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[Fieari]

Of course, you still need to define what a soul IS, before you can say they lack it.

[Neonivek]

Of course, you still need to define what a soul IS, before you can say they lack it.

For the most part these are the Pernament Soul Stats on Toady's Original Write up

Rationality
Focus
Willpower
Creativity
Intuition
Patience
Memory

No one is going to question that a Zombie has a few of these.

[shadow_archmagi]

Of course, you still need to define what a soul IS, before you can say they lack it.

For the most part these are the Pernament Soul Stats on Toady's Original Write up

Rationality
Focus
Willpower
Creativity
Intuition
Patience
Memory

No one is going to question that a Zombie has a few of these.

Well, not creativity intution memory or rationality.

Focus, patiency, and willpower though, it has in abundance.

[Philosophical Gamer]

Of course, you still need to define what a soul IS, before you can say they lack it.

For the most part these are the Pernament Soul Stats on Toady's Original Write up

Rationality
Focus
Willpower
Creativity
Intuition
Patience
Memory

No one is going to question that a Zombie has a few of these.

But it could be the wizard or necromancer or spell or program that is controlling the body of the deceased which makes the zombie seem rational.

Insects for instance seem sentient but many animal behaviorists believe that the brain of an insect essentially has a bunch of 'scripts' in it for different activities (hunting for food, building a web, building a nest, etc) built into its brain. 

In some studies they stopped the insect halfway in building its nest, and then it simply built a whole nest attached to the partial nest that it had been stopped from creating - in other words, it simply went back to the start of the 'script', because the initial script had been interrupted and it had no conditional properties or whatever for that happening.  I believe that study was on wasps.

Kind of a different thing but it's relevant, and if you look at an insect it really does look like they're going about their business and 'thinking' to some degree, but they might just be running through little 'programs'.

[Neonivek]

Well, not creativity intution memory or rationality

While Creativity is questionable and Memory isn't a requirement. (Well it AT LEAST needs a Short Term memory)

It does have Intuition and Rationality

Rationality allows it to tell the difference between you and a lump of dirt and Intuition allows it to act upon it.

It may not be the bastion of rationality but it still has it.

Insects would be a good example of a creature with pathetically low rationality but tons of Intuition

A Zombie that doesn't take SOME action for itself is a Puppet and would need constant movement from a Puppet Master... Something Id think would cause a Necromancer's brain to explode.

[Philosophical Gamer]

Double Post, 

[Arkose]

Kind of a different thing but it's relevant, and if you look at an insect it really does look like they're going about their business and 'thinking' to some degree, but they might just be running through little 'programs'.

The same might, of course, be true of all animal, including humans; we would just have many more lines of code, more specialized neurologic hardware, and more of a focus on using our neural nets to learn new patterns rather than just a series of conditionals initialized as 'instinct' at startup (birth).

[Jude]

Kind of a different thing but it's relevant, and if you look at an insect it really does look like they're going about their business and 'thinking' to some degree, but they might just be running through little 'programs'.

The same might, of course, be true of all animal, including humans; we would just have many more lines of code, more specialized neurologic hardware, and more of a focus on using our neural nets to learn new patterns rather than just a series of conditionals initialized as 'instinct' at startup (birth).

This. Our scripts are just more complex and allow us to adjust to changes in the environment, to a greater degree.

As for souls...I don't really see why it matters in a game unless it's for storyline reasons (like Soul Reaver or something) and IRL, a "soul" is basically a holdover from the days before we realized there's no such thing as a mind-body dichotomy. The idea of there being some "essence" of each individual person is intriguing but really essence is created by the human mind's recognizing it, to the extent it exists at all.

So would undead have one? Who cares? Really, what matters is which bodily functions are still working. In the case of things like ghosts....well, I guess you can't get into that without talking about souls, but it really only matters if you're either really nitpicky about your pet fantasy world's cosmology, or if it somehow matters for the storyline.

[Philosophical Gamer]

So I guess an easy way to solve it is, if Toady wants souls in the game, he'll put them in, if not he won't.  It seems like a topic for which inevitably there'll be 50 different viewpoints on, though it is fun to discuss.

What about if after a creature is slain, its soul comes out and is now a wraith, something like that.  Maybe it only happens if they're beheaded or something.

Something that I wish is that DF would be more descriptive about what is happening in the game.  During a goblin siege, you can see creatures dying and their limbs and organs turning yellow/red if you use the '.' key, but there's a lot of small details that you have no idea about, I wish that it were possible to somehow have more detail in the graphics or some textual explanations of the action or something.

There are souls in the creatures and probably a myriad of other details but there's no way to know the details of what is happening, which is kind of not cool;  This is probably an unreasonable feature request, but what about having a command where what is happening within 2 squares of the cursor is reported in a text window or something, so that you can get a description of the combats or other things.  This is the total wrong thread for it too 

[G-Flex]

I personally wouldn't say the undead have any of those traits, at least if they're traditionally represented.

Sure, they have "willpower" - in the same sense as my toaster does. After all, my toaster doesn't chicken out when I put a fork in it and tell it to start heating up. Roombas are also pretty good about not taking breaks.

[Tormy]

Of course, you still need to define what a soul IS, before you can say they lack it.

For the most part these are the Pernament Soul Stats on Toady's Original Write up

Rationality
Focus
Willpower
Creativity
Intuition
Patience
Memory

No one is going to question that a Zombie has a few of these.

Let's see...I think that a Zombie doesn't has memory, creativity, rationality, patience & intuition from that list. Focus & willpower, yeah maybe...but only minimal.
However maybe the Zombie was a bad example Neon. Take a vampyre for example: They should have memory, creativity, rationality, focus, willpower and intuition also. Patience..I don't think so. 

[Neonivek]

The problem is Tormy is the difference between No and Little.

A Zombie at least has some rationality... It may not be very complex.
A Zombie could have some memory... It may be able to remember that you ducked behind a corridor and come after you regardless.
Blaw blaw blaw (you know where it is going)

Yes we know fully intelligent undead are great examples as well as the more animalistic undead.

However Zombies or the mindless undead are the only case that really needs an arguement.

[Tormy]

Yep, that was my point. Some undeads like a zombie or animated entities like skeletons should be on the "bottom of the list", in fact even specific creatures should be different a tiny bit. [IE. randomized within realistic limits]

[Grek]

Idea: make it so that the nature of souls and if undead/ demons/ animals/ goblins have them or not up to proceedurally generated religions that violently disagree with eachother. Then impliment reanimation without specifying if anything has a soul or not.

[Ascii Kid]

Grek raises an interesting point: perhaps all these ideas could be valid, or extapolated from the fact that undead DO walk around.  This whole discussion could take place inside the game, within the game world, in theory, which would divorce the artificle aspects of game playing (the idea that a soul can be scored on a particular scale) with the presently fairly whole story experiance that is being built up.  So then the discussion becomes one of mechanics, which is much easier to deal with because it has no affect on the internal aspects of the game.
So yes, all undead do have souls.