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[mickel]

At the moment dwarves can take more or less time to do something and they can do it more or less well, but they never seem to actually fail. No matter how inept a dwarf is he always manages to successfully build a bridge, carve gems, craft armor or tunnel through sand. All of these things and many more that the dwarves do routinely without any skill at all are things that are very complicated to do in real life. I think dwarves should be able to fail.

Depending on the skill of the dwarf, failure is more or less frequent and can be more or less severe. A complete beginner failing at cutting a gem will probably ruin it, but perhaps an expert might be able to salvage the situation and do something else with it, such as producing an inferior quality gem?

What failure means to a miner should be rather obvious. Cavein, outburst or something equally bad. All the more reason to reserve the sand tunneling and coal mining for the experts.

[Savok]

Toady never does a half-assed job. Not even as little as an assed job or a doubly-assed job.

Wait.

[PTTG??]

I've long thought the same. I think I heard Toady One say he didn't like the idea... possibly because it would be annoying to have your last Soththingotherite gem get smashed by the RNG... though I feel that any new way to fail in DF is a good one.

[DennyTom]

This is good idea, but there is problem - it could make building fortress a nightmare. Failing at cutting gem, falling bridges, etc are no problems, but digging and building aboveground is essencial and at start of game you do not have skilled dwarves. They fail, they die, you cannot build and fortress fails.

[PTTG??]

I'd think that's part of the challenge of embarking with all peasants. I think it will still be likely that you will be able to embark easily, depending on the location and some outside settings.

But if you take any set of seven dwarves and put them in Mordor, it should be tough.

[LegoLord]

Random failures are one of the most annoying things I have ever encountered in any game, even when they are based on "skill," because the skill just makes it slightly less likely to fail.  No matter what you do, there would always be failures, and they would have a nasty habit of cropping up in the absolute worst places. 
I hate this suggestion with every fiber of my being, as it would ruin DF.

[PTTG??]

Random failures are one of the most annoying things I have ever encountered in any game, even when they are based on "skill," because the skill just makes it slightly less likely to fail.  No matter what you do, there would always be failures, and they would have a nasty habit of cropping up in the absolute worst places. 
I hate this suggestion with every fiber of my being, as it would ruin DF.

This is different from real life how? I imagine that even a modest middle-range craftsdwarf would have a very low failure rate. Only a raw amateur would fail to produce a useful product- and perhaps they would try again, so an order for 10 mugs always gets 10 mugs, even if it takes 15 stones.

I for one see this as part of a craft improvement set, including bad quality modifiers (This is a terrible calcite mug: #Calcite Mug#.), and other general improvements.

And please, don't say "[something] will ruin DF." This would change it, yes, but the game is not complete yet, and there will be changes.
I just don't see a reason to get so upset.

[Pilsu]

I prefer dwarves actually needing to be taught to do complicated things like gem cutting instead of slapping it with a band aid that sometimes makes them botch it. It still wouldn't make any sense

[SirHoneyBadger]

I'd like to see some failures happen, just for the sake of variety/reality, but I think there could be a balance achieved by limiting the severity of failure, and the potential of failure to certain tasks/certain materials.

There might be a switch you could turn on in the Raws, if you wanted to make failure an option for certain difficult processes, like when dwarfs are working with say patterned steel, or whatever.

The game could still "ship" with everything turned off, though, so you'd have to actually turn things on yourself, if you wanted failures.

That, on a personal note, would help a *lot* towards balancing out some of the more powerful materials I want to mod in.

As far as mining goes, it might be made in such a way that the crude mining itself never fails (they're dwarfs, afterall), but that the smoothing process might, potentially causing (generally minor, and certainly less than fatal) injuries.

Failure need not be total, either. Failure might very occasionally mean a-relatively minor-disaster where one of your Miners got, say, a broken limb, or you had to use an extra unit of fuel to forge that super-powerful axe, but it also might just double or triple the time needed to perform a task (which would be the worst a failure should ever do, when our dwarfs are performing "everyday" tasks.)

It might be applied to the above Mining example, costing you twice the time to get through a patch of stone, but you'd eventually get through it.

In this way, it would be more of an annoyance (while being more realistic), and less of a potentially fortress-stomping gamble.

Failure could also be *extremely* useful, when the Magic Arc gets here, considering that failure would work both ways, and that demon/goblin/kobold wizards could be quite nasty, especially if everything they ever set out to do works perfectly, every time.

[codezero]

Two failures already implemented: miners yielding no stone and low level herbalists just fail sometimes.

[LegoLord]

The thing I don't like about random failures is this:  Any one can make ten mugs using onlyu ten stones if they just take they're time with it (which low skilled dwarves already do).  Just think, waiting for that job to get done after ages of waiting, just to have it fail, and then waiting ages for it to get done again, and then it might fail again.  It's just stupid is what it is.  In real life, you'd have to be an idiot to mess up a stone door, or a table, or even a simple statue.  I mean, the lowest value modifier already in the game is fairly equivalent to "crappy"- that's what novices generally make.  Why do you need negatives?

The failures that already exist are enough.

[mickel]

Anyone can make ten stone mugs without wasting material? Having actually tried a lot of crafts I've found that ruined material is the rule of the day as a beginner. You put the chisel in the wrong place and the whole piece cracks in half, completely ruined. It wouldn't have helped if you took more time, because it would just have delayed that fatal tap of the hammer to a point where you had wasted even more time on a ruined piece.

No, anyone cannot make ten stone mugs without wasting material. Neither ten wood mugs, and anyone can certainly not carve a raw chrysoberyl into an attractive shape.

It's bothersome to have dwarves fail, indeed. That's why you have more skilled dwarves supervise them as they do unimportant jobs. The important jobs are done by dwarves who already know their trade. It's how we get around the problem in the real world.

And yes, it means if you embark with all peasants it's probably going to be spectacularly difficult, but what do you expect, kicking seven completely unskilled people out into the wilderness? 

[Granite26]

isn't a broken mug still a mug?

What I mean is this: 

Could we multiply the existing quality levels by 3(ish) and have the bottom 2-3 be 'failure' qualities?  Ruined <material>, Ruined <item>, Malformed <item> are all useless, then a bunch of 'unhappy' quality items (using them gives an unhappy thought), the normal quality, and 1-3 qualities at masterpiece level (that give happy thoughts.

Then, failure is implimented, within the normal scope, but even still almost never wastes material.

[Tormy]

This is good idea, but there is problem - it could make building fortress a nightmare.

Yeah, exactly...I don't know about you, but I would like to spend less time with messing around with the fortress itself when the Army Arc will be functional. If something like this will get implemented, we will spend more time with building stuff in the fortress. So, I am against this suggestion...however if we would be able to turn off the feature...well I don't care about it in that case. 

[Mikko]

I don't really like this idea.

This would work on human and elves, but I consider a dwarf magically aligned with crafts, that they would think breaking an unfinished craft (eg. a mug) as a sin. That's why poorly skilled dwarves work so slowly.