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[jasonxfri13th]

I was wondering how many times your dwarfs have died of suffocation due to sparring injury.
It has been 6 years for me and my third dwarf died of suffocation.

[(name here)]

Sparring is not even remotely kinda like safe if you do it wrong.

NEVER skip the part where you train up their wrestling skill some.

[Kanil]

IIRC, zero... or one, tops.

Give your dwarves armor, shield, and let them train up to legendary wrestlers and shield users before you give them dangerous things and you'll never have a casualty.

[Duke 2.0]

 I'm sure you can skip the wrestling step if you have good enough armor and horrible weapons. Still, seeing as the ability to dodge is tied into the wrestling skill 'till the next version it is a very useful thing to raise.

[Skanky]

Wrestling is still a good idea. The skill with a weapon (and hence the chance to not hit a partner in training) is also tied to the quality of the weapon. Crappy weapons = more chance of hitting their partner.

[tacklemcclean]

Crappy weapons = more chance of hitting their partner.

Well that doesn't sound right?

Anyways, I too thought I would make my soldiers wrestlers first, to avoid deaths/injuries.

I wanted them to become a lot of different types of soldiers, mostly marksdwarves, which doesn't work now that they're wearing socks in their hands. No idea how to fix that

[BirdoPrey]

In my current fortress there is absolutely no water anywhere (desert planet), so even minor yellow wounds are effectively a death sentence. I've lost track as to how many I've lost so far but I'd put it somewhere between 10 and 20. 

[Haven]

One word for that situation: Crossbows.

But at any rate, I'm wondering what part of having perpetually boozed-up dwarves fight each other for training seemed safe in the first place.

[Gorjo MacGrymm]

well, just set all your fortress guard to unarmed, as all they do is spar anyway.  Then, when your real military dwarves goto spar, they wont get hurt and will get training in both wresting and their own weapon, as those elite fortress guards smack them around errr, I mean teach them how to fight.  So far, this method has produced zero casualties in sparring for me in 2 fortress, one went for 7 years, the other is at 11 and still going.

[BurnedToast]

I don't think wrestling is a good idea at all. Sure, it makes the dwarves tougher (usually, anyway) however they tend to get unhealable injuries while wrestling anyway, and it doesn't help that much once you give them weapons. It's also a LOT slower, because wrestling trains so slow compared to weapon skills.

If you don't use spears, the cripple/death rate only seems to be maybe 40% or so in my experience, once they get legendary it's not a problem anymore. 40% of recruits sacrificed to turn the rest into unstoppable killing machines is not that big a deal, especially considering it's usually a bunch of dyers and soapmakers. Furthermore, new recruits train very quickly when they spar with legendaries and will almost never take injuries so it's easy to replace any injuries.

I also don't think it's worth bothering trying to get and equip people with wooden/silver weapons either. You can get new cheese makers faster then you can set all that up.

In short: Sparring is deadly, but dwarves are disposable, so throw the otherwise useless ones into the meat grinder and eventually a few champs will pop out.

[andrei901]

use the Dump trick on caravan guards armor, because you get the first one before your first immigrant wave. then have them use full steel armor and train wrestling to legendary. they wont get injured while wrestling and it serves them well when one of the goblin leather wearing wrestler fodder manages to steal their masterwork steel warhammer.

[Skanky]

Crappy weapons = more chance of hitting their partner.

Well that doesn't sound right?

http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Item_quality#Effect_of_quality_on_weapon_skillv0.23.130.23a

The quality of any weapon, including crossbows used as launchers, affects the skill of the shooter.

Granted, there is nothing listed for lower-quality weapons.

[jarathor]

Didn't somebody have one dwarf rip out another's heart while sparring?

As for me, most of my deaths come from giving everybody equal-to-steel rock swords.
By this time enough caravans had been killed by ambusing orcs so that everybody had steel armor, but still.

So many decapitations...
So much blood...

[LegoLord]

My uncle found that a good way to train wrestling was to assign every trainee to use shields, forbidding all non-wooden or high quality shields before hand.  They will largely hit each other with the shields, which do very little damage when made from wood.  This will train wrestling, shield use, and armor use (possibly even if they aren't wearing armor) at the same, tripling (or possibly doubling) efficiency of training.

[Time Kitten]

I'm amazed that no one has a report about a recruit being ludicrously gibbed on their first day.  Sure, it's good for your completely psychopathic one dwarf legion's moral, which is why I let him keep the artifact weapon while training, but it makes all these slow, painful deaths seem... trivial.