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[Ignoro]

I prefer the current system were more skilled dwarves work faster, and dwarves prone to failure work slower but more carefully to prevent failure. It would irritate me too much to see my couple locally produced diamonds destroyed entirely.

Low quality modifiers would be fine. Crafts falling apart or wearing out based on the skill of the crafter (and the user) would be fine too (and I think a maintenance job would go with that). Like for buckets, barrels, and beds.

Mixing this with the suggestion of setting how fast the dwarves craft (slower for ☼bling☼ or faster for !!garbage!!), there could be an option to have the dwarfs craft carelessly for light speed low-quality mass production, but the the possibility of the occasional outright failure (the frequency of failure decreasing with skill). That I would go for.

What I think is a problem that should be fixed before anything is added to how dwarves craft is creating a need to train up crafters. Right now you can supply an entire fort with riches unheard of elsewhere in the lands with ONE legendary dwarf that worked for just a couple years. I've never really found a reason to waste resources training up more crafters beyond the starting core. All my other immigrants live as meat shields to my founding legendaries.

===

BTW some children should job shadow in the way cats pick owners.

[profit]

"Great ideas often meet strong opposition from mediocre minds"

Not saying this idea is great, but It would barely affect a fortress..  RNG Fail could only realistically happen at very low skill levels.   And I have never heard of a fortress that balanced on a single block of stone.  I know it could happen... just have never seen it happen.

Anyhow here was my version of it from a couple months ago.... Still think it was a decent way to implement it.. But I had far better ideas that have been lost in the suggestion pile..

Just a realism addition:

If an item created is the lowest quality there should be a 75% chance of a failure.

*this only affects the LOWEST QUALITY LEVEL ONLY, so most craftdwarfs after getting a little skill, this will no longer really affect.

If a failure occurs NO item is crafted.

If it occurs on the forge, The Metal is returned, fuel is not.

If it occurs using carpentry, Sawdust is made, only able to be made into ash or charcoal.

If it occurs using masonary, The rock is destroyed.

If it occurs with the kitchen, The Food is turned into a substandard food item.

A lower chance of it happening but if it occurs while gem cutting, the raw gem  is destroyed or turned into some substandard cut gem *better practice with raw green glass =p

If any craft fails, the task remains and the crafter will probably try it again. So.. if you queue 10 rock coffins, you will still get 10 rock coffins just it may take a little longer until your crafter gains some experience.

I expect this to actually change the game very little as most of the low value items are just fluff anyhow.  Just adds realism and kinda encourages higher skill sets even more.

[LegoLord]

That seems a fairly solid suggestion for implementation, but there are a few problems:

Carpentry:  Sawdust?  Guy makes a mistake big enough mistake to make the wood unusable for what he's trying to do, and the wood gets completely dusted?

Masonry:  The "stone" items aren't really giant boulders.  The are piles of stones, which are carved into suitable shapes and assembled.  Stone is tougher than it looks too; most of it anyway.  Taking a chip out of floodgate quality stone would take a lot of effort.  It would be hard to destroy it by accident.

Really, I think Ignoro's got it exactly right.

[Jifodus]

I see no reason to add failure to the game when failure of a sort already exists.

If you want negative quality it's easy, I consider anything less than a quality of ≡ to be bad and a waste of material.  In all honesty, I see this topic as the result of the inability to use imagination to rationalize away the difficulties of taking real world problems and applying them in a virtual world.

I for one don't see a problem with taking more time with 100% creation rate. In fact, I suspect you would find it much harder to suspend disbelief with 75% creation rate considering that you 100x more source material than the final product.

Wurm Online is the epitome of failure as described in this thread.  Even if the action listed a completely accurate success rate, it will never feel like that success rate since failure is a strong motivator.  Even with some sort of fake skill value, there's still no sense of control over the outcome.

[LegoLord]

Even with some sort of fake skill value, there's still no sense of control over the outcome.

Best argument I've heard this whole thread.  I've been trying to work out how to say it, but it just never came out right.  I hate it when that happens.  Not you saying it, just me explaining things poorly.

Like right now.

[Savok]

I'm sorry, Lego, I'm sure that you're a perfectly intelligent guy, but this... not quite so much.

No, I don't.  In the game, whether or not you get a large gem is completely based on skill, implying that they all start out large.  This is my logic.

If they were like real life, however, smashing a small gem would just get you more small gems, eliminating the possibility of dwarves completely failing to cut them.  What you get now is not one small gem; it is a lot of small gems, hence why it refers to those items in plural.  I modded in clear plastic as a gem, a small gem item of those are called "clear plastics."  Plural.

Um. Maybe it's just the Internet Stupidity Effect.

Fact: Gem mining still goes on. The large gems of the earth have not all been destroyed by incompetent craftsmen. We aren't running out of gems.

Fact: Gems do not all start out large. If they did, large gems would be much more common, since large gems are extremely rare and will thus be sold (in modern times) to those who can cut them properly.

Do you have any idea how freaking hard it is to smash a brittle gem out of solid rock into nice facets without breaking it into pieces and without any sort of modern equipment?!

Also, large gems are NOT completely based on skill. Only a few gems start out as large, and it takes a highly skilled gem cutter to have a decent chance at keeping them at an unusual size. Or at least, that's the effect that the game mechanics have, which only allow a gem to be cut large x% of the time, regardless how high the skill of the crafter gets.

That is not remotely what I said.  Anyway, have you ever seen child do any crafting in a fort, aside from moods?  No.  As I said, and now emphasize, the game implies that crafting has some cultural significance to the dwarves.  Children would probably watch various people working through out the day, and get some small idea on how to do these jobs.  The dwarves that immigrate have, hypothetically, grown up somewhere, and should have done this as children.

And only someone too prideful for his own good, or just plain stupid, would crush a set of gems into powder before accepting them as shoddily cut.

Example: While generations pass during a constant war against the acid-spouting globbins, what was one a military outpost is now a full-fledged fortress, bane of all sorts of twisted alchemical creatures created by the Cult of Moar Cheese. They have developed the art of forging far beyond anything the world had ever seen, arming dwarves with suits resistant to the acid of the globbins and axes that would never dissolve. Yet, in this constant strife, the other arts have been neglected. Naught a single dwarf has seen a gem for decades, let alone crafted one. Suddenly, a lone peasant miner discovers a cluster of magnificent star sapphires (which were renowuned in antiquity for the ease at which they could be shattered), collects some nearby stone into a workshop, and creates a beautiful gem! With its flaws, yes, but nevertheless stunning.

That story went off track at "suddenly," would you not agree?

Even less unusual, we have such a peasant born in a normal outpost with normal immigrants. and normal founders. Still, no. Gems are really hard to cut.

That seems a fairly solid suggestion for implementation, but there are a few problems:

Carpentry:  Sawdust?  Guy makes a mistake big enough mistake to make the wood unusable for what he's trying to do, and the wood gets completely dusted?

Masonry:  The "stone" items aren't really giant boulders.  The are piles of stones, which are carved into suitable shapes and assembled.  Stone is tougher than it looks too; most of it anyway.  Taking a chip out of floodgate quality stone would take a lot of effort.  It would be hard to destroy it by accident.

Really, I think Ignoro's got it exactly right.

Masonry: Exactly, taking a chip of floodgate quality stone takes a lot of effort. Kinda like the effort we're applying all over the place with hand tools.

Even with some sort of fake skill value, there's still no sense of control over the outcome.

Best argument I've heard this whole thread.  I've been trying to work out how to say it, but it just never came out right.  I hate it when that happens.  Not you saying it, just me explaining things poorly.

Like right now.

Then don't have a merely competent craftsdwarf cut a legendary gem! Only a moron would do that.

[tsen]

Ok, let me be more specific. Randomly prancing about a fortress looking in on craftspersons does not constitute a systematic and efficacious educational method. Certainly it does have cultural significance to dwarves, but learning a craft well enough to produce quality goods is a lengthy and involved process.

This leaves us with two possibilities:
1. All dwarves begin with an extremely rudimentary grasp of all possible tasks and we need to add additional lower qualities to let them train themselves up to par. Remember that most players view Masterwork as normal and everything else as inferior. Making the training gap larger would go a long way toward making MW stuff special.
2. Dwarves need an apprenticeship period to learn a craft and come out of it being able to craft basic, but servicable goods.

[Aquillion]

Aquillion. Some of us want the local economics and city-building to actually constitute a game, and not an annoying prerequisite activity that must be completed before we get to play the real game. That said, regardless of how much material he uses up, a dwarf assigned a task should keep at it until he completes the assigned task, as this loads the extra micro-management into the early game where the player can best afford it, and makes sense in context of the current interface.

This does not load the micro-management into the early game; in fact, this suggestion would hit the game the hardest and most ruinously in the mid to late game.  This illustrates why it's important to fully think suggestions through before you grasp on to them.

Poorly-skilled dwarves can enter a fortress at any time.  Even with the most obsessive micromanagement possible (which only gets harder and harder as your fortress gets larger and larger), every so often some new barely-skilled immigrant is going to attempt a difficult task.  Having it randomly cause a failure means that, in a fortress of hundreds of dwarves, there are going to be a large number of chaotic, unpredictable catastrophic failures.

I can understand your desire to play a game loaded with micromanagement even if I disagree with it, but this leans towards making it the only way to play the game; players who do not want to constantly have to adjust individual dwarves' labor settings and micromanage important tasks will face serious problems requiring even more late-game micromanagement to address, constantly calling their attention away from anything else they want to focus on.  You are basically saying that players who do not want to play the game your way should be left to hang.

I prefer to manage fortresses through broad, overall plans and strategies rather than individual instructions; when I give a general instruction to produce an item, build a bridge, or dig a mineshaft, I prefer to be able to then move on to other things without the random risk of a catastrophic failure.

I prefer to not have to track all the skills and abilities of every last dwarf in my fortress when I have hundreds of them running around.  I do not like having to carefully go over all my dwarves or workshops and adjust their labor settings to keep unskilled immigrants from attempting tasks, something that this suggestion would make almost essential.  Maybe you like the idea of constantly tweaking and retweaking the labor settings of every single dwarf in your fortress one by one to avert catastrophes while ensuring you have enough dwarves at work, but many people do not.

[Twad]

DF is already punishing us enough for mistakes that we do. Dont need a layer of uncertainty on top of it "will that wall stand? Will that bridge work? Will that door stay closed? Will that cage hold? Will that floodgate hold the lava..?
 ..Never know.. OOPs!! it didnt!, oh well, there goes 20+ hours of game due to a random faillure. Fun! I feel rewarded for my efforts!

Its basicaly stripping the "fun" out of the game... and why would i bother with inferior/ruined/ect stuff? it would only clutter my inventory screen (goblin stuff is more than enough). I would destroy them on-the-spot and start again.. basically just wasting my time for something that doesnt do anything positive. Its working prefectly now; low skill = takes ages to do the job.. but the job gets done in the end.

[Ignoro]

..Never know.. OOPs!! it didnt!, oh well, there goes 20+ hours of game due to a random failure. Fun! I feel rewarded for my efforts!

Right there.

When my fortress fails, I want it to be MY design flaw that failed. Not because intrand(0,9)*skill_level=0.

If there is to be random failures, they need to be preventable. So when part of your temple collapses, you know to have more masons on maintenance duty.

[Granite26]

Try thinking of failure as an event, not a flaw in your processes.

I.E. on level of a siege showing up.  Somehow, people have decided random attacks of goblins that has nothing to do with the gameplay otherwise is 'FUN', but Nobles making random demands (that fits perfectly with the normal gameplay) isn't.  This is another example.  Sometimes something doesn't work, and you're forced to deal with that.

It's a question of whether you're playing a game against the world, or building something out of legos.  I know that there are people out there who like the legos mode, the "Let us rehide dug tiles cause it looks ugly" people, and thats ok.  Just trying to establish who the others are.

...Not trying to start something, I'm just trying to reframe the debate into something more intelligible, since we've got ~5 pages of... this.

[Pilsu]

You fail logic forever.

Yes, how illogical of me to not claim a dwarf who made a handful of perfectly cut small gems for encrusting "failed" at his task

Then again, I don't remember whether cut gems have actual quality levels

It would irritate me too much to see my couple locally produced diamonds destroyed entirely.

Why are you letting a novice cut diamonds? That's stupid, real life or in a game

Arguing that bridge collapse is frustrating doesn't really hold water if it's you choosing to make some cheese maker do it instead of a proficient mason/architect. Might as well complain about raw recruits getting slaughtered in combat

[bjlong]

Granite has a good point. Some of us want to look at the walls we built to contain magma and think to ourselves, "Are these strong enough? Maybe I should make a second layer of walls. Out of ice or something." Others want to say "These are walls. They won't break."

So the failure rates and effects (output) should be in the raws, so that people can make a... er... "lego" mod.

I'd think that this should work for everyone--hammering out reasonable failure effects should be the next step?

[Pilsu]

I'd think that this should work for everyone--hammering out reasonable failure effects should be the next step?

It's been suggested a dozen times and ignored by the nay sayers. Guess they don't want to feel like they're "cheating" if they turn it off and we pay the price

[Felblood]

Gems are a bad example. They don't even follow the current quality levels system. You either turn out a masterwork, or you create a bunch of smaller gems, of undefined quantity. Whether gem cutting needs quality levels is another debate altogether (It makes simulation sense, but it tends to throw the economy all out of whack).

There are two questions being debated here.

First: Should the current quality level system have a quality level so low, it is completely useless? --or even yields no object at all? It's the same thing really, except the latter takes less hauling.

No quality level items are usable products that typically net you 10 or twenty points. Fine goods are worth twice that, etc.

It is theoretically possible, however unlikely, that a dwarf could produce an item that is actually unusable, or a mug with a crack down the side (Dwarves do not have glue. Yet.). Exactly how often this might/should happen is buried under so many layers of raw material abstraction that nobody can actually saw how likely it is.

Modeling this in-game, instead of leaving it under the abstraction could have serious repercussions for certain styles of play, especially those involving a group of accountants lost in the tundra. The will of Toady be done.

This brings us to the second issue, that has crept in: Should an accountant, lost in the tundra, and forced to build a shelter from ice cubes, eventually gain enough construction skills to build elaborate bridges from ice?

Where did he learn the formulas necessary? Did he invent trigonometry while he was out there? What level of statistical math does a dwarven accountant have at his disposal?

This has less to do with the skills and talents of the dwarf in question being deficient, than the local level of technological advancement (zero, effectively) being insufficient to support his growth.

To remedy this, I would recommend tracking the technological level of the fort, relative to each skill. The arts and sciences we all know and love grew to maturity over many hundreds of years, and it isn't completely unreasonable to think, that our dwarves would need to stand on the shoulders of giants.

For memory and personal tastes a [TECHNOLOGY_OFF] tag is probably a prerequisite.

Start with a trained dwarf, and you get the technological level of your parent civ. Every time a dwarf gains a skill level, the civ gains a few experience points toward the next technology level of the same skill.