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[Warlord255]

If I recall correctly, the demon is an elephant-carp-unicorn-hippo. The stuff of nightmares.

It should simply be renamed "Nightmare Demon."

[PREFSTRING:elephantine features]
[PREFSTRING:carp fins]
[PREFSTRING:blood-soaked horns]
[PREFSTRING:hippo tusks]

[Turnip]

wow

[Tahin]

That's quite the wall of text you have there. I must be going off to bed, but the parts that I did read seem to make enough sense.

Actually, I just want to say the following: Holy shit those drawings are awesome.

[Tormy]

I join to the tl;dr club. 
I also join to the "Nice image, sir!" club in the same time. 

[Silverionmox]

Poison is of course a relative thing. Some substances are poisonous for some creatures, others are not. The question is how much types of poisons should be tracked?
Making poison build up within creatures is a good idea. I'll be raising special livestock to sacrifice to the local megabeast

Concerning the magic drawbacks, I generally agree. Maybe there could be a balance along these lines: a battle takes place, many fall. All those deaths create a potential for death magic, and sure enough, some entity creates a few undead with it. However, at the same time the rotting corpses are a feast for the crows, the maggots and in the next years the plants, creating a potential for life magic. And sure enough, some entity uses that life magic to either put those undead to rest, or raise the birthrate or somesuch.

[Servant Corps]

Give us a god damn reason why the people aren't heating up their leftover soup with Medivh's Burning Toes spell

Because magic is pretty useless.

Sure, sure, you may ask, "But, it's magic!" Of course. I don't deny that the manlipuation of physical laws does look sorta cool. But to be fair, "Medivh's Burning Toes spell" produces 1000 KJ of energy...but requires 60,000 KJ of energy in order to start up said spell. Meanwhile, just using a non-magical stove produces far more energy, at less cost. The average peasentry does not use magic because it's worthless. In fact, the only reason that there are still magicians is the fact that nerds love tinkering with pointless facts, and so...er..."creatively interpert" their experiments so as to fool Kings that the Nerd is in fact doing something important with their mandates rather than just heating pots and pans.

[Bromor Neckbeard]

By Armok's beard!  That's possibly the longest post I've ever read on the entire Internet!  I actually read the whole thing, since I'm waiting for my dwarves to stockpile all the stone out of the area that's about to become my tower-cap farm.

Okay, I don't really have an opinion about the magic topic, because I don't have the faintest idea what Toady's gonna do with magic when it finally makes it into the game.  However, I mostly agree with the "pollution" topic.  I always used to make my Butcher's Workshop and Magma Forges out of cinnabar (Hey, cinnabar's red, like magma, right?  And lots of meat is red, and blood's red, right?  Okay then.) until I read the Wikipedia article on it and found out that this would kill my dwarves.

I don't know about hidden flows, but I agree that mining or otherwise using toxic minerals should be hazardous, and I'd also like to see magma pipes produce some kind of toxic gases.  Magma workshops should require some kind of venting system.  This would also allow the creation of even more fiendish and elaborate deathtraps, as you could vent toxic gases into a low tunnel you expect goblin raiders to come through.

Oh, and that elephant demon kicks six kinds of ass.

[Areyar]

nice.

hmm I'm not totally agreed with the theory on meat vs brains in roleplay, as my experiences tended to b the reverse.
The meat tended to think up crafty (meta) ideas to defeat the goblin army and when/if this failed ran off, leaving the dumbstruck nerds to get trampled.
Although this may be a result of the average age...maturity might have backfired on our roleplaying classes. or that of my DMs...although he might have been just plain evil* instead of realistic. He made us die early by various methods undead, tropical disease, spiders, choking on beer, a chair to the head, etc, thus ensuring none of us had opportunity to become demi-godlike wizards. Except for the thief who invariably had run off with the partys swag to score more pixiedust to snort.
*He spoke often of his DM exploits in that dark alternate AD&D universe ... I forget the name, but it made us roleplayers paranoid. edit: ravencroft? It made me think of lovecraft I remember.

My characrters included: Nordic bard, nordic warrior. etc, etc...eventually warrior-priest of undead slaying.

In another setting a physically useless gnome-like alchemist with a useless meatshield Ogre servant with a head full of phobias in stead of brains. We were revolutionaries and rebels, but the DM had other ideas and had me (the geriatric gnome) craeling through caves and climbing trapped towers without ogre only to get ejected, scorched, boiled, covered in acidic goo, raped by giant rats, etc. Meanwhile my great protector was sitting outside sucking its thumb because of a little spider.
...
sadistic bastard.
Why are DM such cruel masters?   
...
this was before DF, mind you.

---
Anyhow.
I agree on most of the points made on magic.
The toxic stuff not so much. Not everything needs to be overly complex.

[Neonivek]

Why are DM such cruel masters?

Trust me... Players are JUST as cruel if not more so... or shall I open up my library of "Horrible DMing experiences" from back when I ran games of Exalted.

Heck I had most of my players leave because I wouldn't let them be evil.

Hmm let gets back on track

Another reason why magic is often rare is because it is expencive. One common cliche (remember cliche =/= bad) is that kingdoms only have one wizard because they require such expencive materials such as crushed diamonds and vials of baby tears that it would be much to expensive to host many of them.

Though the Wizard may be expencive, but he does get things done that would normally be impossible. So your really paying for the impossible, not for efficiant use of resources.

[G-Flex]

I love the original post, and especially that image.

But I'm not sure I agree with the reason why mages are powerful.

I mean, I understand the reasoning and think it applies. However, the opposite reasoning is also true. This is to say that nerds also have a reason to roleplay something DIFFERENT from themselves; a big, hulking brute. In fact, I've seen this at least as often as I've seen them playing magic-users.

The suggestions for magic are pretty decent, too. The only problem with this assessment that I see is that it's generally aimed at your basic high-fantasy magic, and we have no idea if Toady will implement anything even remotely simlar, so it might not have the same problems to deal with.

[EverybodylovesTJ]

As many great fictional characters have pointed out to their young apprentices, "Magic (or the Force) isn't a fix all my problems sorta thing! It's a tool, and a tool is only as useful as it's user."

Paraphrased, of course.

[JohnieRWilkins]

WHITE WIZARD APPROACHES.

Nerdiness has very little to do with intellect besides a possible correlation. I personally know plenty of bodybuilders that would make quantum physicists look like 3rd graders. I also find your concept of there being only two types of people revolting at best. Not all guys are alphas or omegas, there are plenty of betas in between.

I have always pictured the mage to be a charismatic antihero. Mage = a badass cross between Bruce Willis and John Travolta in my book. The frontline meatshields are the little scared 16-18 year old kids, too dumb/too scared/too brainwashed to run away. The elite group of 800 pound slabs of muscle are the mage's escorts, because he is clearly the only person capable of paying for their services. So basically nerd = ezlisted, as there were no computers during the pre-1400s. If anything, an alchemist/engineer better fills the role of an autistic in the game.

How do you make magic expensive -to combat the problem of peasants whose rakes rake the fields for them? Make it so that the magic isn't inherent to people; use the Magic: The Gathering system. Artifacts should grant you magic which replenishes very slowly over time, some artifacts grant more mana/sec than others. Also, there are very few people who can perform any magic at all.
So:
1. Very few people are born as mages through some mechanic.
2. Those mages need to seek out special artifacts which grant mana.
3. Those same mages need to survive the ensuing mage bloodbath.
-> Mages don't throw away mana needlessly.

Also:

What better use for magic can there be?

[Captain Failmore]

Poison is of course a relative thing. Some substances are poisonous for some creatures, others are not. The question is how much types of poisons should be tracked?
Making poison build up within creatures is a good idea. I'll be raising special livestock to sacrifice to the local megabeast

That's the idea, more or less. To make it so you don't have to track fifty billion different types of poison for there to be a general 'Clean/Polluted' quantity out there that affects things and reacts with the world.

Here's a good example of how that would work. Take my Heavy Metal Barbecue fortress for example. A miner digging up poisonous ores is going to generate dust. If there's a general 'tox_dust' profile for the kind of cloud it'll generate, that miner could be affected by some degree of poisoning if he's not protected from it, assuming it's especially nasty stuff. Regardless of whether or not that dust cloud with that profile affects him or anyone else around him immediately with a certain set of effects, the same event that generates the dust adds to the pollution flow, which wouldn't generate an extremely noticeable effect unless pollution levels are exceptionally high. (Kind of like how temperatures don't kill things unless they're searing hot or freezing cold.)

I imagine pollution simply weakening the general health of plants and animals exposed to it. How the health system in Dwarf Fortress will continue to evolve is up to Toady, but if there's a general 'condition' of a creature, pollution should cause it to either recover more slowly or actually decline of pollution is too high. That's different than actually getting exposed to a highly poisonous entity or event, even though either one might leave behind generous amounts of pollution in their wake. That allows for specific and concentrated poisons with immediate effects (including potential disease vectors), and residual pollution that has a negative effect on the health of things overall. Since plants and trees already react to nearby temperatures in a way similar to this, I don't see it being too hard to make them fail in the presence of overbearing toxicity, either.

More difficult would be getting pollution to interact with soil, water, and air in different ways. That would be especially nice if it doesn't cause my computer to melt.

[Captain Failmore]

Nerdiness has very little to do with intellect besides a possible correlation. I personally know plenty of bodybuilders that would make quantum physicists look like 3rd graders. I also find your concept of there being only two types of people revolting at best. Not all guys are alphas or omegas, there are plenty of betas in between.

Just because I explained where some of the more repugnant fantasy traditions hail from - and I do love this genre, by the way - doesn't mean that I agree with them or the kind of ass backwards thinking that spawned them. (I thought I'd made it clear that the way of thinking I'd explained was something that 'bugged me' and that I was at least in disagreement with the effect it's had on fantasy gaming if not the idea itself, but if that's not the case then allow me to make it clear that I find that way of thinking equally unpleasant as you do.) Rather, these are just widely popular trends of thinking among nerds of varying degrees of intelligence and equally various backgrounds, and I feel that taking a moment to explain where this ignorant shit comes from is essential to understand some of the many reasons why broken INT-DEX biased game mechanics came to be and persist. (Rule of Cool being another major culprit. Explosions fucking rule.) As many of us now know, with 'geek' transforming into the new 'chic' and bare-chested manliness taking a back seat to Buddy Holly birth control glasses, many of those trends of thinking are based on outdated social norms. That doesn't stop the average pimply little shit from regurgitating them all over your latest fantasy project though, especially if said pimply little shit is particularly young or sensitive.

Anyone with half a brain knows that the world doesn't exist in black and white, but how often do you see people actually exercise that mode of thinking? (Especially people with the social aptitude of a brick that herd amongst themselves because nobody else will tolerate their quirks and eccentric interests, leading to another common phenomenon among nerds and pretty much every other social clique out there - group-think - which is why every other cheeto-encrusted armchair historian on the internet is convinced you can't move faster than two miles an hour in plate armor.) The real point is, for so many reasons - jealousy, traumatic experience, and inability to relate being three of the big ones - many nerds reject the notion that strength is valuable and when nerds start playing pretend, this stuff bleeds to the surface in a big way. You might say, "Those guys are in the minority," and while you're entitled to that my personal experiences with nerds - and I've known far too many of them - have been the opposite.

Also, I agree very much with your thoughts on the 'expense' of magic. If it was necessary to either create, find, or be handed from God a magical device that gives you MP, then go about your routine in a special way so you can continue accumulating MP over the course of weeks, and on top of that take an exceptional risk to use a lot of that MP while being one of the maybe two or three people in your whole fortress that could even think of using magic, that would probably keep a lid on INT-class overuse. I think that magic originating from a supernatural being should require that you be in very good standing with them and go far out of your way to convince them to intervene on your behalf, too.

[zagibu]

Baby tears are a bad example for a rare resource. You punch a baby, you get baby tears.