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[PTTG??]

On a similar idea: I think that adventurers, moving quickly near a drop, have a small but real chance of "slipping". Same thing with some Fortress Mode units. That'll teach ya to build 1-tile ledges over pits of lava!

I feel this would add some more drama to exploring dangerous places- you have to walk carefully up on those gantries!- and who's to say that dying because you tried to run along a 2-foot wide precipice over a bottomless pit is any less "fair" than dying due to being ambushed by 50 wolves?

[LegoLord]

On a similar idea: I think that adventurers, moving quickly near a drop, have a small but real chance of "slipping". Same thing with some Fortress Mode units. That'll teach ya to build 1-tile ledges over pits of lava!

I feel this would add some more drama to exploring dangerous places- you have to walk carefully up on those gantries!- and who's to say that dying because you tried to run along a 2-foot wide precipice over a bottomless pit is any less "fair" than dying due to being ambushed by 50 wolves?

Bull.  Shit.  No.  Why?  That's just stupid.  A random chance that you will slip?  That's even worse than job failure.  There would be nothing you could do to stop it or reduce it.  Might as well be a random chance of falling down.  I mean, what if you couldn't, hypothetically speaking, build something to protect the dwarves from falling?

[profit]

On a similar idea: I think that adventurers, moving quickly near a drop, have a small but real chance of "slipping". Same thing with some Fortress Mode units. That'll teach ya to build 1-tile ledges over pits of lava!

I feel this would add some more drama to exploring dangerous places- you have to walk carefully up on those gantries!- and who's to say that dying because you tried to run along a 2-foot wide precipice over a bottomless pit is any less "fair" than dying due to being ambushed by 50 wolves?

Bull.  Shit.  No.  Why?  That's just stupid.  A random chance that you will slip?  That's even worse than job failure.  There would be nothing you could do to stop it or reduce it.  Might as well be a random chance of falling down.  I mean, what if you couldn't, hypothetically speaking, build something to protect the dwarves from falling?

I already use walls as guardrails for my bridges and such, so there are ways around this... but.... You are right, it's kinda silly for dwarves to fall into lava at random.

As for the Original Post.

You know I posted the exact same idea a long time ago and everyone was afraid of it... they cannot bear the thought of making someone moderately skilled to eliminate failures so the idea was doomed... They actually reacted almost violently to the idea... but.... doomed or not I still posted it first =p 

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=27596.0

[Footkerchief]

Slipping came up in my spatters thread -- Kanddak mentioned that dwarves might slip on floors spattered with liquids, especially slippery ones like grease.  This would give the Cleaning job an actual practical use.  Slipping on dry rock floors would be a little mean, but slipping on ice would be totally reasonable. 

Bull.  Shit.  No.  Why?  That's just stupid.  A random chance that you will slip?  That's even worse than job failure.  There would be nothing you could do to stop it or reduce it.  Might as well be a random chance of falling down.  I mean, what if you couldn't, hypothetically speaking, build something to protect the dwarves from falling?

First off, it SHOULD be dangerous to have 1-tile-wide catwalks without guardrails over magma or water or whatever.  I mean, would you feel safe working in a place like that?

Second, this doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.  It could be easily set up such that normal dwarves in normal circumstances never slip, but dwarves that are exceptionally clumsy or blind or walking on slippery floors do have a chance of slipping. 

Third, there would be plenty of ways you could stop or reduce the adverse effects, so that even the most pathetically clumsy dwarf can work safely near magma.

• Once the cleaning labor gets fixed (might be in the next release, I'm not sure), you can ensure that you always have a few janitors on duty to avoid slick, muddy floors.
• If you have to build catwalks over magma without guardrails, build them 3 tiles wide.  The pathfinder could easily detect whether a tile has an adjacent drop-off and adjust its traffic weight accordingly.

And last, this wouldn't exactly be unprecedented.  Creatures fighting nearly ledges frequently plunge to their deaths.

[Flaede]

dwarves are surefooted like mountain goats.  hehe.
Seriously, though. Falling when you're dodging makes "OHSHI-splat" sort of sense. tripping over your own two feet when there's no puddle of blood to slip on or enemy you're dodging? ridiculous. That is all just stupid WIN/FAIL introduced for the sole purpose of playing buggerup. It has no percentage of WIN. "if you train up the 'not tripping over your own two feet' skill, you wont have dwarves die".  Woo. fuuun. Because people in medieval times were dumb, and made it past childhood needing to train their "not tripping over your own two feet" skills before they walked up the mountain to pick blueberries. 'A skill for everything, and to everything its skill' - sounds ok, but when it gets that anal, it just looks like WoW to me. Which might actually work out rather well for Toady, but I sure wouldn't play.

You want to add heights based bad things to happen? have dwarves afraid of heights. They wont path that way. Or path that way only reluctantly. Or slow to a crawl when pathing that way. These make sense to me.

Footkerchief: a 'catwalk' "should" be dangerous? How wide is one tile. It's as wide as a titan is tall (lying down). or as a dwarf is wide, or as a shark is long. that tile is not really a defined number at all except when it comes to liquids. It's wide enough for two titans to wrestle on, while being stabbed by 20 pixies and a cave bear, after all.

...All that on the back of an elephant, for good measure.

Also : LegoLord, I agree. I fully consider the "normal" mug a large percentage failure. I would have those be much worse for drinking booze out of (once booze gets implemented). Bad thoughts, even. "drank out of a badly made vessel lately". My rule still stands, though. It's still got a percentage of WIN. You still have a cup dwarves can drink out of. So that they don't have to try to lift the lead keg over their heads to drink from And you can manage the bad thoughts in a way you can't manage "randomly the entire boulder crumbled to dust while you were trying to carve a cup from it. There isn't enough left to make even one ring out of it"

[Footkerchief]

dwarves are surefooted like mountain goats.  hehe.
Seriously, though. Falling when you're dodging makes "OHSHI-splat" sort of sense. tripping over your own two feet when there's no puddle of blood to slip on or enemy you're dodging? ridiculous. That is all just stupid WIN/FAIL introduced for the sole purpose of playing buggerup. It has no percentage of WIN. "if you train up the 'not tripping over your own two feet' skill, you wont have dwarves die".  Woo. fuuun. Because people in medieval times were dumb, and made it past childhood needing to train their "not tripping over your own two feet" skills before they walked up the mountain to pick blueberries. 'A skill for everything, and to everything its skill' - sounds ok, but when it gets that anal, it just looks like WoW to me. Which might actually work out rather well for Toady, but I sure wouldn't play.

No skills needed, this would be handled with attributes, just like walking.  The AGILITY and KINESTHETIC_SENSE attributes would probably suffice.

You want to add heights based bad things to happen? have dwarves afraid of heights. They wont path that way. Or path that way only reluctantly. Or slow to a crawl when pathing that way. These make sense to me.

Yes, that was what I just said.  I even described how the pathfinding system can handle it.

Footkerchief: a 'catwalk' "should" be dangerous? How wide is one tile. It's as wide as a titan is tall (lying down). or as a dwarf is wide, or as a shark is long. that tile is not really a defined number at all except when it comes to liquids. It's wide enough for two titans to wrestle on, while being stabbed by 20 pixies and a cave bear, after all.

...All that on the back of an elephant, for good measure.

Well, actually there's a pretty good way of handling this.  All other things being equal, the larger a creature is, the more likely it is to slip into another tile.  That is, if a dwarf and titan with the same clumsiness are walking on the same surface, the titan will be more likely to stumble sideways or whatever.  So a very small creature, even if it was extremely clumsy, would still probably manage to stay in its tile.

[Flaede]

You want to add heights based bad things to happen? have dwarves afraid of heights. They wont path that way. Or path that way only reluctantly. Or slow to a crawl when pathing that way. These make sense to me.

Yes, that was what I just said.  I even described how the pathfinding system can handle it.

You're right. I misread there. You were defending an argument which had its origin in the idea that this lack of skill should sometimes kill them, and I didn't catch your worthwhile alterations.

Footkerchief: a 'catwalk' "should" be dangerous? How wide is one tile. It's as wide as a titan is tall (lying down). or as a dwarf is wide, or as a shark is long. that tile is not really a defined number at all except when it comes to liquids. It's wide enough for two titans to wrestle on, while being stabbed by 20 pixies and a cave bear, after all.

...All that on the back of an elephant, for good measure.

Well, actually there's a pretty good way of handling this.  All other things being equal, the larger a creature is, the more likely it is to slip into another tile.  That is, if a dwarf and titan with the same clumsiness are walking on the same surface, the titan will be more likely to stumble sideways or whatever.  So a very small creature, even if it was extremely clumsy, would still probably manage to stay in its tile.

And this makes those narrow pathways good for something. I like it. Although I'm still very dubious about anything other than blind idiots falling off cliffs, the pathing solution you had there applying for big things on "narrow" walkways has some merit... if there were multi-tile megabeasts (hehe: "Wagon-Zilla Approaches! OH NO!") I'd be all for it, though.

[PTTG??]

Look, what I'm reading (which may be different from what you mean) is that random failures make the game less under your control and more unfair.

I agree with this statement to a point, and I think there is a way to take that into account.

However, I like the idea of there being failures (In the sense of dwarves needing to try again, and making 'terrible felsite mugs') for two reasons: 1. It makes skilled dwarves essential for a fortress, adding a new dynamic to gameplay. If your Mason gets killed in the first week, well, you can't just tell your farmer to take over his shop; so you have to improvise with what you have- unless you need that stone thingamajig, and then you have to pay the price it takes to get McFarmer up to speed.

As I said, there is a way to address the points you make- all that's needed is a workshop setting:
[Work Carefully] [Work Normally] [Work Quickly]
Where working carefully means that all but the most dabbling dwarf would NEVER fail, and a legendary worker will regularly produce Masterpieces, Normally will work much like it does now, with a slightly reduced chance of producing Masterpieces and everyone up to a journeyman has a small chance of failing. Working quickly will decrease the amount of time needed to create something, but will cause an increased chance of failure, and will nearly never produce a masterpiece.

About the "slipping" thing- perhaps I was unclear. This is a combat-only mechanic. Units that are running at full speed along a single-tile edge of rough, blood-soaked rock while dodging arrows are the only people who'd have to worry about it. Just try and tell me that it wouldn't be awesome to have your hammersquad charge out against goblins on a bridge and have the gobbos be so scared that the mob is pouring off the edges in the rush to escape!

Besides, I'm not one of the Adams Bros. They are the finalonly arbiter, so why try to convince a moron like me? After all, if you're sure that you have the right idea, then you can be sure they agree with you.

[Pilsu]

Have you crafted anything in your life? You don't just decide to "work quickly" and sometimes end up cracking the bed frame in two. What you get is a shitty quality product by cutting corners

<No Quality> is not the baseline for products, despite what crud you see NPCs wearing. They should be wearing -items- and +items+. This oversight really seems to have poisoned the playerbase's expectations of quality from handiwork. Mind you, having one more quality level for crappy products for the really poorly skilled would be nice


Only way this would make any sense is if poorly skilled blacksmiths, gemcutters and the like do their thing. Dabbling dwarves shouldn't even be able to attempt doing such advanced labors without any kind of instructions in the first place however, it makes no sense. It's the novice blacksmith that fucks up. And the material isn't exactly lost. That could be reflected by giving you a malformed useless object from failures and making the smelting not incur a material loss. Gemcutters would just plain fail and lose the gem(s)

Mind you, this ties in with my views on apprenticeship and items in general and the desire for more realism. Not empty convenient game mechanics that arbitrarily make you lose materials for the most trivial of tasks while ignoring the question how a dwarf knows how to do every damn thing without any instructions in the first place

[Footkerchief]

Have you crafted anything in your life? You don't just decide to "work quickly" and sometimes end up cracking the bed frame in two. What you get is a shitty quality product by cutting corners

Bed frames are a conveniently sturdy example.  In fact, wood is pretty forgiving in general -- it doesn't tend to shatter.  I think what people have in mind here is more stuff like stone rings.

[Pilsu]

Well, individual items having difficulty levels would certainly be in the spirit of the game. I like it, solves the problem of novice trainees knowing how to do everything elegantly without arbitrarily setting them items that they can make. IE novice blacksmiths knowing how to make helmets but not armor for no damn reason

I've never felt a need to make my farmer crank out stone rings though. Bedframes and blocks on occasion and failing at that would be embarrassing

[Felblood]

It might should be harder to make a fine stone ring than a fine stone mug, but that's away from the idea here that seems to me to be hazardous to gameplay.

The critical fumble. "You drop your gun, it discharges and kills a kind, little, old lady, on the other side of the street." is all well and good if you're playing Bribe(the system the critical fail came from). However, this is Dwarf Fortress, and being able to run a prolonged single player campaign is more important than creating memorable critical fail moments around the table.

Look at the way DF handles critical hits. They're partially debilitating, and gruesome, but they aren't always an instant win, and they are usually required to make some level of sense. You can't punch a dragon's head off of her neck like a tee ball.

Failure should run the same way. It should be the mundane sort of failure, where you completely fail to strike the target, or you fail to create a masterpiece. --Not the sort of failure where your engraving is so bad that it destroys the wall.

Slipping and falling on slippery things makes sense, it happens all the time. That's why they make those caution triangles. Standing on a muddy ledge, in a rainstorm, is not particularly wise, but walking along on under the same conditions should be more than simply possible, but feasable.

Now mark, I'm an old mountain goat, from the snowcapped Rockies, so I have certain expectations about how well a person, or at least a mountain dwarf, should be able to handle themselves on a ledge. However, I don't think slipping on dry ground and sliding off a cliff is normal for any sort of adventurer.

Rhetorical Posit: When was the last time you fell down? What were you standing on? Is this more probable than punching off a dragon's head?

[Leonidas]

Have you ever watched Frontier House?  It was a little reality show about three families who live for a couple of months as Montana homesteaders in the 1880s.  It's pretty good.  You can get it on Netflix.

I mention it because in that show the modern families had to learn all sorts of skills that were vital to surviving on the frontier, such as milking a cow, shaping wood in various ways, and cooking on a wood-burning stove.  And the show didn't just toss the families into log cabins and expect them to learn those tasks by trial and error.  There was a class before the show started, where various experts taught the families how to do those tasks.

My point is that knowledge and skill are very different.  I as understand it, the implication of failing at a skill is that a dwarf who knows literally nothing about stone carving sits down with some stone and tools, and tries to figure it out by trial and error.  And then he makes a total mess.  It's projection: If we were dwarves at those workshops, then we would have to figure it out by trial and error.  And we would make lots of messes.

But that's not how things really work.  Most skills are far too difficult for anybody to learn by trial and error.  First you have to gain the knowledge of how to do it correctly, and then you accumulate the skill to do it well.  And the knowledge is easy to come by for tasks that are commonplace in your world.

For example, I assume that we all know how to type.  If you bring a dwarf from the world of DF into our world, and you want him to learn to type, then you don't just lock him in a room with a computer and leave him there until he figures it out.  Instead, you teach him how to type.  You show him how to hold his fingers correctly, and how to reach off the home row correctly.  Unless you've recently taught someone to type, then you probably don't think much about how people learn to type.  It's such a ubiquitous skill in our world that the education phase seems like a non-event.

That's how I see the skills in DF.  Your seven dwarves all took the pioneering class.  They all had to sit through the lecture on how to carve a stone ring, how to make a barrel, how to shoot a bow, and so forth.  They also learned a lot simply by growing up and living as dwarves in a world where people routinely smith, smelt, weave, and so forth.

Or, if you prefer, they all have little instruction manuals with titles like "Stonecrafting for Dummies" and "How to Smelt without Losing Your Beard."  The point is that a dabbler trying to make a barrel isn't like you or me trying to make a barrel, because we don't live in a world where people routinely use hand tools to turn turn logs into barrels.

So let's not do the crafting fail idea.  The dwarves have little instruction books.

[Granite26]

Leonidas, you're damn lucky you didn't make any spelling errors... that's all I've got to say...

[Felblood]

Leonidas, a person not trained in typing will be really slow, since he hunts and pecks the keys he wants, but he will type the document eventually.

That's something of a bad example, since there are no raw materials to destroy in that situation, unless the dwarf manages to somehow destroy the keyboard, by trying to type with his feet.

I really think that raw materials need to be handled more exactly before we worry about dwarves wasting amounts of it based on skill. This is a guy making a ring out of a boulder; he's got plenty of room for slip ups and learning experiences.

A person trained in a tradition of a skill, that has been honed over decades of research and trail and error, should be better in almost every way than a solely self taught person. I've got a lot of unfortunate inefficiencies in my typing style, precisely because I was taught in a time and place where you just gave the kid a keyboard, and let him figure it out.

I'll never be as fast as a proper typist like you, and for some reason I always double the wrong letters, but the post does get done, after a little proofreading and correction.