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[GoblinCookie]

Some dwarfs may prefer tea.... I am not disagreeing with that.

I am disagreeing with the idea that there will be enough dwarfs who prefer tea for that civilization to create and sustain a "tea" ceremony. Ceremonies (and rituals/customs/etc) require groups of individuals to create and sustain the ceremony through time. These groups of individuals require a common interest in the ceremony.

Please make a list of about ten ceremonies/traditions/rituals/customs/etc that you know of... then for each entry on your list, determine a few reasons these ceremonies developed. Which of those ceremonies could continue to exist if the number of interested individuals dropped too low? If any of these ceremonies have been discontinued, determine some reasons why this happened.

In the DF worlds, elves probably have ceremonies involving trees... I have a few nature-loving dwarfs that would enjoy a "tree ceremony" but most of my dwarfs would hold it in contempt. This is the difference between personal preferences and cultural preferences.

Group activities require groups of individuals, not individuals.

Individuals seldom develop individual stuff independent of the wider culture. 

You are talking about dwarves like they exist and there are empirical facts about them, you have no stated reason why dwarves would not drink tea and have tea ceremonies.  Dwarves don't develop tree ceremonies because trees are not a major part of their lived experience, unlike with elves; it has nothing to do with their abstract opinion of the nature above their heads, trees are not part of their life.  The only facts as regards dwarves are the facts about the environment they are supposed to live in (the artificial underground), they have no reason to hold tree ceremonies in contempt because there is no reason to oppose something that is impossible. 

On analysis tea is actually more likely than alcohol for dwarves to drink.  The reason is that the 'charge' of tea does not depend upon the energy content of the tea leaves, it is a chemical thing produced independently of that.  The strength of alcohol on the other hand is related to the amount of energy that is invested in making it, given the general scarcity of energy in the environment they live in dwarves would be be likely to eat the things they would make alcohol out of than ferment them into alcohol. 

[Rowanas]

Since we're coming up to a season of ceremonies in the meat world, I'd like to put forward some of our non-useful but very-much-present ceremonies and traditions that we've developed, and for which I can find no purpose beyond bonding.

Christmas, including the giving and receiving of gifts.  A dwarven culture (with procgen myths) could have a mythic tea-drinking figure.
Singing Auld Langsyne and getting wasted on new year's Eve.  We do it.. for fun, I guess?
Gradutation ceremonies.  Not vital to survival, but we take pride in them.

 etc.

[anewaname]

Individuals seldom develop individual stuff independent of the wider culture.

Actually, that is the only way it does happen... It starts with an individual within a group of individuals and is introduced into parent, peer, or child groups.

For a ceremony/custom/ritual to continue and thrive in each group that it is introduced into, these groups of individuals must find some meaning or benefit from engaging in the activity.

You are talking about dwarves like they exist and there are empirical facts about them, you have no stated reason why dwarves would not drink tea and have tea ceremonies.  Dwarves don't develop tree ceremonies because trees are not a major part of their lived experience, unlike with elves; it has nothing to do with their abstract opinion of the nature above their heads, trees are not part of their life.  The only facts as regards dwarves are the facts about the environment they are supposed to live in (the artificial underground), they have no reason to hold tree ceremonies in contempt because there is no reason to oppose something that is impossible. 

You are saying that trees (which exist above-ground and below-ground in DF) are not part of their life... but tea leaves (from one type of tree that only grows in tropical regions), are part of their life.

On analysis tea is actually more likely than alcohol for dwarves to drink.  The reason is that the 'charge' of tea does not depend upon the energy content of the tea leaves, it is a chemical thing produced independently of that.  The strength of alcohol on the other hand is related to the amount of energy that is invested in making it, given the general scarcity of energy in the environment they live in dwarves would be be likely to eat the things they would make alcohol out of than ferment them into alcohol. 

Fermentation continues until the sugars have all been converted to alcohol, and dwarfs are not involved in this activity once the container is sealed. I agree that it takes less effort to make tea than to make alcohol, since fermentation requires the effort of putting the sugars into the container and if the dwarfs live in a biome with tea trees, it is easier to bring a bucket to the pond full of rotting tea leaves and fill the bucket.

I think you are ignoring my argument that you won't always be playing dorfs.

I am not ignoring it. Humans may become the primary protagonists, but dwarfs and other races will continue to be be playable. It will not matter what race the overseer chooses if that race's ceremonies/customs/rituals/traditions are procedurally generated based the race's raw data and that civ's environment (biomes, friendly civs, enemy civs, etc). And, one can assume that if dwarfs are removed from the game, modders will add them back in again, creating raws with ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT or ALCOHOL_SUSCEPTIBLE... And those players that want their dwarf civs to develop "tea ceremonies" will add a CAFFEINE_SUSCEPTIBLE tag and look for mountain homes based in tropical biomes. And then again, I probably will still play humans as if they were dwarfs.

.. A dwarven culture (with procgen myths) could have a mythic tea-drinking figure...

Yes!! Tea-drinking may be unlikely for dwarfs but it could happen. "And Erush drank tea with the elves to confirm the truce..." Later, he and others drank tea once a year to celebrate that event and to remember their dead, and this continued to be known as the "tea ceremony", long after their grandchildren had began spiking the tea with rum and their grandchildren's grandchildren stopped spiking the rum with tea."

[KittyTac]

Yes, races and civs will be procgen. But dwarves, being a common fantasy race, will likely be present in many worlds. I'm just saying that there is no point in not adding tea just because dwarves would not drink it.

[Dorsidwarf]

I still absolutely do not understand your bluntheaded insistence that the default state of dwarves is to hate and abhor tea and that only extreme circumstances could ever deviate from that. DF has always been a mix of classic stereotypes (elves love trees) and very much atypical attributes (elves ritually devour the bodies of their fallen enemies).

[GoblinCookie]

Actually, that is the only way it does happen... It starts with an individual within a group of individuals and is introduced into parent, peer, or child groups.

For a ceremony/custom/ritual to continue and thrive in each group that it is introduced into, these groups of individuals must find some meaning or benefit from engaging in the activity.

Not quite.  What happens is that a bunch of individuals within a culture independently come to the same conclusion based upon the pre-existing culture they have in common (same thing applies to ideas as with customs).  Then they realize that they have something in common and create an institution.  The institution then spreads the custom to everyone in the culture, regardless of whether they would independently develop an interest in it on their own.  This is why cities and urban centers drive culture forward so much, because in a city it is easier for a number of individuals as described above to meet. 

You are saying that trees (which exist above-ground and below-ground in DF) are not part of their life... but tea leaves (from one type of tree that only grows in tropical regions), are part of their life.

The tea leaves come from the surface because they are harvested there (in real-life tea trees are actually high-altitude plants, they will grow happily in Scotland) and brought below by a section of the population.  However we are talking about literal tea there, nothing keeps there from being other plants, even underground ones of which 'tea' can be made; perhaps with more industry being involved than with tea leaves.

About trees, the point is kind of that trees lack general relevance to the population.  Some dwarves will find trees relevant, because they go there to harvest things from trees, whether they be fruit, tea leaves or wood.  But they don't have general familiarity to everyone, which means their cultural significance would remain for traditional fantasy dwarves limited; this does not have anything to do with their abstract ideas about nature.

However if you stretch things a bit we can end up with a different situation to traditional fantasy.  If we have a dwarf fortress below a forest and nearly everyone goes out to get fruits once a year, trees could become a key cultural thing.

Fermentation continues until the sugars have all been converted to alcohol, and dwarfs are not involved in this activity once the container is sealed. I agree that it takes less effort to make tea than to make alcohol, since fermentation requires the effort of putting the sugars into the container and if the dwarfs live in a biome with tea trees, it is easier to bring a bucket to the pond full of rotting tea leaves and fill the bucket.

I was not talking about the effort involved  .  I was talking about the sugars and carbohydrates used up by the production of alcohol.  Traditional fantasy dwarves live in mountainous areas underground, which amounts to two environments where energy is scarce.  Above them there are few carbohydrates and below them (in the caverns) there are also few carbohydrates, most energy in those environments is the protein and fats in the animals of creatures.  There simply isn't the ability to mass-produce beer or wine as there is in human societies, because dwarves will simply have to eat the scarce carbohydrates and sugars needed to make them in order to stay alive.

Tea on the other hand, that grows in mountainous slopes as it's idea environment.  Between alcohol and tea, tea makes more sense because this frees up all the energy that would be used to feed yeast in order to feed dwarves. 

[Bumber]

Traditional fantasy dwarves live in mountainous areas underground, which amounts to two environments where energy is scarce.

Yet DF caverns have giant mushrooms and bear-sized birds. You can't disregard fantastical environments for fantastical creatures.

[Egan_BW]

Who says mountains have little energy? They have a very variable amount of energy because "mountains" by itself isn't a distinct biome, just a place that so happens to disregard the supposed flatness of earth's terrain.

[Bumber]

Who says mountains have little energy? They have a very variable amount of energy because "mountains" by itself isn't a distinct biome, just a place that so happens to disregard the supposed flatness of earth's terrain.

The problems are soil and air, which are products of high altitude. The sunlight exposure is also quite harsh, counter-intuitive to the low temperature (which is caused by the inability to trap the heat.)

[Azerty]

Actually, that is the only way it does happen... It starts with an individual within a group of individuals and is introduced into parent, peer, or child groups.

For a ceremony/custom/ritual to continue and thrive in each group that it is introduced into, these groups of individuals must find some meaning or benefit from engaging in the activity.

Not quite.  What happens is that a bunch of individuals within a culture independently come to the same conclusion based upon the pre-existing culture they have in common (same thing applies to ideas as with customs).  Then they realize that they have something in common and create an institution.  The institution then spreads the custom to everyone in the culture, regardless of whether they would independently develop an interest in it on their own.  This is why cities and urban centers drive culture forward so much, because in a city it is easier for a number of individuals as described above to meet.

You could provide interesting input to the Events, Customs and Traditions, or the introduction of celebrations thread.

Fermentation continues until the sugars have all been converted to alcohol, and dwarfs are not involved in this activity once the container is sealed. I agree that it takes less effort to make tea than to make alcohol, since fermentation requires the effort of putting the sugars into the container and if the dwarfs live in a biome with tea trees, it is easier to bring a bucket to the pond full of rotting tea leaves and fill the bucket.

I was not talking about the effort involved  .  I was talking about the sugars and carbohydrates used up by the production of alcohol.  Traditional fantasy dwarves live in mountainous areas underground, which amounts to two environments where energy is scarce.  Above them there are few carbohydrates and below them (in the caverns) there are also few carbohydrates, most energy in those environments is the protein and fats in the animals of creatures.  There simply isn't the ability to mass-produce beer or wine as there is in human societies, because dwarves will simply have to eat the scarce carbohydrates and sugars needed to make them in order to stay alive.

Tea on the other hand, that grows in mountainous slopes as it's idea environment.  Between alcohol and tea, tea makes more sense because this frees up all the energy that would be used to feed yeast in order to feed dwarves.

Given the information you provided, I wonder how the "beer-drinking mountain dwarves" trope came to birth. OTOH, mead-drinking might be more widespread and, moreover, a fantasy world might have more lively undergrounds.

Warhammer made dwarves trave their craftswork to the valley humans in exchange of food, enabling them to devote their farmers to grow their special barley.

[GoblinCookie]

Yet DF caverns have giant mushrooms and bear-sized birds. You can't disregard fantastical environments for fantastical creatures.

Nutrients are not presently a factor in determining creature populations.  It is actually more energy efficient pound for pound to have a few larger creatures than to have a lot of smaller creatures.  Provided the caverns were large enough to fit the creatures in, we might well see very large cave-dwelling creatures. 

There are plenty of thing that live in caverns in real-life.  We actually don't know exactly what creatures there are down there because so little of the cavern systems are accessible to us.  Then there are whole quasi-alien ecosystems based upon the chemical reactions driven by extreme heat deep in the earth which we naturally know little about. 

It seems however that fungi do actually store energy as carbohydrates according to the answer to this question.  The problem is that there is little requirement to store energy in an underground environment because there are no seasons.  A lot of carbohydrates are stored by plants because of seasonal fluctuations demand they go dormant for long periods and/or regrow themselves.  Carbohydrates are also stored in seeds in order to speed up the growth of new seeds to give them a head start in the competitive race to get to the light, which does not exist underground.

That leaves only one possible option.  A mushroom is normally a means by which the fungus propagates itself, which makes it in a sense a fruit.  A mushroom that wanted to be eaten, could presumably exist and therefore they could store carbohydrates in them to attract animals to eat them in the same manner than fruit does.  Problem is nothing is in any real rush to reproduce in an environment which is both static and energy scarce, in that environment to waste energy to reproduce more effectively is a sure way to go extinct. 

Given the information you provided, I wonder how the "beer-drinking mountain dwarves" trope came to birth. OTOH, mead-drinking might be more widespread and, moreover, a fantasy world might have more lively undergrounds.

Warhammer made dwarves trave their craftswork to the valley humans in exchange of food, enabling them to devote their farmers to grow their special barley.

Mead is pretty much what they are going to be drinking.  That is because honey bees like mountainous area because there are plenty of flowers on the lower slopes of mountains.  The problem is that mead still has less sugar in it than the honey that it was made from and honey does not go off.  That however might be entirely the point, dwarves drinking alcohol is conspicuous consumption but that does leave a gap for the staple beverage to be filled either by tea or by mushroom derived 'buzzes'.

From Warhammer Total War I rather got the impression that the dwarves neighbors were mostly orcs and goblins.  I also got the impression that they mostly ate the barley rather than turning it into beer. 

[Bumber]

Nutrients are not presently a factor in determining creature populations.  It is actually more energy efficient pound for pound to have a few larger creatures than to have a lot of smaller creatures.  Provided the caverns were large enough to fit the creatures in, we might well see very large cave-dwelling creatures.

Does this account for the ability of sized creatures to seek out food and spend time grazing? Aside from that, the issue with bear-sized birds is the required wingspan and the muscles to use them (also, cavern walls.) It is apparent that there's magic involved, and energy isn't really so scarce.

Just because there aren't "seasons" (although farm plots disagree) doesn't mean there isn't some kind of cycle.

[GoblinCookie]

Does this account for the ability of sized creatures to seek out food and spend time grazing? Aside from that, the issue with bear-sized birds is the required wingspan and the muscles to use them (also, cavern walls.) It is apparent that there's magic involved, and energy isn't really so scarce.

Just because there aren't "seasons" (although farm plots disagree) doesn't mean there isn't some kind of cycle.

As I said, a lot of it has to do with the size of the cavern.  The main issue with big creatures is that you still need to maintain a viable population, by which I mean the population has to be large enough that if any plausible catastrophe happens it's population won't fall below the number that it ceases to be able to reproduce without problems.  In this case it is the total number of creatures, not their biomass that matters.  A small number of large creatures deals with a shortage of food better than the equivalent biomass of smaller creatures but we have to have a certain number of actual creatures in a certain proximity in order for the population to be viable at all. 

Thus, while economies of scale make large creatures quite viable in an energy poor environment, the amount of total space needed per creature means that there are problems with maintaining a viable population in a 'small biome'.  In real-life unlike DF caverns tend to be small, so cavern life is also small but in DF we presently have a massive global cavern and massive cave creatures are entirely viable in such a cavern. 

Cycles in a cavern system would have to be related to changes to the flow of water in response to rainfall patterns on the surface. 

[Bumber]

Cycles in a cavern system would have to be related to changes to the flow of water in response to rainfall patterns on the surface.

Or plant/fungal reproductive cycles. Or ambient magic cycles.

But, of course, none of this has to do with tea. Dwarves drink alcohol because plump helmets can apparently be brewed into alcohol, and any explanations are superfluous, especially if plump helmets don't exist in non-magic worlds.

[GoblinCookie]

Or plant/fungal reproductive cycles. Or ambient magic cycles.

But, of course, none of this has to do with tea. Dwarves drink alcohol because plump helmets can apparently be brewed into alcohol, and any explanations are superfluous, especially if plump helmets don't exist in non-magic worlds.

Even if plump helmets exist, they would still need scarce nutrients to grow; limiting their number.