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[SirHoneyBadger]

It's really, really difficult to actually cut off your own leg, even while chopping wood, let alone carpentry.

Not with unpowered tools, anyway.

Injuries can happen, but I've worked with a wood axe sharp enough that you could shave with it (it was nearly as sharp as the straight-razor I owned at the time, for comparison), and whacked my ankle with the edge, and all it did was glance off the bone and leave a small scar.

A dwarf's bones would be harder than mine, it's to be assumed, and a Legendary dwarf ought to know enough about the dangers of doing *any* hard labour enough to be cautious when learning a new skill.

So maybe cumulative experience might count against the chance for injury? That way, only your Slappys get hurt, most of the time. 

After all, you're not *trying* to chop a leg off, like you would be in battle.

Chainsaws are a hell of a lot more dangerous, and I really don't enjoy using them, if I can avoid it.

The worst danger in a medieval setting would be having a tree fall on you, which is pretty easy to avoid if it's a small-scale operation (meaning you're the only one out there, or you know where everybody is--so a typical DF situation), and you pay attention.

When I say "injuries might be possible", I mean in extreme cases, doing jobs that you know are going to be bad, or at worst, the rare freak accident. And a dabbler/beginner simply shouldn't (and probably wouldn't) be capable of doing (or allowed to do by the dwarfs around him/her) something dangerous enough to cost a limb.

These aren't humans, after all, and they're not working with power equipment, which is where things get really hideously dangerous.

Mining's maybe the most dangerous thing people did back then, outside of war ofcourse, and our dwarfs have that covered.

[Pilsu]

Flawed: A significant aesthetic flaw mars the piece. Works just as well as normal quality, but sells for half price
Inferior/poor: Your mug comes out looking more like a bowl or even a saucer. Not only is it completely worthless, if it's quality matters, it is half as good as a normal quality item.

I rather like those. Bit more flexible than going from worthless to normal quality immediately

[Felblood]

I dunno.. I cut myself way worse with a drawknife, than I did with the chainsaw. --but then both of those injuries were so minor that all it cost me was a few minutes and a band-aid. (Thank God, my pants leg jammed the chainsaw gears.)

While smashing your finger with a hammer or gashing your thumb with a draw knife would be sensible issues for low agility, low skill dwarves, you wouldn't want the wounds to be serious enough to stop production, or frequent enough to accumulate into something more serious. We shouldn't see more than gray hand wound and an unhappy thought from a rookie carpenter.

Without proper medical treatment, even a small cut, particularly one from a dirty tool, and become dangerously infected, but that's a natural extension of however wounds and medicine get implemented.

Making the raw material tracking system more complicated would make keeping track of your raw materials more complicated.

I suggest that no matter how unskilled he is, no carpenter needs more than a single unit of wood logs to make an item. The final product can be as horrible as Toady wants to make it, but then at least, us wood importers will know the minimum number of beds we'll get out of a given shipment.

How bad can an inferior bed be, before it's worse than sleeping on the floor? I'm fairly sure I slept on one of those once, but even a total rookie shouldn't turn those out 100% of the time. These are dwarves, and they care about quality.

[Shades]

Flawed: A significant aesthetic flaw mars the piece. Works just as well as normal quality, but sells for half price
Inferior/poor: Your mug comes out looking more like a bowl or even a saucer. Not only is it completely worthless, if it's quality matters, it is half as good as a normal quality item.

This I like, also it would be worth making it so it's harder to get the higher levels. (but then maybe the whole skill system needs to be slowed down, getting almost any skill to legendary within a year is pretty easy)

[SirHoneyBadger]

"How bad can an inferior bed be, before it's worse than sleeping on the floor?"

I once-and by "once" I mean for a couple of months-slept on a futon with a hole in the middle of it. So, where on a couch there would normally be a middle cushion, there was instead a big empty hole, about the size of the cushion that ought to have been there, but sadly wasn't.

I've actually slept better outside on the ground,  but at the time it was too cold to do that, and the house I was living in wasn't of a type you'd want to sleep on the floor of, even if you had the worst sorts of alternatives.

[Neonivek]

Sounds like you  were sleeping in a slaughter house.

So yeah Flawed equipment could do a few things

It could default damage to Blunt

It could cause damage to the user (Bad beds harm the dwarves spine)

It could easily catch fire through normal use (Bad Beds could harm the Dwarves Spine)

[tsen]

Idea: settings/toggles etc. to let you specify whether failure is an option within the game itself. Then scale task times based on it. So for example, if you're just doing routine training and want the dwarf to gain xp faster by doing lots of tasks, let him fail, representing more freedom to experiment and such. If it's an important task, however, let's say triple the time and make it no-fail. Turns failure into a tradeoff players can make rather than an annoying RNG hell.

[Granite26]

Idea: settings/toggles etc. to let you specify whether failure is an option within the game itself. Then scale task times based on it. So for example, if you're just doing routine training and want the dwarf to gain xp faster by doing lots of tasks, let him fail, representing more freedom to experiment and such. If it's an important task, however, let's say triple the time and make it no-fail. Turns failure into a tradeoff players can make rather than an annoying RNG hell.

I'm still not converted to the church of murphy's RNG hell, but this has merit. 

Less as a 'never fail', and more as a 'skill boost that makes failure way less likely for newbs and impossible for midranking and up'

There were a few suggestions in the past that said high quality should take longer.  This could get back into that, where masterpieces only happened when people of high skill took their time.  (Default would be just like now).

The problem with this is that crafting is already way too fast.  The majority of the time taken is materials gathering, not actual crafting.  (When it takes longer to walk down the street and pick up a rock than it does to create a museum quality carved rock, there's a problem)

[Mikko]

Idea: settings/toggles etc. to let you specify whether failure is an option within the game itself. Then scale task times based on it. So for example, if you're just doing routine training and want the dwarf to gain xp faster by doing lots of tasks, let him fail, representing more freedom to experiment and such. If it's an important task, however, let's say triple the time and make it no-fail. Turns failure into a tradeoff players can make rather than an annoying RNG hell.

When it takes longer to walk down the street and pick up a rock than it does to create a museum quality carved rock, there's a problem

THIS

Seriously. All the failing is pointless. I kinda tried to point this out earlier on this thread, but when I saw there was no discussion, I decided that "okay everybody knows" and there is no need for further appointment.

[Flaede]

Seriously not down with this idea as its most ardent supporters seem to like it.
And, until we get smaller divisions of things, I do not like this idea at all. To take an earlier example, you use a log for a bed... you fail... now I say how about you use the bits to make a bucket?

That kind of thing seems ok to me. Completely failing and turning an entire TREE into sawdust while trying to make a bed? this dwarf is dumber than a braindead rhesus macaque and should be given a pickand told to dig west until he breaches magma or the ocean. then walled up and forgotten. This stuff I am talking about has been implemented in small ways already. FAIL exists in DF, you folk are just looking too hard. I know some of the following have been mentioned, but...

Spoiler: List of Fail (click to show/hide)

Gems - if you don't get a large gem, you FAILed to cut that giant hunk of gem properly. you get a smaller one. because that's what you're left with.
Smelting - if you are of a higher skill you can get extra  "goodies" out of some ores. otherwise, you're likely to FAIL
Melting - I think that melting items is tied to skill as well, in terms of how much you FAIL to recover. (if not, I'm cool with that one)
Digging - you took a huge amount of time, and you FAILed to actually extract anything from the rock. Anydwarf can dig, but if you have no skill, it can no longer be called [MINING], which is what you're actually trying to do (even if it's really the [DIGGER] tag in the raws.)
Weaving - I do believe there are ways to accidentally destroy the spiderweb you were supposed to be harvesting and FAIL to get it to the thread stage.
Fishing - you die. the fishes eated you. you FAIL at life.
Masonry - you followed the plan (and by this I mean the large swath of designated floor sections), but you followed it badly and cause a cave in. Sound familiar? (note: If this is/were tied to skill level, then that would be cool with me, because it is an obvious example of FAIL that makes sense, and hampers megaprojects, but in a realistic way.)
Animal Hauling - you FAILed at moving the critter to the new cage before it got smart and eated you, you coffin fodder you.
Archery/Melee - you miss. FAIL. duh. this happens all the time, but less as they train, one of the good places to actually have this happen.
Combat Sparring - you FAIL to miss, killing your best bud while sparring. Tantrum ensues.

Sumary: in my eyes, there is a simple test to find out if a "possible failure" is a good idea - don't look at it from the failure half, look at it as "percentages of win".

see if as long as every FAIL can contain at least some percentage of WIN (except for the combat-type examples, because you can fall back on armor/shield/dodge skill for your attempt at WIN), then I am ok with it. If it is a goddamed WIN/FAIL dichotomy, then your dumbass peasants and soapmakers are well and truly screwed and I do not at all endorse the idea.

That's what quality levels are about right now, and expanding that would be cool. If a bad barrel could hold food but not booze? and maybe not keep out bugs as well? Ok. that's cool. If making a barrel badly means you get NOTHING, and lose the resource they started with? then your dwarf is undwarvenly and is secretly a kobold, because a metal barrel fail should give you a lump of metal to try again with. and with a entire tree to work with, there should be something left for your troubles.

[EDIT] I just realised I missed one: the failed mug.
howsabout "This cups not half empty... it's full. that's all it holds"

[Felblood]

Making a cup that holds less than one unit of booze could be problematic, but I see where you're coming from.

I don't want to 70% of a beginning dwarfs work turn into total failure and waste, particularly if he's quite graceful and co-ordinated.

I'm not a great potter, and nothing I've made from clay could be considered fine or even salable, but I've never actually failed to create a vessel. Granted, clay is somewhat more forgiving than stone, but unless you're trying to craft delicate stoneware teacups, instead of tumblers and mugs, you'll probably end up with something that can hold liquids.

How could anyone who knows which end of a knife cuts, and is familiar with his own limitations, fail to make a cup from a single, short log? Just scoop the end out until you get 3/4 of the way down and you've got a drinking cup fit for a dwarf, even if you do occasionally get little wood bits floating off into your drink. If you've got the chops, you can make something a bit less unwieldy, or just smooth the thing up, but it's a perfectly good first try.

A poor bed should be as bad as sleeping on the floor, but not as bad as sleeping on the ground. Dwarves are start enough to know not to invent the futon. Once you have invented a device that attempts to be a sofa and a bed at the same time, and yet makes a worse bed than a sofa, your civilization can only decline.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Sounds like you  were sleeping in a slaughter house.

Nah, just a real old farmhouse that was infested with carnivorous fleas--and between the fleas and the poison being used to kill the fleas (who were amazingly dug in), the futon was the lesser evil, especially since it didn't have any cushions.

Still, pretty much like sleeping on a woodpile.

[LegoLord]

Now see, the thing about failures in games is that they have to be based on a number.  This number is the skill.  This means that no matter what, you will fail sometimes.  In real life, once you are past novice (at most) you should be able to succeed every time; it won't necessarily be good, but it will work.

And what's wrong with just keeping the current quality system.  I mean, a no-quality mug is already pretty worthless, right?  It could look like a bowl for all you know.  But since it doesn't say "crappy" or something like that in game, you assume that it is at least "good."  Honestly, I think it's just the optimist's way of looking at it that exists right now.

[Felblood]

Actually, under the current system no label is often read "crappy" and fine is read "still pretty crappy."

With so little caravan space, and so many high grade goods, it's hard to appreciate all the +gabbro mug+s that flood your warehouse.

[LegoLord]

Actually, under the current system no label is often read "crappy" and fine is read "still pretty crappy."

With so little caravan space, and so many high grade goods, it's hard to appreciate all the +gabbro mug+s that flood your warehouse.

That's what I said.  The game doesn't describe it like that, and a lot of people seem to take that to mean "okay" even though it isn't.