It's been a while since I've made one of these. It's also been a while since I played Dwarf Fortress. (By the way, being able to save my party load-out has made the process of actually starting the game a lot easier. The revised wall and floor interface is also a wonderful, wonderful thing. Thanks Toady.) Now that I'm getting back into the game and we're looking at another major release some time early next year, I'm looking at my dwarfish future with great optimism. That doesn't mean that I will cease making unreasonable requests, however. It also doesn't mean that I'll shut up. Ever.
I'm dividing my thoughts on a few subjects into sections, so bear with me. Read if you dare, or have a lot of time you don't feel like being productive with.
POLLUTION or
THE DEATH AND RETURN OF CAPTAIN PLANETOnce upon a time, I was digging my way into a mountainside during the infancy of one of my many ill-fated fortresses. (For those of you who are curious, it was magma-men this time, and not the pushover from Mega Man 9.) After carving a farm plot into the layer of soil covering most of my map which would soon be covered in curiously flammable plump helmets, I started digging into some rather unremarkable bedrock. Unremarkable, until I got the following messages:
'You have struck cinnabar!'
'You have struck realgar!'
'You have struck galena!'
At the time, I was glad to have a reserve of a nice lead-silver ore along with some red and yellow stone to build things out of. The bands and stripes of colors smeared across the new dining hall I was digging out were a nice touch, and gave it a real psychedelic look. None the less I couldn't keep my curiosity at bay, and later that evening after my Technicolor dining hall had been reduced to cinders I decided to look up what the other two strange rocks were. At the time, I only knew that cinnabar was supposed to be red and that realgar sounded more like a mega-beast name than a mineral, but Wikipedia was there to help.
Cinnabar - Mercury sulfide.Realgar - Arsenic sulfide.Galena - Lead sulfide.At once it occurred to me that my dwarfs were living, eating, growing their crops, and storing water in what may quite possibly be the heavy metal poisoning capital of the world. My miners were inhaling dust from three different types of toxic minerals, food was being eaten on tables made from the stuff, practically every item of significance was crafted out of some colorful stone, and if there were ever a dwarfish version of OSHA they would be rightly pissed. If pollution existed in the game, the locale I had chosen would've been terribly harmful to any unprotected visitors, and much more so for any long term residents. Then I thought to myself, wait. Wouldn't that be challenging? Wouldn't that make the game a bit more interesting?
As it just so happens, pollution is a planned feature of the game. One of these days we'll have more than just miasma to contend with, but how would that be handled, I wonder? Also, what about creatures and the waste they inevitably generate? Pollution, in a very real sense, is a substance. We have substances that can cover things, like vomit for instance, and items that are themselves a form of waste. More subtle forms of pollution such as contamination aren't covered, save for miasma which is as of right now just a reeking stench. At the risk of bloating Dwarf Fortress further and necessitating that we run the program on no fewer than ten floating point units, I think we need a pollution fluid-simulation and things that can add to that flow.
Pollution should be generated by two things: objects and events. Objects would include anything that can act as a contaminant - such as blood, vomit, corpses, and rotting food - regardless of whether or not it can be picked up and carried or poured. Events would be interactions with objects that could be expected to release pollutants, such as burning something or pulverizing rocks into dust. (For that matter, digging should generate little clouds of dust that should affect sensitive individuals that don't wear kerchiefs or hoods to protect themselves with an unhappy thought.) A pollution-generating object should release a certain amount of pollution into this hidden flow at a regular interval, while the event would release it on the spot. (And perhaps continuously, such as a fire generating smoke or a volcanic vent releasing toxic gas.) While removing the source of contamination prevents the pollution from worsening while spreading through the air, water, and soil, the pollution itself should linger for a time and 'evaporate' from its surroundings after that time expires. (Understandably, certain materials should be 'pollution-tight', like rock and metal.)
Generally speaking, the pollution present in a given tile should affect anyone or anything occupying it. Crops in polluted farming areas should produce stunted yields. People and animals should get sick. Trees and plants should eventually die. The consumption of food and drink in a polluted space should hasten this process, also. While miasmas, smokes, mists, vapors, and whatever else Toady comes up with should have immediate effects on the health and mood of those exposed to them, a lasting residual pollution flow would have lasting long-term implications on a fort's health. (More than just, say, ventilating your fortress to let all the smoke out.)
How would it affect things as a whole, though? Why not just stick to clouds of stinking gases and eye watering smoke? It would mean that it's not enough to just have an outdoor trash pile, and it would mean that building your dining hall and living quarters in rooms made out of Nature's Rat Poison just might be a bad idea. Generating wastes in generous quantities would sicken your fortress and the surrounding environment, making it unfavorable for certain activities. Even if your living space is safe for habitation, the local flora and fauna might bug out, leaving you with only hardy but economically useless grasses and trees that no longer grow back. It would also provide a means by which certain creatures and nefarious parties could attack your fortress. (Say, an object that generates very high amounts of pollution could be dropped off or hurled into your fortress where it silently festers.) As a mechanical part of the game, it would serve the functions of both an environmental element and as a vector of attack, while making waste management more than just a hauling job.
Not only that, it gives our alchemists another job. Surveying the grounds for contagions could be one of them. (A rough map detailing the pollution levels within a certain range of the alchemist's workshop could be made available through the 'z' screen once you have an alchemist and a place to put him to work in. Surveying the area could be a job assignable to him through the workshop.) Entities like trees and plants could regularly destroy pollution as well, and while they wouldn't be immune to the harmful effects thereof, they could help diminish the overall impact of pollution by removing some of it from the environment. (Once tree planting makes it into the game, this could be a good reason to plant the things. They're a source of wood, a possible future source of food, and could sponge up toxins from their surroundings.) If pollution were to play an important role in determining the health of your dwarfs, crops, and livestock and how likely it is they're going to die a horrible death at the hands of disease enabled through their poison-ravaged bodies or the pollution itself, having the alchemist around to keep track of how dirty the surrounding area is would be nice. If everyone suddenly starts showing signs of poisoning without a clear cause, he'd be able to point out the likely location of that sack of crushed cinnabar and hog feces that the goblins kindly dropped off in your local brook.
One of the cool things about poison is that it doesn't always appear in a giant green cloud like most games would have us believe, you know.
MIGHT AND MAGIC or
HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE DPS CLASSMagic absolutely
should not make the game look like this:
Pardon me for springing off on a tangent, but there's something about high fantasy settings that really bugs me. Strength has no value. Strength, endurance, resilience of the body, they don't mean anything. While it's easy enough to blame things like tradition, lazy developers, and the Rule of Cool for the supremacy of INT and DEX over STR, I have my own theories as to why those traditions of design began in the first place and why they're so popular even today.
Once upon a time, most of us were probably physically unfit pimply little things that lurked the shadowy halls of a nameless high school somewhere. Some of you might still exist as such creatures, having yet to ascend to the plane of adulthood and achieve the coveted status of Spineless Working-Class Nobody. Maybe you've deliberately extended your stay in that lower realm of existence like penitent souls lingering in purgatory out of shame and remorse, by subjecting yourself to the rigors of higher academia. Whatever the case, as one of these lower creatures - a nerd, if you will - we all had a common enemy.
The jock.The jock is personified as this: A large, physically imposing, intimidating, borderline superhuman-strong, classically masculine entity with little in the way of brains. His means to every end is a double order of brute strength with a side of charisma, and the most cherished target of his various simple-minded frustrations is you,
the nerd. Being a nerd, you can't relate to the jock's astonishing strength and success with girls you wouldn't be ashamed to bring home with you without first garbing them in a paper bag, and on top of that, you associate those qualities of the jock with the torment their boundless aggression brings. Simply put, as a nerd you don't want to be the jock.
Jocks get all the attention though. They're the able-bodied junior sports stars that everyone worships, the attractive alpha males that all the good looking and most of the not so good looking girls are after, and their sheer strength allows them to muscle their way around people and situations that they would otherwise find impossible to negotiate with. There's an element of jealousy here - a desire to have that which the enemy enjoys - and a desire to find in ourselves desirable qualities to validate our lonely existence. We're smart, we say. Clever. Witty. Crafty. We have practical talents. We have skills that lay outside the realm of punching things. Even if we're not as attractive, strong, healthy, virile, charismatic, hygienic, or likable as they are, at least we have the brains to succeed in life. This way of thinking is the coping mechanism that allows the nerd to exist free of repeated attempts at hanging itself with the elastic waistband of its own underpants. It also has at least some basis in reality, but many nerds - including plenty for which the attribute of intelligence simply does not apply - take it to extremes.
Enter the wizard, and his glamorous and street-smart associate, the ranger.
The wizard is, in the simplest terms, the
alpha nerd. Through his years of scholarly study and service to the sciences and the arcane arts, he has mastered the fundamental forces of the universe. At his command are the powers of God, Satan, and Elvis combined. He needs only his mind to unleash that incomprehensible and unstoppable thing, magic. Only another wizard may stake as high a vantage point over the rest of the fantasy world as that timeless Merlin we all know and love.
The ranger, on the other hand, doesn't throw lightning bolts or fireballs using the power of his mind, but he's still pretty bright. He resourceful, he's crafty, and he solves practical problems. The very thought of engaging his foes face to face is a woeful waste of the ranger's time, as no foe would ever have even the opportunity to raise arms before him - because he'd be too dead to try. The ranger's would-be assailant would find himself navigating an inescapable gauntlet of improvised traps on his way into our trusty sniper's cone of fire where, if he were so fortunate as to survive this long, he would be instantly struck down with a single shot from Robin Hood's trusty bow. While lacking the godly aptitude for the impossible that wizard's enjoy, their wits and fast reflexes carry them just about as far.
That leaves the fighter. (For all intents and purposes we can consider the priest a wizard that blows things up in reverse.) Regardless of what game he appears in or what novel you're reading, unless the setting is tailored to them, these guys are peons. All they can do is punch things. Punch things and die. They might have an easy time pillaging defenseless villages and picking their noses, but compared to the average peasant they're just untidy common folk with bigger sticks to brandish. They're too
slow both physically and mentally to keep up with a ranger, and they're not
wise enough to comprehend the wizard's magic. They're just strong, which in the fantasy world is doublespeak for weak. That's because the above two stock characters arose out of the nerd's need for validation and their gravitation toward characters that are like themselves - presumably smart, but not strong. Entire fantasy traditions that nerds speak of as law are propagated by their own perceived inadequacy and myths created to justify the very same broken ideas and game mechanics that allow their characters to thrive.
Apparently nerds have a taste for cruel irony, too. Their idea of throwing the jock class a bone is to make him the meat shield of the party instead of removing him completely. That is, the strapping armored brutes of the fantasy world that embody many of the same characteristics of the nerd's real world tormentors and closet idols are only good for getting beat up on. I suppose they're so dumb - I mean strong - that they can't even feel pain anymore, so they just don't mind. Not only that, they wouldn't even be good at getting beat up if a certain flavor of wizard wasn't keeping them standing through supernatural life support. In the fantasy world, jocks become the hardy man-servants, pack mules, and black holes of abuse for a party of various types of nerd.
These simply aren't traditions worth keeping. Smart people are already valuable enough in Dwarf Fortress, and they're only going to become more valuable as new versions come out. Architects for our buildings, doctors for our sick, mechanics for the devices that make dwarfish life easier, engineers for our weapons, alchemists to harness the wonders of medieval science for the common good; nerds will be worth gold in Dwarf Fortress. They don't need to be validated any further through patently broken 'traditional' game mechanics, and I don't care how awesome an army of wizards with a mastery of the devilish art of 'Power Word Fuck You' would be. If the arcane should come within our grasp during fortress mode, it should by no means trump the value of more practical talents. In fact, I think it should be appropriately dangerous and limited in its scope, reliability, and general usefulness.
Things I would consider for magic in general since we're going to get it no matter what:
Aim Away From Face - Magic should have a probability of backfiring. Not only that, it should have a probability of backfiring in terrible, terrible ways. For example, you might not want your young apprentice wizards toying with portal spells unless you want one of those lovely spirits of fire from the eerie glowing pits to pay you a visit.
Madness to My Method - Overuse of magic should have a negative effect on its user's psyche. Chronic overuse should lead to them progressively losing touch with reality and becoming mentally unstable, plagued by demons both real and imagined. It's kind of like doing acid, but the airplanes almost flying into your house are
real.But I Don't Want to Go to Gym Class - Magic should be tiring work, just like hauling things around. "Foolish Failmore, magic is a mental ability," you say, but take a moment to consider that pound for pound the brain consumes more calories than any other part of the body while you explore your bowels with a rusty post-hole digger. You want to know why magic users in Final Fantasy 1 weren't completely broken? They didn't have a mile deep magic point pool like every other dipstick in a robe and wizard hat these days, nor did they have items to recover those lost points. You know what you did to get those points back?
You got a good night's rest.Little Shop of Horrors - Most spells should require a substrate or reagent of some kind to work. Not only that, the majority of them - especially the more powerful magics you might uncover - should require a workspace. Carving or painting magical circles into the ground upon which you heave three-day-old giant olm chunks before performing a ritual dance in a rope reed thong should be absolutely necessary for performing certain feats of magic.
The Chosen One - A certain arbitrary factor should limit the number of potential magic users you have overall. Be it birthright, selection by a higher power, or sheer randomness - a strange mood, even - there should be a certain criteria for being a magic user other than simply being smart. If that was the case, I have a few mechanics that might want to start replacing their needy stone-fall traps with glyphs of fire instead. That also means some of the more scholarly nobles might react to you failing to fulfill their mandates by filling your fortress with the undead. That'll teach you to under produce marble bracelets from stone you don't even have.
Industrial Revelation - Magic should not represent a significant industry. Maybe the wizard keeps demons and undead away. Maybe the wizard's precognition lets us see danger before it arrives. Maybe the wizard has brought us into the good graces of some benevolent spirit of the land that protects us from sickness for our piety. Whatever the wizard does, he will not be directly affecting trade in any way that doesn't involve keeping it from getting mauled by zombies. That means he will not be an enchanted sword factory or a gold transmuting machine. He won't even be a food vending machine. Any magically delicious masterworks the wizard happens to produce or enhance with his talents should be the product of the wizard's whims and sheer chance. That is, he should only be able to enchant things for better or worse if a strange mood strikes him. (To be fair, maybe magic users should be more prone to moods so that they'll be more likely to enchant things.)
A God Am I - A god the wizard is not. Nuking goblin armies should only come about as a result of the wizard going insane, running out into the middle of the battlefield, and
exploding. A legend for the ages indeed.
Author
Topic: Suggestion Failpile (For Old Time's Sake) (Read 18110 times)