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[DoomsdayWeapon]

not sure if this is the right place ... however: I spotted some flaw in his logic.

The issue with prophecies is not neccessarily one of predicting the future, but producing it. So, integrating prophecies could work by first creating an event. Perhaps take some fragment of a population to create a new site or however that would work; And make it be protected so that nothing can interfere with the projected event - other than perhaps a few means for the player to interact with it. So, any other civ trying to conquer the place, or any monsters trying to do some nasty stuff, or the player trying to raid the place - would essentially be facing off with the powers that intend to manifest themselves. So either the chances to succeed at that would be slim or non-existent.

[IndigoFenix]

It's an interesting thought, but it gets tricky in a procedural game like DF.  At what point does your failed attempts to overcome an obstacle stop being "fate" and start being "overt magic"?  If a prophecy states that the Dark Lord can only be slain by the Chosen Hero, but I decide to attack with an overwhelmingly powerful force, there's a limit to how many times he can repel the attack before you've broken the simulation and created an overly gamey situation where stuff happens "because destiny says so".

Instead, I think that prophecies should be handled with a somewhat softer approach.  They are less about "fated actions that must come to pass" and more about the will - and the influence - of the deity that is associated with them.  A prophecy creates a "mission" that units may carry out - willingly or unwillingly - and the deity will grant favor (in the form of skill rolls) to a unit or army that is in the process of carrying it out (how this is to be determined is a more complicated question).

Perhaps the deity can actively override the usual RNG within reason, allowing a "Chosen" unit to avoid unlucky random death at least a few times before the deity decides you are abusing their favor and lets you die.  You still have to play the game and make reasonable choices, but it could give you an edge in avoiding bad luck.

A deity's worshippers may actively attempt to bring the event about, making it at least in part self-fulfilling.  But prophecies can also fail, at which point they will simply be forgotten.

[Azerty]

Could the amount and powers of fate being variable between worlds? In some world, it could be so powerful even deities would be bound while, in other, it might only be a facilitating factor.

And IndigoFenix had good ideas on implementing it in a procedurally-generated world.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

They could be made of two parts - the first part is conditional and the second is vague.

Prophecy "If the king sits on a golden throne, you will be attacked by a great evil"

So if the game sees a king sitting on a golden throne, then it the game fetches something that fits "a great evil". A megabeast, a forgotten beast, or an army from somewhere.

You can't make them like "If the king sits on a golden throne, you will be attacked by a hydra" as hydras might be extinct by the time it happens - any specific type of creature could be extinct. You could off course make the game create a new hydra but that would be an ugly solution IMO? Unless gods can create a brand new hydra out of nothing.

Some effects the game COULD create and it would work. Like "If the king sits on a golden throne, madness will run rampant in the fort". In that case the game could just make half the dwarves mad.

I'm actualy thinking now that prophecies type "the plagues of Egypt" - like all your food/booze gets annihilated, everybody looses a leg, 10 dwarves become werebeats, all the children die, and so on, could be interesting challenges for experienced players.

Like you could prepare and then trigger the prophecy by doing the thing.

[Mr Crabman]

You can't make them like "If the king sits on a golden throne, you will be attacked by a hydra" as hydras might be extinct by the time it happens - any specific type of creature could be extinct. You could off course make the game create a new hydra but that would be an ugly solution IMO? Unless gods can create a brand new hydra out of nothing.

Another option could be to load the RNG dice so that worldgen never allows hydras to go extinct until the prophecy is fulfilled. To prevent the player themselves making them extinct to break the prophecy, rig things so that the player is somehow unable to discover/find the last hydra (if they get whittled down that much).

For conditional prophecies this would be less ideal of a solution though, because then for every prophecy you have to ensure some required conditions never change (keeping hydras non-extinct is one thing, but how many prophecies about different beasts and kingoms can you keep going?).

In general, rigging RNG so that prophecies get fulfilled is the way to go I think, along with allowing them to be sufficiently vague. There could also be a distinction between prophecies just based on the gods will/promises (like IndigoFenix suggests), and "true" prophecies based on fate itself (some worlds may not even have real "fate").

It's an interesting thought, but it gets tricky in a procedural game like DF.  At what point does your failed attempts to overcome an obstacle stop being "fate" and start being "overt magic"?  If a prophecy states that the Dark Lord can only be slain by the Chosen Hero, but I decide to attack with an overwhelmingly powerful force, there's a limit to how many times he can repel the attack before you've broken the simulation and created an overly gamey situation where stuff happens "because destiny says so".

With a sufficiently heavy-handed version of fate in some mythgens, "because destiny says so" may not be such a bad thing. I could see a situation inspired by the likes of Leibniz's idea of how interaction between the mind and body worked; his answer was "they don't, God just arranged in advance that they would coincide/act in harmony", so the appearance that "your desire to eat caused your body to move and get food" was really just an illusion, because the mind/desire really didn't do anything.

So maybe fate demands that the Dark Lord gets a snack and then is stabbed, and non-fated things like "desire to eat" or "presence of a stabber" are irrelevant; he will walk to the kitchens against his will and then have a stab wound appear, inflicted by fate itself, because "technically" the knife was never the thing stabbing him, or anyone else, the gods just pre-ordain that people are stabbed, and usually that also a knife happens to be put into the body, and this time they skipped the knife.

It's wouldn't fit all worlds due to the weirdness of this metaphysical system, but it's one option for some. And for the flipside of it, maybe the Dark Lord is immortal because he is fated to only be killed by one man in particular, and maybe he even knows this and abuses it to his advantage.

You could also try a variety of methods to make his apparent invincibility more "organic" in some other worlds, like ensuring different things always happen to foil attempts to slay him, like a "random" dragon attack decimating an army that he otherwise couldn't have plausibly beaten, or maybe the player sends the wrong person to slay him, and they turn out to be a traitor.

Really, the main thing that would be hard to make organic is keeping him alive if he visits the players fort on the loaded embark area, or if you go after him in adventure mode; anything "offscreen" can be sorted by cheating with the RNG in varying ways.

You could also in some cases go for "you just broke the prophecy and in doing so destroyed fate itself, and now the world is unraveling and being assailed by eldritch horrors, thanks a lot".

[betaking]

there needs to be a setup so prophecies come true but they are like "actual prophecies" IE: they're vague and can be seen to be fulfilled no matter who wins.

[Red Diamond]

Why do all the prophecies have to be true?

[voliol]

Why do all the prophecies have to be true?

They shouldn’t, there should be room for both mistakes in divination and pure shams, as well as breaking the chains of fate in worlds where that make sense. Still, some prophecies need to be be true and enforcable by the game, otherwise it breaks the narrative conceit of a prophecy, and turns the whole system into nothing more than a tidbit for more experienced players: ”prophecies never come true”.

[EuchreJack]

Maybe prophecies exist like Gods exist in Dwarf Fortress?
As in, more in the minds of the entities and less so in a highly concrete manner?

You see effects regarding Gods, yet you'll never meet one.

So, a prophecy might be: "A mighty hero from Canaan will defeat the Demon General in Elah"
The game then "buffs up" characters generated from Canaan periodically until the Demon General in Elah is defeated, and gives them quests to kill the Demon General in Elah.

Thus, the game sets up a scenario where the prophecy "may occur", but doesn't force the issue.  Sometimes, the prophecy doesn't work.  So what?

Essentially, prophecies are like quests the NPCs can do?

[Red Diamond]

Why do all the prophecies have to be true?

They shouldn’t, there should be room for both mistakes in divination and pure shams, as well as breaking the chains of fate in worlds where that make sense. Still, some prophecies need to be be true and enforcable by the game, otherwise it breaks the narrative conceit of a prophecy, and turns the whole system into nothing more than a tidbit for more experienced players: ”prophecies never come true”.

I don't think I was clear enough before; I was not suggesting that prophecies actually be false, I was remarking about the silliness of all the wrangling about how to make an event reliably happen given player agency and general plausibility issues.  We don't have to provide definite answers to the 'philosophical questions' created by the game-world.

Thus we do not need to actually decide if the individual prophecies are true or not when they are generated by the game.  We only need to decide whether to use mechanics to weight the game engine in favour of the realization of said prophecy.  This is quite a different question to the question of whether the prophecies are true or not and how clear their truth is, that issue can be solved quite easily.

If the prophecies come true, the prophecies can be retrospectively defined as true regardless of whether the prophecies were weighted to come to pass.  So if the game is weighted to make some event come about, but the player managed to keep it from happening anyway, the game decides it was false prophecy.  While if an event that was not actually weighted happened by player agency or by coincidence, the game decides the unweighted prophecy was actually true.