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[mickel]

The suggestion to toggle how carefully the dwarves work has come up before and was violently determined undwarvenly.

[LegoLord]

I have to say I have done some crafting in my life and even just learning I was able to build something without ever completely destroying the materials.  Even with cutting paper, you can improvise a mistake.  It's what I always did.  Didn't look as nice, but it still worked.

[tsen]

In defense of the idea of craft fails, I remind everyone of the false consensus effect and accompanying issues with meta-cognitive skills. Specifically, the average person believes that he or she is better than at least 67% of the rest of the population and without solid education or practical grounding in a discipline, will often feel that his or her skills are up to par or excellent when they are in fact quite poor.

If you ever teach a subject you are intimately acquainted with to a neophyte, you'll observe this.

[LegoLord]

In defense of the idea of craft fails, I remind everyone of the false consensus effect and accompanying issues with meta-cognitive skills. Specifically, the average person believes that he or she is better than at least 67% of the rest of the population and without solid education or practical grounding in a discipline, will often feel that his or her skills are up to par or excellent when they are in fact quite poor.

If you ever teach a subject you are intimately acquainted with to a neophyte, you'll observe this.

I'm sorry, what?  Translate that from numbers to English, please.

[irmo]

In defense of the idea of craft fails, I remind everyone of the false consensus effect and accompanying issues with meta-cognitive skills. Specifically, the average person believes that he or she is better than at least 67% of the rest of the population and without solid education or practical grounding in a discipline, will often feel that his or her skills are up to par or excellent when they are in fact quite poor.

And why do we care about this?

[bjlong]

It's a counter argument.

The argument that everyone's giving is that "I could do better than fail at a craft--noone should ever ever ever evar fail so totally that it's not just a plain mug or something." This can be broken down into two assertions and a conclusion: 1) I am representative of the population as a whole; 2) I have not observed myself failing horribly at a craft or hobby like dwarven trades; C) Therefore, noone should be expected to fail horribly at any dwarven craft.

tsen is pointing out that by asserting 1), you make 2) invalid, as self-assessments are gravely inaccurate for the population as a whole. Moreover, the idea of a horrible failure is up for grabs, which means it's an inaccurate test against an inaccurate standard, amplifying the errors.

Moreover, tsen indirectly gave an argument for failures, with some extrapolation:

1) The average person cannot properly assess his/her skills in a field other than that they know well.
2) Crafting requires an accurate assessment of skills to know when and how to perform a job.
C) Crafting cannot be done decently without a good knowledge of crafting.

As a note: I'm for crafting failures, with finer units of material and a scaling system for the failures. Controls for say "learning people/workshops/materials" would help this a lot. Someone who's learning to cut gems could be trained on glass while your legendary gem cutter could cut the diamond of awesome you just dug out.

[Felblood]

The majority of people will say they are above average drivers. A person's assessment of his/her own skills rarely reflects their actual level of skill.

This is not acounter argument. To be an complete counter argument the following would have to make sense:

Dwarves are not as skilled a they think they are, and neither are you guys, claiming you can make things without totally botching them, or learn skills without going to a specialty school.

Ergo, inexperienced dwarves should break mugs when making them.

There are clearly some missing elements to this. How exactly did you get from your initial data to your conclusion? What connection are we supposed to draw between the data you cite and the conclusion you draw from it? I don't see it, and it just leaves your readers confused.

[mickel]

The argumentation might or might not be sound, but the conclusion is. To argue that the fact that you individually have never failed at a craft (which strikes me as improbable) means that it is unrealistic that anyone should ever fail at a craft makes very little sense to me.

I've seen people fail at bending a 2 mm thick iron thread the right way even with the correct tools at their disposal. Merely identifying the correct tool in woodcraft takes education and experience. And then you have to learn to use it correctly...

[irmo]

It's a counter argument.

The argument that everyone's giving is that "I could do better than fail at a craft--noone should ever ever ever evar fail so totally that it's not just a plain mug or something." This can be broken down into two assertions and a conclusion: 1) I am representative of the population as a whole; 2) I have not observed myself failing horribly at a craft or hobby like dwarven trades; C) Therefore, noone should be expected to fail horribly at any dwarven craft.

The counter-counter-argument to both of those is "You are not a dwarf."

Or, more to the point, "You are not a character in a video game." The problem with "crafting failure" is abstraction: Do we need to simulate every event of placing the chisel wrong and cracking something? Or can we assume that mistakes are part of the reason novices work more slowly than masters (they're constantly screwing up and having to fix it), and part of the reason their work is of lower quality, and so it's sufficiently handled by the existing system? The issue of material loss seems really trivial, except maybe for gems.

tsen is pointing out that by asserting 1), you make 2) invalid, as self-assessments are gravely inaccurate for the population as a whole. Moreover, the idea of a horrible failure is up for grabs, which means it's an inaccurate test against an inaccurate standard, amplifying the errors.

tsen is refuting an argument that has no merit to begin with, and doing so by arguing that we all suck and are probably wrong about everything.

As a note: I'm for crafting failures, with finer units of material and a scaling system for the failures. Controls for say "learning people/workshops/materials" would help this a lot. Someone who's learning to cut gems could be trained on glass while your legendary gem cutter could cut the diamond of awesome you just dug out.

I'm iffy on finer units of material. They'd require massive changes to the way stackable items work now, even beyond the stack-recombining problem. Ideally Toady would break down and decide how big a "square" is, in actual units of measurement, and then enforce size limits on how much stuff can fit into a unit cube, and express quantities in terms of that.

Other than that, if the finer units are there to allow for crafting failure, then your novice runs to the stockpile and takes out 1 unit of stone (from a boulder which contains 64 units). He carves it into a ring, and then at some point screws it up and has to start over. So he has to run back to the stockpile and get another unit of stone. And so on. Hauling cost to do tasks greatly increases. Plus there's the question of what happens to the failed crafts--metal could be melted down, wood could be turned into charcoal, but failed stone isn't good for anything.

(Please don't say "making glass" unless you've at least seen glass being made some time in your life.)

Oh, and can the now-62-unit boulder still be carved into blocks? Turned into a table or a floodgate? Can it be combined with other, smaller stones?

[Felblood]

I am not a dwarf, but I and my dwarves both have hands. Abstraction will be reached further down.

I may not be much of a woodcrafter myself, but I know some things about handywork. I can tell when a bookshelf or dresser was made by a construction worker, instead of a real carpenter, just as you can tell when a house was designed by a carpenter, or a dollhouse by a draftsman. They are uglier, less durable, and generally have defects that reduce their usefulness; Bookshelves will have shelves too close together, drawers will beak easily or constantly get jammed, the bathroom will also be the hallway(I lived in that one), etc. However, I have never seen such an object fail to actually exist.

Upon considering it, one of my earlier statements is incorrect. I have jigsawed some simple toys out of boards before. They were blocky little planes, held together by recessed screws and wood glue, but otherwise quite suitable for giving to orphans (a function they performed). I bought the pegs to hold the little propellers on, so it doesn't really count as making the whole thing, and didn't design it myslef, but the idea is the important thing. None of those five planes were fine, or even decent quality goods, but they weren't failures. I wouldn't give you a dollar for one of them; I doubt they were worth the materials I put into them, on the open market, but since they didn't burst into flames, kill me or crumble into sawdust, their failings were sub-critical.

If I'd had to cut them out with a hand saw, they'd be even blockier, and the sanding would have taken a lot longer (particularly since I have trouble with the whole crosscut/ripsaw thing), but I could've done it. Starting with round blocks would have seriously delayed the project, but again I'd have got at least one of the things done, before christmas.

Oh! I also made a bookend. That nearly did end in failure, though if it had, it would have been me failing to realize how easily the project could be salvaged, and my actual incompetence violating conservation of matter. Though the details of that project make me wonder if dwarves have bow drills or crank drills, since I did need a drill.

Now, I am pretty rural, and I grew up around people sawing up wood and making things out of it, so maybe I'm a biased sample, but I'm pretty sure that I'm one of the least competent carpenters on earth. I have tremendous respect for anyone who does it very well, but no respect for anyone who feels that such skill gives one the right to believe that nobody else can do it at all.

[/compulsive self correction]
=====

Armor is a special case. On the one hand, chain mail is labor intensive and requires skills and knowledge to do properly. On the other, you're not going to destroy the metal, under anything resembling normal circumstances. The day your first suit of ringmail is issued, should be the saddest day in the life of one unlucky soldier; the rings will be oversized and misshapen, the thing will probably fall apart before he even gets hit and the fit will be nine kinds of wrong, but the thing will get finished given enough fuel and years of mind bending frustration. The right course is probably to melt it down and do better this time. Exactly how much that should be reflected by longer manufacturing times, and how often you should produce -3 holey armor, is a delicate matter. Realistic fuels costs for re-working need to be balanced against player frustration, which needs to be balanced against the player's ability to actually upgrade his dwarves into useful craftsmen.

For materials that are being physically broken and cut, to shape them, the issue get's grayer. Can a dwarf be so bad that he can't make a chair out of a load of wood? That's hard to answer, not knowing what tools he has at his disposal, or how dwarven chairs are structured. You can just take a log with two flat ends and call it a stool, but for that you need a saw, and our dwarves are presently making chairs by karate chopping (I know that isn't what it's called!) and pegging together wood chunks of unknown size.

Somebody invented all those techniques and tools the first time, and if some caveman (I know; it's funny. Shut up.) can do it, so can my dwarves. Whether they should be able to do it in four years instead of hundreds is debatable, but presumably your smith wannabe has seen a hammer before, so you aren't starting from scratch.

[Sowelu]

So quite a few people here on the forums probably wouldn't be able to figure out how to brew alcohol, even if they were set down in front of all the machinery and supplies they needed.  But wouldn't a dwarf know how?

I mean, it's kind of like...kids in the city often don't learn how to drive, but a kid who lives on a farm surely learned about the time he could reach the pedals.  It's just the environment you grow up with.  I've seen people be very confused by modern compound bows, but I think everyone has seen enough movies to know how to load and fire a shotgun.  Lots of people today would suck at farming or even gardening, but they kind of had to know how a couple hundred years ago.  We all know how to read and write.  Dwarves all know how to smooth and engrave stone.  Etc.  The basic knowledge IS there.  It's just not displayed in the skill list, because that would be very spammy.

Now, if you wanted your dwarf to build bow-and-arrows, I could see that failing.  Or if you wanted a human to install mechanisms.

[tsen]

I actually wasn't making an argument so much as reminding us as a group that it's not fair to argue based on just one person's experience or perception. I'm not saying the average person is *incapable* of crafting something with the proper tools and materials, simply that they probably should leave it to those with training IF the desired result is a trade good or well-crafted item.

In response to the poorly crafted planes: My point is not that the materials should cease to exist spontaneously without creating anything. It is that dwarves are a race of people who are fanatically obsessed with craftsdwarfship and might even consider such a creation beneath pawning off on the elves. So in the dwarfy mind, they *are* failures, which is the kind of failure I meant. Real "critical" materials-totally-wasted failure should only happen uncommonly to novices and not at all to anyone much past that. The idea there is to make dwarves less interchangeable because there is an "entry cost" to training them in a profession they have no skill in. NOTE: I vastly prefer the idea of an apprentice system, which in any form I would be *VERY* happy to replace this concept with.

Although the idea of more precisely keeping track of materials appeals to my sense of complexity, as a game player I think abstracting it into a relatively unsophisticated number would probably work best. E.g.:  1 log = 50 units of wood. Making a wooden toy consumes 10 units, but if you fail you can disassemble the finished inferior quality product and reclaim some of the material, based on the skill of the reclaimer. This would need to go in hand-in-hand with additional quality levels, and preferably additional skill levels.

Again, this idea would require hauling to be changed such that perhaps a cart-dwarf can deliver 5 logs at a time to the workshop. Or perhaps we add a lumber yard and have them process the wood into usable form. It fits DF's model. (Milling, processing plants, smelting ore, sand to glass, stranding adamantine, crafting blocks to build with, etc.)

My own compulsive self correction is that I would never want materials to simply cease to exist except in cases where the material is clearly broken down to a level where reclamation is simply not an option, such as making stone toys. Almost anything else should leave something which can at a minimum be reclaimed for part or all of its basic component materials. If I gave another impression in my support of the idea of "failure" then... whoops.

[Felblood]

Nothing is beneath pawning off on the elves. That's what they're for. The gods created them to be a walking garbage disposal.

The question is, can a dwarf physically make an object so poor that not even an elf will buy it, even for a mere 10 points?

Of course, the elves wouldn't have bought the wooden planes anyway. That's what Armok gave us humans for.

[bjlong]

I'd like to remind everyone, before I start, that dwarves come from a pseudo-medieval society. In this, you learned one trade very well, and used that to make your livelihood and bought what you couldn't produce yourself. I'd also like to remind everyone that watching someone do something doesn't help actually doing the action. For example: Try juggling, if you don't know how to juggle, or contact juggling if you do. Then watch an hour of performances. Then try again. It doesn't get easier, from my experience and the experience of others.

Fellblood: Your arguments are confused and pretty much based on you having made wooden toys. I'm not sure what you're arguing.

It seems like you're claiming that dwarves, having seen smiths smith things, should be able to learn to smith things themselves from scratch. Perhaps you're right, but understand that smiths, weapon and armorsmiths specifically, had tons of things that they had to remember to get a sword that was sharp, well-balanced, and wouldn't break--they had psalms that they would chant at a certain tempo to make sure that they wouldn't overheat the blade when doing certain things during forging.

Remember that crafting, forging, smithing, building, and various other things weren't all made up in a day. There were lots of things that had to come through from trial and error over years and years, passed from one person to another. If you didn't get one step right, a dome would collapse, or the sword would shatter, or the glass would cool strangely and explode. Not every failure is that traumatic, but you get the picture.

That argument is a good example of why I'm for crafting failures being added after teaching and apprenticeship is added. It's also a good example of why I want failures to scale according to the task.

Irmo: Most of the reason I'm for failures is because I've never seen anyone sit down and say "Oh, I'm just going to learn how to make an X out of Y" without eventually breaking some Y's along the way. Even if they go slow--meticulously slow.

Also, finer units shouldn't be a problem when realistic resource gathering and improved hauling go in.

tsen: I see your point about apprenticeship, but you should allow for us to say, "Oh, yeah, I need someone to make glass, but I don't have any glassmakers to master an apprentice. Oh well, guess I'll just suffer for a season while they produce +glass shards+."

[Felblood]

My arguments aren't confused. I'm just not arguing.

The bit about the wooden toys was just correction my earlier statement that I figured I could make one, even though I hadn't done so before. Then I remembered I actually had. The resulting infodump is unnecessarily verbose.

Both sides have points that I like, points that won't work on the current groundwork and points that I find patently ridiculous.

I'd someday like to see a version of DF that has all of the former, none of the latter, and some of those in between.

I want becoming legendary to take longer, and I want dwarves to be able to eke out a subsistence living. I don't want dwarves subsisting on limited supplies to be unable to construct basic living arrangements, but I wouldn't expect the elves to actually want to buy their lumpy rock, which is "totally an idol of their god; don't you see the resemblance?"

The last thing I want is for dwarven crafting failure to become the next Magic Swords vs. No Player Wizards debate.