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[KillzEmAllGod]

It's rather annoying making things and the quality being random. One way to make it better would be setting what quality you want to good to be at.
Now the way the system would work is that masterworks would require a skill level to be able to a target quality and that they would take an insane amount of time to make. The quality of the object should change through out the crafting of it before it's finished.

Might be better to also add how quaility on how armor and weapons work so there's condition. Quality might also come from the metal (there being good iron/steel and bad)used as well as how well sharpened a blade is.

[Bumber]

Ability to set desired quality of item
Apparently suggested even before that.

Nevermind. Slightly different.

[Ribs]

I'm all for this. Extremely talented and experienced artisans should be able to make masterworks more consistently and even on demand at the cost of them having to put more time into the work order, to simulate the fact that they are doing it very carefully. This should be counterbalanced by making unskilled craftsmen harder to train, which is already a planned feature.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Perhaps only "Great" and above workers should be able to produce masterpieces "on demand." I honestly doubt that while working on one task, I could produce a masterwork wooden craft, even though I am of Adequate training.

SUGGESTION: Allow manager to say "make 10 rock chests, exceptional or better." Automatically assigns the most skilled dwarf; prefers dwarves who are capable of regularly outputting the desired quality. Superior and below chests do not count toward the production count. Toggle for "breaking the resulting stuff into raw material," which should produce a boulder occasionally (or if NW_Kohaku's Continuous Quantities suggestion is implemented, a small amount of rubble and usable stone). With gems: same as stone, makes small gems occasionally, always gem dust. With metal: automelt superior or below crafts. With wood: cut it back into usable wood, with some loss and production of sawdust. (A few of these only implementable with NW_K's suggestion.)

This way, as long as you've got some stone, a mason's shop, and a mason, you can tell the manager to make 10 masterpiece stone tables and let the dwarves do the rest.

Addendum: You can also say "make this below exceptional." Any masterwork craft is automatically changed to be exceptional at production time. Either task option (like material is now), manager option, or workshop option. These together would make the manager more powerful and useful.

[GoblinCookie]

I think the amount of time needed should increase exponentially, so to guarantee the production of a masterwork would take say a month of work.  All these kinds of ideas however need us to make creating workbenches more difficult and expensive however.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

...um. I don't think that after working for half a year on one project, it would be great. I think it would be utterly crappy.

You can definitely skill up by working for a long time on a project, but if you don't have the right base, you can't really improve a craft that well. Especially for stone-carving crafts, where if something gets chipped, it's chipped. Forever. So a better way is to clean up the UI and allow the player to quickly and simply order something they can already do, not make dwarves magical craft-making artisans from birth.

I also think that workbenches should be a little more difficult to build. They should need metal tools.

[GoblinCookie]

...um. I don't think that after working for half a year on one project, it would be great. I think it would be utterly crappy.

You can definitely skill up by working for a long time on a project, but if you don't have the right base, you can't really improve a craft that well. Especially for stone-carving crafts, where if something gets chipped, it's chipped. Forever. So a better way is to clean up the UI and allow the player to quickly and simply order something they can already do, not make dwarves magical craft-making artisans from birth.

I also think that workbenches should be a little more difficult to build. They should need metal tools.

After working for half a year on one project the project would be brilliant because of the sheer amount of time they have to make sure they do everything perfectly.  Similarly if somebody is in a hurry they make mistakes resulting in a situation of randomised quality even for brilliant people, so the present situation fits well for people working as fast as possible.  The slower the work pace the more reliably the resulting item will not be BELOW the given quality established by the skill of the dwarf, but it should still not be possible to get a novice to produce a masterwork reliable. 

All of this requires more expensive/difficult to produce workshops because at the moment you can simply mass-produce workshops so basically no reason not to set all your dwarves to produce reliably at maximum skill and still end up with an excess of goods by simply employing an aweful lot of dwarves at the same time and every task one by one.  So all the dwarves produce one thing, then all the dwarves produce another thing, then another etc; because capital is superabundant due to the workshops having minimal material requirements to build. 

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Nononono. I think we disagree over what a "project" is.

My idea of a project is that I carve one piece of wood for a year.

Your idea of a project is apparently carving different pieces of wood for a year.

I actually think that there should be two kinds of quality: base errors and aesthetics of proportions, for one, and embellishments and decorations for the other.

...which is actually technically already implemented.

I mean that when a Legendary Carpenter makes a door, he might have put patterns in it, as well as perfectly smooth edges, no rough patches, and very perfect proportions.

Sometimes, IMO, newly-created objects should come with a decoration of whatever-the-item-was-made-of. Since decorations add no weight (or anything but value, actually), this would model an excellent craftsman including cool bits on his chair. Sure, he could make an IKEA-style boring rectangular chair with nothing but flat edges, but if you don't tell him not to, he should sometimes make a chair with curly bits on the end.

Remember, DF is set in the time of artisans, not factories. Maybe every chair in a room might be identical, but they would frequently otherwise be unique. (Correct me if I'm wrong, and just pulling facts out of my rear. But I'm fairly certain of this.)