies to articles of clothing and food that dwarves pick up for immediate consumption (that sometimes they decide not to eat for some reason, so they become their permanent property). This could be expanded to other things, like toys, books, and other small personal objects like jewelry, small crafts, etc. Maybe furniture could also be considered private property.

Rooms are more complicated. They don't currently really own them, as you can freely make them homeless if you want to (while unable to   make them take off their clothes, for instance). If dwarves own their bedrooms, then it is harder for the player to take those bedrooms away from the dwarves, even for relocation purposes. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, as it could became an interesting feature. Also, it allows the possibility of dwarves selling/trading their bedrooms to other people, etc.

About guilds... Before, all they did was basically demand more work. If we have a functional economy in the game, guilds would be more important. They would probably demand buildings, and exclusive meeting areas, so in a way they would "own" those, like a king owns his throne room. I don't know if they would have any control over the goods the workers associated with it produce, though. I know that guilds often worked as cartels, so that could be the case.

[GoblinCookie]

First, shouldn't this thread be moved to another part of the forum?

Second, don't you have to define private property first?  If I remember right, there is a difference between Private Property and Possessions within Marxist thought.  That your shirt is your possession.  Your house is Private Property.  Or something like that.  There has to be a line between what you can't take away from a Dwarf and what you can due to the process of the law or the rights of the Nobles.  Don't we have to define what is Private Property and what would be State (or Public) Property. 

Also what happens if Guilds are brought back into the game?  What do they "own" or do they have "shareholders"?   

Sorry if I am tossing a monkey wrench into the debate but I sometimes feel that certain terms need to be nailed down.

(Also when I say Dwarf I just really mean NPC, as we are also talking about Elves, Humans, and Goblins)

The key issue that Ribs generally does not understand is the difference between Feudal private property, what we nowadays call leasehold property which was basically the only form of land ownership at the very least prior to the 17th Century England and Netherlands.  The reason why discussions about private property by people prior to then are so dry and technical, couched entirely in terms of what was good for the State/Community overall as opposed to making any mention of individual is that nobody assumed that property was something people actually had but merely something they were given.  They were given property and in return they were expected to do something, normally pay taxes or fight in the army, if they broke the terms then they would legally lose whatever property rights they had. 

Guilds did not own many things nor did they have shareholders for certain.  Guilds were a type of 'union' if you would put it that way but not of employees as in a modern union but of independant craftsmen with their own property.  They banded together in order to defend or further their collective interests pretty much against the local government of the place.  Guilds are also completely a Christian thing, they were invented by the Christian Church around the worship of particular saints.  Shareholders are a 17th Century Dutch invention, no buisnesses prior to then had shareholders; that is because all property prior to them was household property, even the largest buisnesses were officially just an extension of somebody's particular household.  The 'owner' was actually the male head of the household, which is why we have the Patriarchy that Feminists like to complain about. 

If we introduced guilds into the game now, they would act simply as public sector unions defending the interests of their members who are state employees against the state. 

Decentralisation of power happens voluntarily in several instances. The story of the dwarf and his wine casket is a good exemple of that. It's actually very simple: the player, who represents a government entity within the fortress can only do so much in terms of orders to keep the dwarves productive.  But if the dwarves have the incentive of private ownership, they may go out of their way to work on their own and accumulate wealth by themselves. You may even tax their efforts, making even more "public" money in the fortress. The reason why a state would voluntarily allow a private business to exist may very well be that said business is more efficient being private, and therefore more profitable to the state because the state has the ability to impose taxes on private businesses.

There is very little inherant need for decentralisation of power because the scale of things is small and the economy highly centralised.  At a larger scale the civilization is very decentralised, so at that level you might think of a site as a cooperative 'owned' by it's members which are also it's workers.  Cutting the fortress down into smaller units does not make any sense because basically there is absolutely no need to do so; remember though that I said inherantly.

If a creature has very low [COOPERATION] values however the creatures might simply be impossible to organise centrally despite the inherant rationality of that setup.  That might force the site to actually institute a strict division of labour linked that ties them to a limited workshop.  In order to keep that workshop they might decree that the individual hand over a given amount of goods because they simply cannot get them to actually follow the manager's production orders.  That would constitute private property in the old Feudal sense, but it's rationality rather depends upon having creatures who are totally unable to cooperate effectively.

What sane player would require that their brewer hand over 20 barrels of alchohol a month in order to keep his still when he could instead have the dwarves produce whatever goods are presently needed by the fortress.  The present system is immensely superior in efficiantly because it allows individuals to be rapidly shifted between multiple tasks and allows them also to produce whatever is needed rather than what they need to get in order to 'pay their taxes' in an inflexible manner. 

You also seem to think that private property in a society like DF would be anachronistic. This is simply not the case; people have discussed the idea of private property for a long, long time. It's been a part of human culture for thousands of years. It goes beyond what your authoritarian, marxist view of how the world should or shouldn't work:

The ancient authors speculated about the relation between property and virtue, a natural subject for discussion since justifying private property raises serious questions about the legitimacy of self-interested activity. Plato (Republic, 462b-c) argued that collective ownership was necessary to promote common pursuit of the common interest, and to avoid the social divisiveness that would occur ‘when some grieve exceedingly and others rejoice at the same happenings.’ Aristotle responded by arguing that private ownership promotes virtues like prudence and responsibility: ‘[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1263a).

The problem is that there is every reason for the dwarves site governments to initially have an 'authoritarian marxist view' of how the world should work.  In DF Universe, Plato wins the argument hands down and Aristotle loses by a horrific wipeout because the conditions that made private property 'make sense' do not exist nor can they ever exist without fundermentally overhauling the very game at it's foundations. 

They would only institute another system if they were left with no other choice, that is to say they would put up with private property only if they were forced to institute it because their ideal Communist setup could not be instituted.  That would only happen if the nature or the values of the creature were such that they could not actually cooperate, as discussed above. 

Dwarf fortresses are lively places where people are allowed to philosophise about higher concepts. Concepts like privete property can easily become popular ideas, and popular ideas can in turn become law. And you keep repeating "why would a player pass these laws". You assume dwarves will always be sheep.

First of all, it may not entirely up to them (the player). Some things could be out of player control. If most dwarves want something, a mayor may be inclined to pass that law to reflect on the wishes of the population. This could very well be how the game will go about certain laws. But supposing the player has complete power over which laws pass and which don't. Dwaves could see the player not passing the laws that they want or passing laws they don't want as arbitrary and unfair, and may become unhappy or even revolt. So that could be one of your incentivesfor doing so. If private property is a very popular concept, you may have a lot of trouble in keeping it away from your dwarves. You may even desire to kill those pesky intellectuals that keep corrupting the youth with these thoughts.

Also, it will probably be the other way around, considering where the development is going. Private property laws will probably be "the standard" to some degree, and most dwarven civs will probably have it by default. Considering how dwarves owned shops in the old economy, I wouldn't be surprised if Toady attempts to give them the ability to own private businesses again when he gets around to making the new economy.

It does not matter who it is, whether it is the King, a Baron, a Mayor, a Philosopher, a random dwarf scholer.  It does not make any sense to any of them to cut the fortress into tiny pieces because that will only make the fortress work less well that it does at the moment.  Real societies production was scattered across the countryside, carried out by thousands of individual peasant households and this was what made private property 'make sense'.  Even if such peasants were introduced, the fortress still does not need them since it is self-sufficiant in surplus value. 

Private Property is a positive concept while Communism is a negative one.  Everything is common property until somebody in power declares it to be restricted to a particular individual.  The idea has to be invented and introduced, but nobody can see any sense in it because there is none.  You could have the philosophers in the world and every one of them will be a 'authoritarian marxist' because nobody can find any reason to be anything else. 

[Ribs]

The problem is that there is every reason for the dwarves site governments to initially have an 'authoritarian marxist view' of how the world should work.  In DF Universe, Plato wins the argument hands down and Aristotle loses by a horrific wipeout because the conditions that made private property 'make sense' do not exist nor can they ever exist without fundermentally overhauling the very game at it's foundations. 

Most of the game's fundations are incredibly broken and subject to change.

There is very little inherant need for decentralisation of power because the scale of things is small and the economy highly centralised.  At a larger scale the civilization is very decentralised, so at that level you might think of a site as a cooperative 'owned' by it's members which are also it's workers.  Cutting the fortress down into smaller units does not make any sense because basically there is absolutely no need to do so; remember though that I said inherantly.

If a creature has very low [COOPERATION] values however the creatures might simply be impossible to organise centrally despite the inherant rationality of that setup.  That might force the site to actually institute a strict division of labour linked that ties them to a limited workshop.  In order to keep that workshop they might decree that the individual hand over a given amount of goods because they simply cannot get them to actually follow the manager's production orders.  That would constitute private property in the old Feudal sense, but it's rationality rather depends upon having creatures who are totally unable to cooperate effectively.

What sane player would require that their brewer hand over 20 barrels of alchohol a month in order to keep his still when he could instead have the dwarves produce whatever goods are presently needed by the fortress.  The present system is immensely superior in efficiantly because it allows individuals to be rapidly shifted between multiple tasks and allows them also to produce whatever is needed rather than what they need to get in order to 'pay their taxes' in an inflexible manner. 

Private Property is a positive concept while Communism is a negative one.  Everything is common property until somebody in power declares it to be restricted to a particular individual.  The idea has to be invented and introduced, but nobody can see any sense in it because there is none.  You could have the philosophers in the world and every one of them will be a 'authoritarian marxist' because nobody can find any reason to be anything else.

It does not matter who it is, whether it is the King, a Baron, a Mayor, a Philosopher, a random dwarf scholer.  It does not make any sense to any of them to cut the fortress into tiny pieces because that will only make the fortress work less well that it does at the moment.  Real societies production was scattered across the countryside, carried out by thousands of individual peasant households and this was what made private property 'make sense'.  Even if such peasants were introduced, the fortress still does not need them since it is self-sufficiant in surplus value. 

Again, this isn't math. You don't need extremely specific situations for things to happen. One could argue that the institution of marriage makes "no sense" in dwarven society. After all, what is the point of dwarven females having childeren from a single male? Why marrying only once in a lifetime? Why mothers supposedly raise their own baby, while maybe it would make more sense if pregnant females got together and started bottling their milk, and only put a couple dwarves to take care of those babies in some sort of baby farm? Why have a monarchy? What's the point of that? Nobility? Why? Using your logic, it's impossible to explain many of the various institutions currently present in dwarf fortress.

Not only that, but as I've said before fortresses are currently so easily self-sufficient in 'surplus value' only because production is broken. Once it isn't, making it self-sufficient should be very hard. In the future, a fortress may actually be composed mostly of nobility and soldiers, and completely dependent on outside production to sustain itself. What happens when making a fortress like this is feasible?

The key issue that Ribs generally does not understand is the difference between Feudal private property, what we nowadays call leasehold property which was basically the only form of land ownership at the very least prior to the 17th Century England and Netherlands.  The reason why discussions about private property by people prior to then are so dry and technical, couched entirely in terms of what was good for the State/Community overall as opposed to making any mention of individual is that nobody assumed that property was something people actually had but merely something they were given.  They were given property and in return they were expected to do something, normally pay taxes or fight in the army, if they broke the terms then they would legally lose whatever property rights they had.   

Guilds did not own many things nor did they have shareholders for certain.  Guilds were a type of 'union' if you would put it that way but not of employees as in a modern union but of independant craftsmen with their own property.  They banded together in order to defend or further their collective interests pretty much against the local government of the place.  Guilds are also completely a Christian thing, they were invented by the Christian Church around the worship of particular saints.  Shareholders are a 17th Century Dutch invention, no buisnesses prior to then had shareholders; that is because all property prior to them was household property, even the largest buisnesses were officially just an extension of somebody's particular household.  The 'owner' was actually the male head of the household, which is why we have the Patriarchy that Feminists like to complain about. 

If we introduced guilds into the game now, they would act simply as public sector unions defending the interests of their members who are state employees against the state. 

Guilds could be compared to "trade unions" as you say, but could easily be compared to cartes as well. One of the main effects of guilds was to cut off competiton with eny worker that wasn't associeted with them. Also, They often depended on grants of letters patent by a monarch or other authority to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials. So, you knwow, The concept of ownership of goods and self-employment existed throughout the middle ages aswell, and aren't necessarily "against the state".

[GoblinCookie]

Most of the game's fundations are incredibly broken and subject to change.

Not the foundations that I am talking about, they are not broken. 

Again, this isn't math. You don't need extremely specific situations for things to happen. One could argue that the institution of marriage makes "no sense" in dwarven society. After all, what is the point of dwarven females having childeren from a single male? Why marrying only once in a lifetime? Why mothers supposedly raise their own baby, while maybe it would make more sense if pregnant females got together and started bottling their milk, and only put a couple dwarves to take care of those babies in some sort of baby farm? Why have a monarchy? What's the point of that? Nobility? Why? Using your logic, it's impossible to explain many of the various institutions currently present in dwarf fortress.

If there are institutions that do not make sense it does not logically follow that one should add in even more institutions that do not make sense.  If you dig a hole you fill the hole in (find a way to make the instutition make sense) as opposed to digging a bigger hole (adding in more institutions that do make sense).  A breakdown of the things that do not make sense according to you.

1. Marriage makes no sense: Babies need to be raised and socialised properly and to do that they need primary caregivers who look at their babies as more than just another job that needs to be done for the good of the fortress.  New dwarves do not simply pop up in the dining hall as adults fully trained and ready to work.  That means they need mothers but mothers need a deputy to take over their role, hence we have fathers as well.  By concieving by a single male the mothers ensure that the propective fathers can be properly focused on their children rather than divided between a large number of children that might be theirs.  To sum up: babies need to have parents to grow into good fortress dwarves so the fortress invents marraige in order to give them parents.

2. Marrying only once: Because at present relationships in general (not merely marraige) fail to disguish between the dead and the living.  It might make sense however if dwarves believe in the afterlife and do not believe that "in death do we part".  If the dwarves civilization does not believe in the afterlife however or we are talking about a race of immortal beings that do not die of old age then marrying only once would not make sense. 

3. Baby farming: A very good idea that makes perfect sense, since sometimes parents die or are too busy doing useful stuff for the fortress; hence are unable to look after their children directly.  Also it makes sense for orphaned dwarves to be given a new pair of parents to take over their dead parents role and for the new husband/wife of the surviving parent to become a step-parent. 

4. Monarchy: Somebody has to be in charge of the dwarf civilization, at present he is called the Etar; a word which we translate as king because that is a better approximation than any other word we have.  Since there is only one etar it does make sense for there to be schools in etar-ness because while plenty of people might want to be an etar there is only one of them.  Since etar still need to be trained and only the existing etar can teach people the craft it makes sense for the etar to educate his own children since only a small group of trainees are needed and people learn best from their parents. 

5. Nobility in General: In order for the civilization to become more than simply a confederation of essentially independant sites, somebody must relay information between the king and the local site.  The mayor cannot do this because he is tied down with running the site, hence we have a baron/duke/count.  Those are clearly translations too, since the latter two positions at least were invented by the Late Roman Empire.  The reason that nobles do not really do anything at the moment is because the mechanics for the central goverment are not yet developed in fortress mode but abstractly they already exist and we see their operation in world-gen. 

Not only that, but as I've said before fortresses are currently so easily self-sufficient in 'surplus value' only because production is broken. Once it isn't, making it self-sufficient should be very hard. In the future, a fortress may actually be composed mostly of nobility and soldiers, and completely dependent on outside production to sustain itself. What happens when making a fortress like this is feasible?

Do you seriously know what you are proposing?  You are not actually suggesting that Toady One will make it so that if we have a fisherdwarf of any skill he will actually eat more fish than he actually catches, that is what getting rid of surplus value actually means!  He is also not going to banish all the fisherdwarves to the hillocks because he has put an aweful lot of work into making all the professions actually work in fortress mode.  The problem is now actually that he did such a good job of it that we produce so much surplus value that the productivity of our concrete fortress dwarves far exceeds the abstracted production of everybody else, which is fortunate or else we would be living in a post-scarcity universe. 

The dev page mentions adding in palaces, militery outposts and prisons.  These sites would be rather as you describe, lots of guards and officials but few or no workers, meaning that it will be dependent on outside income to exist, whether from individual local sites or from the central government.  The normal fortress however is clearly never intended to be such a site, or else there would have been little point in Toady One actually bothering to work on actually making concrete the abstract production of dwarf sites.  The initial fortress can also not be such a site because as things have been set up to work, dwarf fortresses come first and then with their surplus value creates more fortresses, along with hillocks and mountain halls. 

This system is consistant with the basic colonial theme of the game where the player's dwarves head off into the wilderness in order to create a brand new fortress.  Eventually you are intended to be able to actually colonise the whole area around you fortress with hillocks and mountain halls which will provide you with food so that more of your dwarves can specialise in things other than food production.  There is no plans to get rid of fortress production

Guilds could be compared to "trade unions" as you say, but could easily be compared to cartes as well. One of the main effects of guilds was to cut off competiton with eny worker that wasn't associeted with them. Also, They often depended on grants of letters patent by a monarch or other authority to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials. So, you knwow, The concept of ownership of goods and self-employment existed throughout the middle ages aswell, and aren't necessarily "against the state".

Yes, of course medieval guilds were unions of the self-employed  .  Everything you are telling me is what I was saying, the purpose of guild was very much against the State, in the sense not that they are rebels but that they are trying to defend themselves against state policies that are hostile to their interests and get the state to institute policies that are in their interests.  Because their ownership is really a leashold from the generally local government they are also forming guilds in order to protect their property and the ensure the terms of their leash are favourable. 

Stop blurring the lines between Middle Ages and DF.  In the Middle Ages there were no dwarf fortresses in the Alps covering southern Germany with dwarf hillocks.  Since a dwarf guild is actually a Domas, once again we are translating a DF term into the approximate English translation, so there is no need for a dwarf guild to be essentially the same as a medieval guild at all.  To brings thing back on topic: in order for them to be unions of self-employed craftsmen we would need there to be a reason for the fortress to divide itself up into a whole load of individual craftsmen's workshops.

At the moment One Site under VPL happens to be the optimally efficient system as it means that all dwarves are able to flexibly do whatever needs doing and the capital does not lie idle because it is not presently being used by it's owner.  As long as the dwarves do not have means to disrupt the VPL Socialism economy, there is no sense in having any other economic system because no ruler would ever implement it and there would never be enough individuals deciding it was a good idea to force the ruler to implement it.  This is what I have been saying all along, take the present system of VPL Socialism and figure out what the creature that would function perfectly under that system looks like.  Then compare your actual creature to that creature and based upon how it differs figure out how it would disrupt the system and to what extent. 

Then have the civilization introduce policies that would address the particular way that creature messes up the system, whether they be coercive measures or actual changes to the economic setup itself.  The policies are more or less extreme, private property (in capital) could emerge as a result of the creatures lack of [COOPERATION], the more uncooperative the creature the more it needs private property; since if you make them work under the present system they tend to think they know better what the fortress needs than the government.  Instead of having a simply binary between absolutely communal and absolute private property we would instead have those as the extreme ends of the spectrum ([COOPERATION] near-50 for Status Quo while [COOPERATION] near -50 gives you absolute private property), with various levels of leasehold in the middle.

In order to keep those who lean towards the VPL Socialism end from having too great an advantage we do not start with that system in Yr 0.  Instead the civilization guesses it's own nature but not entirely accurately and institutes a set of policies close to what they require to function.  As the creature itself changes, it then changes it's policies so the rulers in the civilization actually do something so political conflicts can actually happen and make sense.  If you have an individual whose values do not coincide with that of the civilization's policies then we get all manner of fun stuff happen.  Say our dwarves civ has [COOPERATION:45] and we have things happily working under VPL Socialism as a result. 

We add in a dwarf carpenter from a civilization with [COOPERATION:-25] and this is how he disrupts the system.  The immigrant carpenter dwarf feels that he knows what the fortress needs better than the fortress manager and what that happens to be is wooden figurines of his mother.  We are in a desert and the caverns are overrun with forgotten beasts so the uncooperative dwarf manages to use up all the wood that is needed to make beds, so the next wave of immigrant dwarves ends up homeless as a result.  Thus the fortress decides to prohibit him from using the collective carpenters workshops but it still wants to make use of his carpentry skills (or he has joined the carpenter's union).  Thus the fortress gives or sells him his very own carpenters workshop on a leashhold along with a limited pile of wood, but in order to keep it he has to produce 20 beds but he is given 25 logs so he can make 5 figurines of his mother as well. 

The 5 figurines of his mother he can make for himself motivates him to make 20 beds for the fortress. 

[Ribs]

If there are institutions that do not make sense it does not logically follow that one should add in even more institutions that do not make sense

Not all human actions and institutions are made for the sake of "efficiency", because humans aren't worker ants. They are adding the institution of Temples in the game. Do they make sense? I mean, current dwarven society seems to work fine without those.  Some of the concepts start making sense if more problems are added into the game. The addition of temples wouldn't make sense unless you also make dwarves want them.

1. Marriage makes no sense: Babies need to be raised and socialised properly and to do that they need primary caregivers who look at their babies as more than just another job that needs to be done for the good of the fortress.  New dwarves do not simply pop up in the dining hall as adults fully trained and ready to work.  That means they need mothers but mothers need a deputy to take over their role, hence we have fathers as well.  By concieving by a single male the mothers ensure that the propective fathers can be properly focused on their children rather than divided between a large number of children that might be theirs.  To sum up: babies need to have parents to grow into good fortress dwarves so the fortress invents marraige in order to give them parents.

None of these things are necessary. Currently, fathers have zero influence in the raising of their children, and mothers feel only the need to carry the baby around for one year before they virtually abandon them. It makes you think: what is the point of fathers at all? If they are so collective, maybe they should never marry and just have children like spores, and leave the babies in "baby farms" (a concept you apparently approve).

Now the reason that I can safetely say that is not the direction of how the game will approach raising of children and sexual/parental relationships in the future is because 'that' is completely alien behavior in most (if any) known human societies.

2. Marrying only once: Because at present relationships in general (not merely marraige) fail to disguish between the dead and the living.  It might make sense however if dwarves believe in the afterlife and do not believe that "in death do we part".

Why would the state allow such ridiculous beliefs? Dwarf fortress has no interest in dwarves having these beliefs, because it doesn't help the collective. Selfish dwarves practicing religious ideas should be arrested and given suitable, nasty punishments for oding so.[/sarcasm]

My point is, some institutions are in the game not becaus they are "mechanically optimal", but because we as humans can relate to them

4.   Since etar still need to be trained and only the existing etar can teach people the craft it makes sense for the etar to educate his own children since only a small group of trainees are needed and people learn best from their parents.

Can you honestly say this justify the existence of a royal dynasty? It's like saying that it would make sense for a president in a modern democracy to only train his or her children in the art of presidency. This is simply no analogous to human hisory.     

5. Those are clearly translations too, since the latter two positions at least were invented by the Late Roman Empire.  The reason that nobles do not really do anything at the moment is because the mechanics for the central goverment are not yet developed in fortress mode but abstractly they already exist and we see their operation in world-gen. 

And again, these positions are dynastical why? What's the point in making a different class of people with different privileges if you consider higher nobles to be simple "governemnt bureaucrats"?

Do you seriously know what you are proposing?  You are not actually suggesting that Toady One will make it so that if we have a fisherdwarf of any skill he will actually eat more fish than he actually catches, that is what getting rid of surplus value actually means!  He is also not going to banish all the fisherdwarves to the hillocks because he has put an aweful lot of work into making all the professions actually work in fortress mode.  The problem is now actually that he did such a good job of it that we produce so much surplus value that the productivity of our concrete fortress dwarves far exceeds the abstracted production of everybody else, which is fortunate or else we would be living in a post-scarcity universe. 

The dev page mentions adding in palaces, militery outposts and prisons.  These sites would be rather as you describe, lots of guards and officials but few or no workers, meaning that it will be dependent on outside income to exist, whether from individual local sites or from the central government.  The normal fortress however is clearly never intended to be such a site, or else there would have been little point in Toady One actually bothering to work on actually making concrete the abstract production of dwarf sites.  The initial fortress can also not be such a site because as things have been set up to work, dwarf fortresses come first and then with their surplus value creates more fortresses, along with hillocks and mountain halls. 

Do you seriously think there would be no reason to build a fortress in a place whithout enough resources to sustain itself?  You could build your immediate fortress in a place where there is very little in terms of food, bacause it's a great defensive/strategic location. The villages that produce food could be a few miles from the site to support a larger fortress population. If you are successful in taxing hose people, you could sustain a fortress that is mostly composed of dwarves that don't "produce" much of anything, and is basically populated of soldiers or nobles.

While "normal fortresses" are intended to be frontier settlements or outposts, there's nothing that prevents them from being more military minded if you can organize them sucesfully to be that way. They could also be like small towns with little to no defenses if you wanted them to.

Also, friendly reminder that the term "surplus value" is a central Marxist concept and very unique to marx's view on economy. If you don't want an ideological debate, I'd advise you to be a little more conservatve about throwing those terms around. Doing so makes it hard for people to argue against your points without trying to debunk several aspects of marxist economical theory, and these arguments proved themselves to be unproductive.

Yes, of course medieval guilds were unions of the self-employed  .  Everything you are telling me is what I was saying, the purpose of guild was very much against the State, in the sense not that they are rebels but that they are trying to defend themselves against state policies that are hostile to their interests and get the state to institute policies that are in their interests.  Because their ownership is really a leashold from the generally local government they are also forming guilds in order to protect their property and the ensure the terms of their leash are favourable.

They were not necessarily to protect workers agaisnt the state, but to protect workers agaist other workers. That's why I (and many historians) compared them to cartels. Becaue when a bunch of businesses band together, that's pretty much what you get: a cartel.

Stop blurring the lines between Middle Ages and DF.  In the Middle Ages there were no dwarf fortresses in the Alps covering southern Germany with dwarf hillocks.

No, there were castles in the Alps covering southern germany with villages and farmland wherever the earth was fertile. It's not hard to compare the two

Since a dwarf guild is actually a Domas, once again we are translating a DF term into the approximate English translation, so there is no need for a dwarf guild to be essentially the same as a medieval guild at all.  To brings thing back on topic: in order for them to be unions of self-employed craftsmen we would need there to be a reason for the fortress to divide itself up into a whole load of individual craftsmen's workshops.

Not necessarily. There could be a large, central workshop for public or guild use that could support several dwarves working there at the same time, possibly for their own individual projects.

At the moment One Site under VPL happens to be the optimally efficient system as it means that all dwarves are able to flexibly do whatever needs doing and the capital does not lie idle because it is not presently being used by it's owner. As long as the dwarves do not have means to disrupt the VPL Socialism economy, there is no sense in having any other economic system because no ruler would ever implement it and there would never be enough individuals deciding it was a good idea to force the ruler to implement it.  This is what I have been saying all along, take the present system of VPL Socialism and figure out what the creature that would function perfectly under that system looks like.  Then compare your actual creature to that creature and based upon how it differs figure out how it would disrupt the system and to what extent. 

First of all, when you say "efficient", you mean that in very relative terms. It's very hard to say that a "realistic" individualist system (that probably wouldn't even be possible to program in DF) wouldn't be more efficient. If dwarves were intelligent enough to pruduce things regardless of your orders and according to their own necessities, maybe they would do a better job than you ever could. But that's not how the game will ever work, so there's no point discussing it.

Also, you know that VPL has it's days numbered. So what people have been telling you all along is that there is no use in being so attatched to that system when it's not going to be as influencial in the future.

Then have the civilization introduce policies that would address the particular way that creature messes up the system, whether they be coercive measures or actual changes to the economic setup itself.  The policies are more or less extreme, private property (in capital) could emerge as a result of the creatures lack of [COOPERATION], the more uncooperative the creature the more it needs private property; since if you make them work under the present system they tend to think they know better what the fortress needs than the government.  Instead of having a simply binary between absolutely communal and absolute private property we would instead have those as the extreme ends of the spectrum ([COOPERATION] near-50 for Status Quo while [COOPERATION] near -50 gives you absolute private property), with various levels of leasehold in the middle.

You're bieng very simplistic in your view of "cooperation". A cooperative dwarf wouldn't blindly follow orders that go against every other value that he has. If the dwarf highly respects commerce, and you set up a fortress with laws that severely cripples commerce, then cooperating with said fortress' official's orders would be a conflict of interests to said dwarf.

Also, you imply that a dwarf that believes in private propery wouldn't believe in cooperation. Why wouldn't they? If you believe in private property, you would do poorly in team sports? If you're going to make it a tag you may as well name it COLECTIVISM.

[GoblinCookie]

Not all human actions and institutions are made for the sake of "efficiency", because humans aren't worker ants. They are adding the institution of Temples in the game. Do they make sense? I mean, current dwarven society seems to work fine without those.  Some of the concepts start making sense if more problems are added into the game. The addition of temples wouldn't make sense unless you also make dwarves want them.

Temples are not productive institutions, they are a form of value; an end not a means.  The question of efficiency in that context is rather then like asking whether dwarf society would be more efficient if the dwarves stopped wearing clothes.

What we talking about is the question of how the temples get built and as far as I can tell between the present setup and a hypothetical individualistic economy based upon private property, the former builds more temples than the latter.  This is why I ask the question of why would anybody ever introduce the latter kind of economy?

None of these things are necessary. Currently, fathers have zero influence in the raising of their children, and mothers feel only the need to carry the baby around for one year before they virtually abandon them. It makes you think: what is the point of fathers at all? If they are so collective, maybe they should never marry and just have children like spores, and leave the babies in "baby farms" (a concept you apparently approve).

Now the reason that I can safetely say that is not the direction of how the game will approach raising of children and sexual/parental relationships in the future is because 'that' is completely alien behavior in most (if any) known human societies.

If children talk with either parents they get happy thoughts for doing so.  The full extent of family relationships is presently abstracted away, much like pretty much the whole game world; either for reasons of dev time or memory. 

If a civilization has [FAMILY:-50] I could percieve them basically dumping their children on the baby farm as soon as they are born; where they would then be adopted by primary caregivers pretty much as pets are adopted.  If a civilization has [ROMANCE:-50] as well I could envison them concieving babies with random strangers as ordered by the manager, considering this just another king of 'work'. 

Why would the state allow such ridiculous beliefs? Dwarf fortress has no interest in dwarves having these beliefs, because it doesn't help the collective. Selfish dwarves practicing religious ideas should be arrested and given suitable, nasty punishments for oding so.[/sarcasm]

My point is, some institutions are in the game not becaus they are "mechanically optimal", but because we as humans can relate to them

If the ridiculous beliefs teach the dwarves to labour for the site they live in, then the state will likely crack down on people who consider those beliefs ridiculous.

Can you honestly say this justify the existence of a royal dynasty? It's like saying that it would make sense for a president in a modern democracy to only train his or her children in the art of presidency. This is simply no analogous to human hisory.   

We are not talking about a modern democracy where the qualifications for leadership frequently often seem to be being "the best liar".  Hereditery leadership is quite the norm throughout human history and I have given you a reason why it might be adopted.  It does not however mean that Dwarf Kings are identical in role to the kings of Real-Life Civ X however. 

If we have to have monarchy schools everywhere in order to get a skilled king then the majority of the graduates would be better off learning how to do something useful since there can be only one King. 

And again, these positions are dynastical why? What's the point in making a different class of people with different privileges if you consider higher nobles to be simple "governemnt bureaucrats"?

The only privilages they presently seem to enjoy is nicer rooms.  As the rooms get handed out to individuals by the beurocrats, it "makes sense" that they end up with the nicest rooms; not in the sense that it makes sense for the fortress as a whole but for those doing the appointing . 

The dynastic bit is pretty easy to work out too.  The barons as implied in the baron-appointement window are supposed to be the middle link in the chain between the King/Central Gov and the Mayor/Site.  The site sends a candidate off to the king who then officially appoints the baron. 

If they are appointed by the king then things are weighted towards the king and things become too centralised.  If they are appointed by the site in some manner, either directly elected or appointed by the Mayor then things get too de-centralised.  If we have the barons however train their children to become barons after them, much as with the kings then the barons are not longer beholden to either side of the coin so we end up with a golden mean of sorts between centralisation and de-centralisation. 

Do you seriously think there would be no reason to build a fortress in a place whithout enough resources to sustain itself?  You could build your immediate fortress in a place where there is very little in terms of food, bacause it's a great defensive/strategic location. The villages that produce food could be a few miles from the site to support a larger fortress population. If you are successful in taxing hose people, you could sustain a fortress that is mostly composed of dwarves that don't "produce" much of anything, and is basically populated of soldiers or nobles.

While "normal fortresses" are intended to be frontier settlements or outposts, there's nothing that prevents them from being more military minded if you can organize them sucesfully to be that way. They could also be like small towns with little to no defenses if you wanted them to.

Also, friendly reminder that the term "surplus value" is a central Marxist concept and very unique to marx's view on economy. If you don't want an ideological debate, I'd advise you to be a little more conservatve about throwing those terms around. Doing so makes it hard for people to argue against your points without trying to debunk several aspects of marxist economical theory, and these arguments proved themselves to be unproductive.

No, surplus value is a basic economic term that means something specific that has nothing to do with Marxism beyond the fact that it makes use of it.  It means the amount of wealth produced by a worker in excess of the amount that the worker consumes.  If in DF terms we have a fishermen that produces 20 fishes but eats 10 of them, that means we have a surplus value of 10 fishes which allows the fisherman to feed his children.  It is impossible for a society to survive without surplus value, because children obviously are not born able to produce more food than they eat.   See, no Marxism; just the undeniable reality that workers must in every society produce more wealth than they consume. 

If the regular fortress/hillocks/mountain halls is the fishermen, then militery outpost/palace/temple/prison fortresses are the equivilent of the fisherman's children; with the unfortunate difference being that they never 'grow up'.  What happens if the fisherman stops feeding his eternal children, the children either 'grow up' or they starve.  To return to the question of how the DF History messes up the normal historical development then the difference is that dwarf society starts off with a fortress that then creates new dwarf sites; a pattern repeated every time the civilization colonises a new area.  This means that the fisherman writes the rules and his children do not. 

To contrast with history: the fishermen in history would be a bunch of scattered about peasants with no effective government.  The goverment on the hand is very much a fisherman's child, which means that the result is that the government makes the rules to make sure that at all costs ensure that the peasants do not form their own government, because their very survival depends upon it.  I shall leave it there before I slip into 'Marxism'. 

They were not necessarily to protect workers agaisnt the state, but to protect workers agaist other workers. That's why I (and many historians) compared them to cartels. Becaue when a bunch of businesses band together, that's pretty much what you get: a cartel.

Workers that are free to join the guild provided they meet the qualifications.  By allowing qualified workers to not join the guild, the guild reduces it's bargaining power against the State because they can no longer command the whole labour power of their craft.  You also have to remember that the guild members are not acting as single company but a whole load of independant self-employed producers and for that reason are still competing against eachother whether they are all guild members or not. 

No, there were castles in the Alps covering southern germany with villages and farmland wherever the earth was fertile. It's not hard to compare the two

If you know nothing about the economics of surplus value it is easy to compare the two. 

Not necessarily. There could be a large, central workshop for public or guild use that could support several dwarves working there at the same time, possibly for their own individual projects.

We are back to collective ownership of the means of production then are we not?  Karl Marx would be proud of your suggestion Ribs  .

First of all, when you say "efficient", you mean that in very relative terms. It's very hard to say that a "realistic" individualist system (that probably wouldn't even be possible to program in DF) wouldn't be more efficient. If dwarves were intelligent enough to pruduce things regardless of your orders and according to their own necessities, maybe they would do a better job than you ever could. But that's not how the game will ever work, so there's no point discussing it.

Also, you know that VPL has it's days numbered. So what people have been telling you all along is that there is no use in being so attatched to that system when it's not going to be as influencial in the future.

I know that and I will be happy to see VPL go; since it is an interface nightmare (would prefer a system of custom classes).  However I know that Toady One has recently put a lot of work into developing the whole labour system on that basis, I am pretty much sure that whatever system replacing it will be to use an analogy, a graft.  The basic code will inevitably be the same underneath but the interface on top of it will be different and definately customisable to different dwarves.

Yes individual dwarves would be more efficiant at meeting their own needs than the player would be.  That is however exactly what we do not logically want, we want the dwarves to meet not only their own needs but everybody else in the fortress's needs as well.  Maximum efficiency means everybody getting all the stuff they need, not merely a few top workers with the required skills to make everything they need. 

You're bieng very simplistic in your view of "cooperation". A cooperative dwarf wouldn't blindly follow orders that go against every other value that he has. If the dwarf highly respects commerce, and you set up a fortress with laws that severely cripples commerce, then cooperating with said fortress' official's orders would be a conflict of interests to said dwarf.

Also, you imply that a dwarf that believes in private propery wouldn't believe in cooperation. Why wouldn't they? If you believe in private property, you would do poorly in team sports? If you're going to make it a tag you may as well name it COLECTIVISM.

Toady One set up the values to be as they are not I, if I made the game I would have used explicitly ideological values along the lines of your proposed [COLLECTIVISM] value because I would have intended to one day make us of them in an explicitly political sense. 

Values are not supposed to be necceserily how the dwarves behave personally, they are what the dwarf believes in.  A dwarf that would in my system believe in private property but still is good at team sports is an example of the combination of a low [COOPERATION] value with a low [DISCORD] personality.  They do not believe in everybody simply working together as one unit under the site manager, but they still by nature find it easy to work together harmoniously with others all the same.

The scenario you mention is the reason that some people "view cooperation as a low ideal not worthy of any respect" .  [COOPERATION] is about putting aside your personal goals in order to work together as part of a larger whole, a being with [COOPERATION:50] does not allow his gripes about the commercial policy of the fortress to stop him working together as part of the fortress.  If he did then he would be [COOPERATION:0] instead, because his cooperation with the fortress is conditional rather than unconditional.  This does not mean that he starts liking the fortress commercial policy, but that he does not let it get in the way of his cooperating.

I am here talking about one single form of property, that is ownership of capital.  There should be multiple independant types of property and different levels of privatisation of each form of property, the tricky thing is ensuring that they can exist independantly.  A list of the various types of property I can think of a civilization introducing and the value that promotes them, either in high levels (+) or at low levels (-).

Noble Property: [POWER+]: To what extent do legitimate position holders have a right to continue to occupy their office.
Family Property: [FAMILY+]: To what extent and degree of closeness do family members get to make use of what their relatives have. 
Sentimental Property: [TRADITION+]: To what extent do objects that it is agreed are of special personal importance to them.
Intellectual Property: [ARTWORK+]: To what extent do authors of intellectual or artistic works have rights over the ideas or forms they have created (not the physical objects).
Capital Property: [COOPERATION-]: To what extent are workshops and tools owned by private individuals. (what we were talking about)
Labour Property: [INDEPENDANCE+]: To what extent do workers have rights over what they personally produce.
Residential Property: [COMPETITION+]: To what extent do people have rights over the rooms or other spaces they occupy. 
Emigrant Property: [SACRIFICE+]: To what extent do people have the right to take things with them when they emigrate.
Government Property: [HARD_WORK-]: To what extent are non-assigned goods owned by the site restricted from public use by it's own members.
Outsider Property: [COMMERCE-]: To what extent are fortress goods made available for free/subsidised for use by visiting outsiders.
Militery Property: [MARTIAL_PROWESS+]: To what extent do items from defeated enemies belong to the slayer.
Foreign Property: [PEACE+]: To what extent and to what length of time do items lost by foreign sites, individuals or civilizations continue to belong to them.
Body Property: [HARMONY+]: To what extent does the individual have rights over their own physical body.
Personal Property: [TRANQUILITY+]: To what extent does the individuals personal items belong to them.

[Ribs]

If a civilization has [FAMILY:-50] I could percieve them basically dumping their children on the baby farm as soon as they are born; where they would then be adopted by primary caregivers pretty much as pets are adopted.  If a civilization has [ROMANCE:-50] as well I could envison them concieving babies with random strangers as ordered by the manager, considering this just another king of 'work'. 

Given dwarven average morals, I doubt a dwarven civ would ever work like this.

If the ridiculous beliefs teach the dwarves to labour for the site they live in, then the state will likely crack down on people who consider those beliefs ridiculous.

Why "invent" religion in the first place then? You speak as if only the state had the power to introduce or manipulate popular culture

We are not talking about a modern democracy where the qualifications for leadership frequently often seem to be being "the best liar".  Hereditery leadership is quite the norm throughout human history and I have given you a reason why it might be adopted.  It does not however mean that Dwarf Kings are identical in role to the kings of Real-Life Civ X however. 

Of course hereditary leadership is the norm. What I'm questioning here is that if dwarf fortress really is such a perfect collective society, why would it "invent" a hierarquical monarchy in the first place?

The only privilages they presently seem to enjoy is nicer rooms.  As the rooms get handed out to individuals by the beurocrats, it "makes sense" that they end up with the nicest rooms; not in the sense that it makes sense for the fortress as a whole but for those doing the appointing .   

They also presently enjoy the privilege of condemning commoners to be physically punished for not making the useless things they ordered. I guess "it makes sense", as dwarves usually just nod and go on with their lives after some random carpenter is beaten to death by a guard for not making a table in time, even though the people in charged forgot to make the order in the first place. *winky face*

If they are appointed by the king then things are weighted towards the king and things become too centralised.  If they are appointed by the site in some manner, either directly elected or appointed by the Mayor then things get too de-centralised.  If we have the barons however train their children to become barons after them, much as with the kings then the barons are not longer beholden to either side of the coin so we end up with a golden mean of sorts between centralisation and de-centralisation. 

All you need is for the site to have more than a single administrator (like the manager). He could pretty much do the same job as the baron. You could also train diplomats when necessary. There's no point to a nobility in this collective utopia that you imagine df as being right now. What I'm telling you is that DF right now is a dysfunctional society, clearly intended to be vaguely feudal but couldn't because it was too complicated to design a proper feudal economy. All I'm trying to say is that maybe, in the future, we'll see one, as Toady seems to be attempting to go into that direction.

No, surplus value is a basic economic term that means something specific that has nothing to do with Marxism beyond the fact that it makes use of it.  It means the amount of wealth produced by a worker in excess of the amount that the worker consumes. etc etc. 

It's not hard to understand what the term surplus value means. According to Marx's theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labour-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold. It is very much a term used in marxian economics, and for someone to believe it to be detached from it is strange to me. If you're using marxist jargon in a discussion about economy, expect people to call you out on it.

Also, you have completely ignored my main argument: while "normal fortresses" are intended to be frontier settlements or outposts, there's nothing that prevents them from being more military minded if you can organize them sucesfully to be that way. They could also be like small towns with little to no defenses if you wanted them to. So, in the future, even "normal fortresses" could be able to sustain themselves through taxes and not by being "self-sustained", whether you think such situation would bee anachronistic or not

If you know nothing about the economics of surplus value it is easy to compare the two. 

Again, if in the future a fortress will be able to become more similar to a medieval fortress, it'll be a viable comparison

We are back to collective ownership of the means of production then are we not?  Karl Marx would be proud of your suggestion Ribs  .

Oh, I thought we were attempting to make polite conversation here, gobbman. I see how quickly you go back to your winky self. I could go that rout too so, how fast do you want this thread locked?

Anyway, marxist nonsense aside, I have nothing against public property in dwarf fortress, even some that are geared towards production. If it makes sense, who cares? Having dwarves possess their own individal workshops, however, also sounds appealing to me but it could be a nightmareto make it work given the game's limitations. Once we see what replaces VPL, it will become a bit clearer if such a thing is possible. To be fair, you can kind of arrange that in a way right now by giving each workshop you have to an individual dwarf when you have a manager.

Yes individual dwarves would be more efficiant at meeting their own needs than the player would be.  That is however exactly what we do not logically want, we want the dwarves to meet not only their own needs but everybody else in the fortress's needs as well.  Maximum efficiency means everybody getting all the stuff they need, not merely a few top workers with the required skills to make everything they need. 

If they are more efficient at producing what they want, they are better at meeting the needs of everybody because, well, they are everybody. You could argue that letting them use certain strategical resourses that are very limited (like steel for instance) would be bad for the fortress, so maybe it would be better to control the circulation of those particular resourses. You can also help those who can't find work by allowing them to use public dormitories and by giving them access to food. Or even better, they would probably go willingly accept joining the army or other appointed sevice for the realm. There's a middle ground for these things, you know? I assume we'll see a few options for these probems once the economy is up and running again.

Noble Property: [POWER+]: To what extent do legitimate position holders have a right to continue to occupy their office.
Family Property: [FAMILY+]: To what extent and degree of closeness do family members get to make use of what their relatives have. 
Sentimental Property: [TRADITION+]: To what extent do objects that it is agreed are of special personal importance to them.
Intellectual Property: [ARTWORK+]: To what extent do authors of intellectual or artistic works have rights over the ideas or forms they have created (not the physical objects).
Capital Property: [COOPERATION-]: To what extent are workshops and tools owned by private individuals. (what we were talking about)
Labour Property: [INDEPENDANCE+]: To what extent do workers have rights over what they personally produce.
Residential Property: [COMPETITION+]: To what extent do people have rights over the rooms or other spaces they occupy. 
Emigrant Property: [SACRIFICE+]: To what extent do people have the right to take things with them when they emigrate.
Government Property: [HARD_WORK-]: To what extent are non-assigned goods owned by the site restricted from public use by it's own members.
Outsider Property: [COMMERCE-]: To what extent are fortress goods made available for free/subsidised for use by visiting outsiders.
Militery Property: [MARTIAL_PROWESS+]: To what extent do items from defeated enemies belong to the slayer.
Foreign Property: [PEACE+]: To what extent and to what length of time do items lost by foreign sites, individuals or civilizations continue to belong to them.
Body Property: [HARMONY+]: To what extent does the individual have rights over their own physical body.
Personal Property: [TRANQUILITY+]: To what extent does the individuals personal items belong to them.

A lot of these are redundant or confusing, like "Military Property: [MARTIAL_PROWESS+]: To what extent do items from defeated enemies belong to the slayer." Why would military prowess influence this at all? If anything, the sense of pride and respect for the law would influence this the most. A very proud dwarf (or dwarven civ), amost religious about his respect for the law would maybe consider using equipment from a defeated foe theft and therefore a dishonorable act.

[Splint]

My turn to interject. Now, I am talking out of my ass, but I do find the constant talk from GoblinCookie about what amounts to communism in a vaguely-medieval setting grating. Anyway, my two cents.

Private Property: Would likely at its simplest extend to housing and personal effects only, or maybe shops and stock therein, the money from buying a shop and stock going to whomever is currently the fortress representative (So whoever happens to be mayor the time or the higher noble, unless the items are sold by another regular citizen obviously.)

If owned, eviction needs to be authorized by an administrator (generally this means the mayor.) If you want someone booted out, the mayor gets a small job that uses the organizer or record-keeper skill to file and approve the eviction. It is then torn down and the residents evicted, unless the player cancels the eviction (resulting in "Urist McMayor cancels approve pending eviction: Eviction canceled.") Same goes for shops. Evictions can be approved and put on hold with a suspension, and if canceled after approval, the mayor simply does a "revise eviction" job to nullify the previous order to kick someone out of their house/shop.

If someone wants to buy better housing or a new shop, the player (via the Mayor most likely) would have to approve it, mainly as a concession so that the player can be kept up to date on who lives where and owns what. Or perhaps having the bookkeeper have a record of all non-consumer good property transactions (keeping tabs on the sales of housing and shops, so that way with a quick check to a screen, you'll know that Urist McShopkeep sold his shop a month ago and it is now owned by Urist McWoodchopper, and that UristMcgoblinchopper recently bought a third house for some stupid reason and needs those houses seized since he only needs the one and there's two other dwarves with the money and no existing private homes of their own.)

Now, I'm sure GoblinCookie will argue "why bother with the money/seizure at all then?" Not your concern since you probably won't have it enabled, but it'd be strictly an anti-frustration feature in my book, since relocating a dwarf would be highly inconvenient if you couldn't tear it down, but don't want to make it seem like the ownership is completely superficial. The "player" at least needs to take the time to do some paperwork before throwing someone out on their ass as they repo their house, even if the intent is benign (such as to encourage them to buy a more conveniently located house.) Is it a bad idea? Probably, but it's a thought.

Any stock and personal effects have the same limit as currently in game to determine who owns the item. if stock or personal items are left unattended too long, it's assumed they are abandoned and the player is free to do with them as they wish.

Evictions/seizure of shops will obviously annoy their owners, with personality and values influencing the intensity. For example, a dwarf who has higher values of cooperation, and lower values regarding personal wealth, they may just be annoyed they need to shack up in the common rooms, while a dwarf with the inverse may feel greatly angered about being reduced to a homeless bum. However, if they own another home, they'd most likely not care in the slightest unless they're the most self-centered and greedy sods in the world (and they'd be more pissed about having thier property taken away than anything.)

This would be the simplest thing I could think of, and might work best as a testing ground of sorts fort that sort of thing.

Economy/Government talk: Stop it, please. The current order of things is the way it is because it works for the time being and is subject to change as per the dev-logs, and  it'd still be up to the player as to whether or not to enable the economy regardless, allowing some the added challenge of more capitalistic elements while those who don't like or don't want to bother with those can keep thier psychotic bearded midget commies.

We don't need any of this communism talk cluttering up the place.

Time for bed. I'll probably have my head torn off in my sleep.

[Ribs]

Hahahaha... nice to see you too, Splint. So I decided to finally visit the suggestion board again after several months, and the first thing I see is our goblin friend enriching another innocent thread. I decided to intervine, and ended up making it worse. Then I thought I could make this thread so we could at least focus the discussion in a single place. I don't know if it was the right thing to do or not, but at least it doesn't clutter up the board too much.

I'm sure this will amount to absolutely nothing, but I find it morbidly amusing that Toady had to skim through some of our nonsense before making the (wise) decision of shutting the thread down.

But anyway, I'm not sure if all the aspects of the "new economy" will be so easily turned off as the old one was, depending on how things go. Did Toady say anything? Because with the world being activated and all, with coins and prices of goods floating around some of it may be hard to separate from your fortress, now that it isn't an isolated island anymore. I'm guessing some of it will though. Hopefully, it will be fun for everyone.

[Enchiridion]

The way to go about this kinda ties in with my zones thread...

But other than that, I am all for a bit more autonomy in the fortress as long as it is meaningful and makes itself notable.

EDIT:

... nonsense...

My God... The Toad walks among us...