Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[KillerClowns]

...You know, with these spheres encompassing the entire range from purest good to darkest evil (yes concepts do vary, I know that, and DF tends towards the darker side), I'm wondering if some of these titans are actually good guys, until you piss them off too much.

Will the new Titans and their underground kin have members which are 'friendly' to dwarves and won't attack unless provoked? It would be cool to have some that aren't hostile to dwarves.

The titans in good regions are benign right now, but there are still some outstanding issues there and they might be of two minds about their status until the kinks are worked out.

Of course, once good/evil lands are removed and replaced with sphere alignments, it's anyones guess how creatures will operate regarding sentients.  Probably by sphere; Nature creatures will like elves, Mountain creatures will have a fondness for dwarves, Peace creatures will be pretty much harmless unless an army wanders through its range, et cetera.

[smjjames]

Oh yea, forgot that was already answered. Probably about as benign as Giant Cave Swallows and Giant Bats where the stupid military won't fight it when its obviously attacking your dwarves.

Or is it just flying creatures that have that problem?

[Neruz]

"Hello little Dwarf, how are you? I am good, that is good, isn't it nice here? KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL!"
"Why hello other little Dwarf, how are you?..."

[smjjames]

I just checked the raws and there are alot of creatures which have that, but we don't get the beserkoid thing with mountain goats or most other benign critters, and even then, the military still attacks them. So maybe its just something wierd with flying creatures and that tag.

[CobaltKobold]

Like most of them, Grek, but

Marriage creature effects:
-Creatures come in married pairs

Oh, come on.

(Seriously, Toady, e'en humans aren't purely monogamous faith-beyond-death m/f like it is in DF)

More importantly, you can't get Bluebeard to happen when this is the setup, a prominent fairy tale/myth. (Death/Marriage?)

-Creature eats only spouses
Could get behind that.
-Creature refuses to harm married people
Also, though pairwise-removed.
-Creature desires a mortal wife/wives/husband(s)
Definitely interesting and story-generating- though it kind of loses a bit of punch if [MEGABEAST] just goes "Hey, I need a mortal spouse", snaps one up, and that's all we see of the effect. Could also be tied into other spheres, though I'm not looking at the list atm.

[Warlord255]

Like most of them, Grek, but

Marriage creature effects:
-Creatures come in married pairs

Oh, come on.

(Seriously, Toady, e'en humans aren't purely monogamous faith-beyond-death m/f like it is in DF)

More importantly, you can't get Bluebeard to happen when this is the setup, a prominent fairy tale/myth. (Death/Marriage?)

-Creature eats only spouses
Could get behind that.
-Creature refuses to harm married people
Also, though pairwise-removed.
-Creature desires a mortal wife/wives/husband(s)
Definitely interesting and story-generating- though it kind of loses a bit of punch if [MEGABEAST] just goes "Hey, I need a mortal spouse", snaps one up, and that's all we see of the effect. Could also be tied into other spheres, though I'm not looking at the list atm.

If permamonogomy is gone, some manner of Friendly Wrestling check goes in, and Megabeasts or creatures like Ogres and Giants search for brides... well, you can connect the dots.

[CobaltKobold]

Like most of them, Grek, but

Marriage creature effects:
-Creatures come in married pairs

Oh, come on.

(Seriously, Toady, e'en humans aren't purely monogamous faith-beyond-death m/f like it is in DF)

More importantly, you can't get Bluebeard to happen when this is the setup, a prominent fairy tale/myth. (Death/Marriage?)

-Creature eats only spouses
Could get behind that.
-Creature refuses to harm married people
Also, though pairwise-removed.
-Creature desires a mortal wife/wives/husband(s)
Definitely interesting and story-generating- though it kind of loses a bit of punch if [MEGABEAST] just goes "Hey, I need a mortal spouse", snaps one up, and that's all we see of the effect. Could also be tied into other spheres, though I'm not looking at the list atm.

If permamonogomy is gone, some manner of Friendly Wrestling check goes in, and Megabeasts or creatures like Ogres and Giants search for brides... well, you can connect the dots.

Adventurers get a name killing them(possibly driving them off), traditionally getting the brides for themselves (...I almost foresee DF players pre-arranging with an ogre to do this), and then the likely half-giant/ogre 'bastard' (marriage w/ ogre unlikely to be recognized) begins a new story of their own.

It's all very Fantastical.

on Giants, btw: ☼Englishman Bonemeal Biscuits☼

Megabeasts kidnapping people for a host of purposes. Or devouring them.
Or demanding the periodic 'tribute' of a fair young maiden (or young master!) from a site(see: Dragons), in exchange for letting them live (or possibly e'en protecting them from other megabeasts). Could also see nations doing this form of tribute demand, though only really goblins atm would seem to want to go for it.

[Urist McDepravity]

  ex: life-flowers-death could be either flowers live while all else is spooky-(un?)dead, or flowers are all brown and withered, but growing, in an otherwise verdant land

As for me, 'life-flower-death' combo suggests a herbalist's nightmare - flourishing flora which is deadly to anyone. Large jungles of carnivoirous trees, plants and grass.
You could find some non-contradicting meaning for any combination, i believe. Effects should stack rather than eliminate each other.

[PermanentInk]

I was thinking of an interesting way to do randomized groups of spheres that make sense together.  Basically, you have to think of it as an artificial intelligence problem, attempting to guess elements of an intuitively-defined set ("sphere combos that are interesting but make some kind of thematic sense") based on a smaller set of exemplars (hardcoded positive and negative associations).  It occurred to me that you could just make a weighted graph with spheres as nodes and manipulate the edges and weightings to represent similarity or difference.

So for example you could start with a fully-connected graph where all edges initially have cost (weight) 10.  To encode an association between e.g. "sun" and "sky", reduce the cost of the edge between the "sun" and "sky" nodes to 1.  To encode a negative association, like between "good" and "evil," delete the edge between those nodes.  Once you've encoded all your explicit knowledge like this, do a random walk of the graph where the randomness favors paths with low cost.  So you might have a path in your graph like "sun"->"sky"->"bird"->"egg"->"breakfast", with a total cost of 4.  This would be reached more readily than some arbitrary node "hammer" with a cost of 10.  Of course, you'd need to tune the numbers to find out what works best, but it's not too many variables.

It's kinda like Six Degrees of Dwarven Bacon.

[AbacusWizard]

I see no reason not to allow titans or whatever that are randomly generated with "conflicting" spheres; that sort of thing shows up fairly often in mythology and literature. Janus was the god of beginnings and endings. Hermes/Mercury was the god of, well, quite a lot of things, but including both merchants and thieves among them. Poseidon/Neptune was lord of both the sea and earthquakes (and horses, for those of you keeping score at home). Thor was both a roving warrior and a patron of the home and family. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" describes a ghostly ship with only two inhabitants: Death and Life-In-Death.

[Neruz]

'Conflicting' spheres being under the jurisdiction of the same being is pretty common. It makes plenty of sense that Life and Death would both be jobs for the same being, considering that all Death is is the end of life, so technically the Sphere is just Life. Good and Evil is another one that makes plenty of sense having together; a creature with both Good and Evil spheres would basically be the balance between Good and Evil (while creatures lacking the opposing sphere would occupy the extremes.)

[Footkerchief]

Most of this was already mentioned, but the DF Wiki article on spheres has a quote from Toady that succinctly describes how spheres work:

Spheres have a parent/child list, a friend list, and a preclude list. A deity has either one or two base spheres, and then they pick friends of those spheres, while never choosing a precluded or parent/child sphere of any of the spheres they already have. I tried to be pretty lax with the preclude list so that interesting relationships could pop up. There will obviously be problems and omissions and things here, since I had to match 100+ spheres together several times and no doubt made mistakes. Feel free to discuss.

The article also details all the relationships between specific spheres.  It's worth glancing over for anyone who's not well versed in the current workings of spheres.

[Cyx]

I already mentioned it in a Suggestions topic but screw it, I love thinking that stuff up.

A way to make it work would be that each sphere has several objects and effects associated with it, and they can interact with each other. Let me explain with an example : Earth, Fire, Rainbows. Earth would have "changes all underground tiles" as one of its proprieties. It would associate itself with fire, which would, when associated with a tile, "make temperature rise". So the game would just have to heat up all underground tiles. Easy. Rainbows would have "turn into magnificent colors". So the earth would be more valuable (with other uses when lighting is implemented). Let's say now that the parent sphere is Weapons. Flaming weapons or colorful weapons. Jealousy ? The propriety of jealousy would be something like "make creatures crave for it". So everyone wants a personal fire or to own colorful things. It allows for randomized, unpredictable things that can both be used by the player in creative ways, and generate interesting challenges. You live in a biome where everyone is craving for booze ? Make some for the goblins, then light it up. Weapons fall from the sky ? Protect yourself ! Send parties to collect the masterwork ones ! You live in a biome with Sky and Fire as spheres, and the tiles that are 2 tiles away from the floor are on fire ? collapse the caverns and watch the inferno rush into the hole. Lust and Magma ? Well, losing is fun. Also, it is moddable, it works with anything randomly generated, and wouldn't need that much change to the game before a "light" version could be implemented. (just apply the objects associated with the spheres to the creatures and/or make it alter its surroundings accordingly)

Part of the magic of random generation, however, is resolving the strange and bizarre combinations that arise in ways that stretch your mind beyond the conventional tropes of video game events. Given two bizarrely contradictory spheres, I would like to see the game come up with something astounding.

Even if I'm totally dreaming with everything I wrote above, I think this is a goal worth pursuing.

[smjjames]

Toady, I know you don't want to spoil the underground stuff, but could you at least let us know about the rope ladder type thing? As that is well known and probably important (if not critical) for the cavern stuff.

[Neonivek]

Ugg I am wracking up questions like no tommorow... but I really want to ask this one

Questions for Toady in spoiler (I am not sure if it needs one but JIC)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Toady will individual underground layers be capable of having their own Spheres seperate from the land above? Will these Spheres be constrained as you go deeper or influenced? Does this apply to the HFS? (You don't have to answer the HFS part)

Ugh, what is this 4-6 questions so far... I am not very happy with myself right now.