I was wondering, Toady, if you would be able to address the "MIRV Crossbow Bolts" oddity that crops up on particular crits. You know, when a bolt seems to go in an eye, break a neck, purée a lung and come out the left knee.
This is slated for the Combat Arc (probably the principal problem to be addressed by it), so it's kind of on the fringes here. Even though it's that important, I'm not sure I'm going to tackle it until I go at combat revisions full-on, as it relates to things like being able to hit multiple parts with a sword and so on.
I was wondering if the new body/tissue layouts would have an effect on crits and organ damage?
It'll be quite a change, I think, but I'm not sure how much it'll actually change the overall results of a given swing on a similarly-sized-and-bodied opponent. There will be enough moving parts that I've got to get my initial system up and play it over and over again and tweak on feel.
Regarding scratches, will multiple scratches in the same area slowly open up wounds or start to cause pain? I'm envisioning a giant being swarmed by rats or piranhas or something here, and it would make some of the lamer cave monsters more interesting if you saw one and suddenly had to worry if there were enough around to swarm you.
Yeah, there will be cumulative effects, so that you can have an actual effect. Even something like a swarm of vicious biting insects causing real trouble for your adventurer in a marsh or something should be possible through the system. Again, it'll be a matter of feel here, with some missteps likely, hopefully with amusing results.
Is weapon equipping receiving any attention? Specifically, the inability to use pikes, whips, bows, and blowguns in fortress mode. In know it's called "Dwarf Fortress", but beyond the hilarity of a dwarf using a blowgun, I know I'm not the only person to try playing "Human Town" and "Kobold Cave".
At the very least, the choices will be based on the entity defs, so if you play a human town, you'll get the human lists. I didn't have any plans at this time for exotic weapon use -- certainly it makes sense that a dwarf, when pressed, would use whatever is around, but culturally it would be odd to have a unit based around it. At the same time, if that's all you've got in significant numbers, you should be able to do it, maybe with some backlash among those dwarves with the "values tradition" personality facet, especially if you have proper weapons available.
Likewise, do you think the 'two weapons' system needs any changes?
It's bugged and also crap, yeah.
And just because it's related, is a creature Mounting system anywhere on the horizon? Dang humans get the breaks.
I'm not sure... I'd put it in adv mode first, and at that point there'd be an opportunity to do it for dwarf mode, but... well, it's not in my set of easy visualizations for them.