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[isitanos]

[...]
Maybe there could be some sort of page giving an overall fortress description to give us the averages.

The Caves of Iron was founded in the year 10 by the dwarf Urist CleavedMoon.  The fortress extends across 12 levels and consists of 20 burrows.  The walls of this fortress are mainly microcline and some are engraved.  The fortress army consists of 37 dwarves in 8 squads.  The Champion of this fortress is Big McLargeHuge, who killed 8 goblins during a siege in the year 87.  The main export is olivine crowns.  The main import is Dwarven Rum.  The dwarves of this fortress are uncommonly rugged and stocky in build.  They are taller than normal and tend to be very lean.  Their skin is usually olive and their hair is on average copper.  They tend to have long, upturned noses.  They prefer to keep their beards neatly combed, their sideburns shaven and their moustaches in double braids.

I would then know that Urist McSparsebeard who is described as short, fat, uncommonly frail and with large ears, a braided beard and purple eyes is actually shorter, fatter and frailer than the rest of the fortress and, in addition to his large ears and purple eyes, likely has olive skin and a long nose.
[...]

Great idea.

[Im_Sparks]

Scars?

Anyways, I don't like the age of all these dwarves. I think younger dwarves should be more common, in a population-pyramid style.

Think of the death rate.

[Dame de la Licorne]

[...]
Maybe there could be some sort of page giving an overall fortress description to give us the averages.

The Caves of Iron was founded in the year 10 by the dwarf Urist CleavedMoon.  The fortress extends across 12 levels and consists of 20 burrows.  The walls of this fortress are mainly microcline and some are engraved.  The fortress army consists of 37 dwarves in 8 squads.  The Champion of this fortress is Big McLargeHuge, who killed 8 goblins during a siege in the year 87.  The main export is olivine crowns.  The main import is Dwarven Rum.  The dwarves of this fortress are uncommonly rugged and stocky in build.  They are taller than normal and tend to be very lean.  Their skin is usually olive and their hair is on average copper.  They tend to have long, upturned noses.  They prefer to keep their beards neatly combed, their sideburns shaven and their moustaches in double braids.

I would then know that Urist McSparsebeard who is described as short, fat, uncommonly frail and with large ears, a braided beard and purple eyes is actually shorter, fatter and frailer than the rest of the fortress and, in addition to his large ears and purple eyes, likely has olive skin and a long nose.
[...]

Great idea.

I also like this, but would rather see it put off for a few releases, to give Tarn a chance to refine the descriptions a bit.  Make a thread for it in Suggestions .

[Taritus]

Scars?

Anyways, I don't like the age of all these dwarves. I think younger dwarves should be more common, in a population-pyramid style.

Think of the death rate.

Multiply those ages by about .56 and you'll get what is an equivalent Human age.  Dwarves on average live to be 160 or so.

[G-Flex]

Aside from the lack of hair color, I'm also having a bit of a hard time judging the shape of these dwarves' faces. We tend to think of people as having a certain sort of jaw structure: Someone might have a long face, or a round one, etc. I saw cheekbones and chins mentioned, so maybe what I'm thinking of is sort of an amalgamation of those, but I'm not sure.

[sparkbolt]

Even considering what a description of someone really sounds like, these example dwarfs do still seem kind of... stereotyped.
Maybe the adjectives should all be toned down in general. So things that are currently 'somewhat' aren't worth remarking on, and the new minimum variation is described as 'slightly'. Then still use mild qualifiers like 'fairly' further up the scale.

Or, might it be possible that you could choose the level of description you wanted in the init file? So you could change the parameters to [SHOW_BRIEF] or something, and go from Fugly Fortress to Functional Fortress once you had too many dwarves to make it worthwhile.

Gotta agree this should be the way to do it. The most sane way seems to be: Make a Civilization standard dwarf. Put this in the civ info somewhere, about what an everyday average dwarf from [whatever] civ looks like. In the descriptors, anyone that varies significantly from thisaverage gets those varied traits mentioned. This could cut the descriptions "bloat" down while keeping their purpose. Also agree that a quick capstone "is pretty/beautiful/ugly/etc" would be useful as a quick summary.

[Wolfius]

and females have no beards...heresy!!

Beardlesss dwarves?! That makes even less sense than freeze-dried water rations! 

[ToonyMan]

and females have no beards...heresy!!

Beardlesss dwarves?! That makes even less sense than freeze-dried water rations! 

Agreed.

[guyinthecrowd]

Is there going to be some system where when a dwarf is born their surroundings affect their likes and dislikes. Like if a baby is raised by a family that lives in a room made out of orthoclase they from then hate the color yellow? Something like that.

[LordNagash]

I don't really like the idea of judging from the average, and only mentioning the main features. I mean, the descriptions are already sorted by greatest different from average to least different - just read the first couple of paragraphs and skip the rest.

If the game does go this way, I hope we can at least get a screen where I can see the whole thing.

[Wolfius]

Like if a baby is raised by a family that lives in a room made out of orthoclase they from then hate the color yellow? Something like that.

...if they had an unhappy childhood, and like it is they had a wonderful childhood?

It'd be cool if experiences could change it, too. Say, a dwarf who's attacked by a swords-gobbo having a chance to start disliking gobbos, and if wounded, swords(and maybe start liking traps and armour).

[Granite26]

Scars?

Anyways, I don't like the age of all these dwarves. I think younger dwarves should be more common, in a population-pyramid style.

Think of the death rate.

Dude... it's just a couple of random samples from the start of the fort

[ManaUser]

I see the description thing is officially "green", but never the less, a few suggestions for whenever they're revisited:

I would prefer that the "His X A is Y" format be dropped in favor of the simpler "His A is X and Y". I find it scans better, and it's also more flexible. For instance you could then merge "His nose is somewhat upturned and somewhat broad" to "His nose is somewhat upturned and broad" without changing the sentence structure.

Another thing you could do to improve how the descriptions read is try and divide adjectives for each topic into to groups, (e.g. large/small or good/bad). Then when if a character has contrasting adjectives, use "but" instead of "and" between them. For example: "tall and stocky" vs. "quick but frail".

And personally I think all of the descriptions should relative to other dwarves. This might cut down on the perceived ugliness somewhat, since what sounds freakish to us might be normal for a dwarf.  The exception would be if at some point it became possible to read the description of other people in adventure mode, then descriptions show be relative to average for the PC's race. So if you're a dwarf, everybody else looks tall, etc.

[corvvs]

I see the description thing is officially "green", but never the less, a few suggestions for whenever they're revisited:

I would prefer that the "His X A is Y" format be dropped in favor of the simpler "His A is X and Y". I find it scans better, and it's also more flexible. For instance you could then merge "His nose is somewhat upturned and somewhat broad" to "His nose is somewhat upturned and broad" without changing the sentence structure.

Another thing you could do to improve how the descriptions read is try and divide adjectives for each topic into to groups, (e.g. large/small or good/bad). Then when if a character has contrasting adjectives, use "but" instead of "and" between them. For example: "tall and stocky" vs. "quick but frail".

And personally I think all of the descriptions should relative to other dwarves. This might cut down on the perceived ugliness somewhat, since what sounds freakish to us might be normal for a dwarf.  The exception would be if at some point it became possible to read the description of other people in adventure mode, then descriptions show be relative to average for the PC's race. So if you're a dwarf, everybody else looks tall, etc.

If you're a dwarf everybody else doesn't look tall. Only if you compare them to dwarves. I think most people are perfectly capable of looking at a cat and saying "that cat is rather plump" instead of "OMG! You only weigh 12 kilograms! You're anorexic! I must run you to the hospital immediately!" Most people (and dwarves) can also understand that the average height of a giant is going to be a bit taller than they themselves likely are. I don't think there's anything wrong with the cognitive dissonance necessary to handle the concept of a "short giant" (who is nonetheless more than 6 meters tall or whatever).

[Areyar]

What I think he means is that
what is a dwarven 'very long nose' may be a 'normal length nose' to an elf,
just because dwarves generally have stubby, broad noses and elves narrow long ones compared to humans.
(I hate humans, they are so average!)

Or not, this is just what is accepted norm in fantasy, actual norms depend on the raws naturally.