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[Felblood]

I'm sorry. Any time someone uses the words "I will come back to this at some point" in a post, I reflexively scroll down to see how long it is. This is still one for the record books.

You want to revise this essay a bit more before you release it for mass consumption. Try to avoid restating existing points, and remove math heavy examples from any post over a screen long, as few will take the time to follow them with sufficient care to get the actual point.

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.

[Veroule]

Massive text block, hard to read, make summary for dummies?

Don't they teach people how to read in school anymore?  I used to read entire chapters of text books in college in 10 minutes using the proper method and then ace the test.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

• Scan the text for a structure.
• If the structure includes any pictures, then examine the pictures before any reading.
• If the structure has side blurbs preform reading actions on them first.
• Read the first sentence of each paragraph.
• Read the full paragraphs that look likely to contain meaningful information.
• Read the second sentence of any unread paragraph
• If no more paragraphs look likely to contain meaningful information, turn the page

I'm sorry. Any time someone uses the words "I will come back to this at some point" in a post, I reflexively scroll down to see how long it is.

This is a good reflex, don't apologize for it, look at the list above for proper reading technique.

You want to revise this essay a bit more before you release it for mass consumption. Try to avoid restating existing points, and remove math heavy examples from any post over a screen long, as few will take the time to follow them with sufficient care to get the actual point.

Editted to insert spoilers so proper reading techniques are forced on people.  There are no math heavy examples as they are meaningless in this forum.  Restating, or at least referencing, existing points is required when that point is an intersection between 2 larger concepts.

[Flaede]

if you intend us to take a test at the end of your posts I am afraid many of us will simply opt out of the course.

[irmo]

(a terrible, terrible thing)

Don't ever do this again. This is the Necronomicon of forum posts. I hesitate to click the last spoiler tag because I expect there to be Elder Gods in it or something.

Don't they teach people how to read in school anymore? 

Don't they teach people how to write in school any more?

This:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Is not an acceptable way to write a sentence.

You've:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Put a colon and a line break between the subject and the predicate.

The right way to use this technique is to write an outline of your idea and then hide supporting details, examples, etc. behind the spoiler tags, so that readers who want to see a more detailed explanation can see it without being intimidated by a big wall of text. This is a reader-friendly approach.

Your approach is reader-hostile. Your little exposed "tags" don't say anything, they're just the first few words of each paragraph. They all start with ordinals to fool us into thinking they're a numbered list. They're not a numbered list. The ideas they contain are neither parallel nor sequential.

Here's the executive summary of your idea, stripped of pointless flailing, ill-defined numerical examples, and self-contradiction:

Every job has multiple internal steps, each of which is simulated and has a random chance of failure. Depending on the job, failing a step could result in loss of starting material, loss of part of the product, or generation of waste. Failed steps have to be retried; every attempt at a step takes a fixed amount of time and grants experience. Therefore, low-skill crafters tend to fail many steps, wasting time and material, but they gain skill points for the failed steps as well.

[Pilsu]

Maybe you shouldn't make a novice cut that star sapphire or make that bridge? Never failing to make a ring out of stone when you're barely dabbling is ridiculous. And we already covered the easier objects like beds, breaking those would be laughable

And for some reason, turning it off if you don't like your novices not being gods of craftsmanship isn't good enough for you. Why is that? We can already turn off a myriad of things for player convenience like rent and invaders


Personally I'd make proficient dwarves never botch anything anymore whereas the novices could only reliably do the easy things out of easy materials. Stone rings would almost always fail for poor craftsmen, preferably with the interface displaying the success percentage. I doubt anyone would want their adept or legendary craftsmen to randomly lose materials

"They're dwarves, they never fail." Yeah, that's not Mary Sue or anything

[LegoLord]

Pilsu, novices as they stand are not "gods of crafting"- they produce mugs and rings worth maybe 50, 40?  I don't use crafts much.  But I made some recently and they were definitely two digits.  Random failures aside from low quality would be more annoying than anything, especially when you consider that MOST OF YOUR DWARVES START OUT AS NOVICES AND TAKE A LONG TIME TO GET MORE SKILL BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM.  I hardly ever get a mechanic past competent when he comes as a migrant, because I never have to make so many mechanisms that everyone can make oh-so perfect ones.  I would have to set "make rock mechanisms" to repeat in every workshop and wait ages just to get them to a skill level where they could make a mechanism without breaking it half the time.

Oh, and you want to know how to make a rock ring?  Break a big rock if you don't have smaller ones.  Take the round ones, cut them to make them flat, and make a hole in the middle.  It should only break if you try to punch the hole out with a chisel instead of carving the hole out.  Repeat.  If you can't do that without breaking it, then sorry, but you are either stupid or having a really bad day.  And yeah, it's a really crappy ring, but it's still a ring, isn't it?

[Savok]

It is simply unrealistic for children who are abandoned by their parents at a very young age and grow up in the wilderness to innately know how to build mechanisms, forge steel, or cut gems. Do you have any idea how freaking hard it is to cut diamonds? Dwarves are simply not some sort of super-race that can do all that stuff intuitively.
Heck, kids abandoned like that shouldn't even know how to talk, much less figure out on their own how to construct feats of engineering, like, say, masterpiece ballista.

That, at least, I know we can all agree on.

And it follows that there must be something like that suggested by the OP.

[LegoLord]

Abandoned child?  Like there are no other dwarves around to take care of it?  That's a dead child, sure. 

What's with this diamond you mention?  No one said it was easy.  If it was easy, dwarves would be able to pop out large diamonds all the time.  And have you noticed how much longer it takes for a novice to do something?

Think about it.  These guys are living in a sort of communal fort.  They can probably see everyone else working at some point in their day.  They probably have some idea on how to do some things.

[Pilsu]

You are a god of craftsmanship if you can produce results from difficult materials using hand tools without any kind of training and never render your material a useless heap of chipped rock

Large gems are an exceptional result even in real life, you can't argue that not producing one is a failure when instead you get a handful of smaller flawless gems

If you don't like it, turn it off. Simple as that. Failure as a feature is firmly based on reality. Smaller material units would help with the issue of losing boulders when failing to make rings but even then, maybe you should just make the easier stuff first

[bjlong]

I hesitate to click the last spoiler tag because I expect there to be Elder Gods in it or something.

I am sigging this.

[Savok]

Abandoned child?  Like there are no other dwarves around to take care of it?  That's a dead child, sure.

Fine. Replace "wilderness" with "kobold settlement" or "human scientific facility, where the child does not interact with any books or creatures" or "some other quite possible situation with the same effect to knowledge as 'wilderness.' "

Q.E.D.

What's with this diamond you mention?  No one said it was easy.  If it was easy, dwarves would be able to pop out large diamonds all the time.  And have you noticed how much longer it takes for a novice to do something?

Um:

Large gems are an exceptional result even in real life, you can't argue that not producing one is a failure when instead you get a handful of smaller flawless gems.

You fail logic forever.

Think about it.  These guys are living in a sort of communal fort.  They can probably see everyone else working at some point in their day.  They probably have some idea on how to do some things.

Perhaps your dwarves do, but many of mine don't. Every one of them can still become an expert engineer without any training of any sort.

[G-Flex]

Personally, instead of dwarves failing at tasks, I would suggest another quality modifier: Something along the lines of "Shoddy" craftsmanship. It would have a high chance of being produced by a dabbling worker, a decent chance of being produced by a novice, and very little chance (if ever) of being produced by actual skilled people. That way, the character still makes whatever he's trying to make, but can do a piss-poor job of it if his skills are terrible enough.

[LegoLord]

What's with this diamond you mention?  No one said it was easy.  If it was easy, dwarves would be able to pop out large diamonds all the time.  And have you noticed how much longer it takes for a novice to do something?

Um:

Large gems are an exceptional result even in real life, you can't argue that not producing one is a failure when instead you get a handful of smaller flawless gems.

You fail logic forever.

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.

Oh, and about dwarves knowing how to do something when they grow up:

The craftdwarfship of the dwarves is unparalleled. Let's trade!

The game tells us that dwarves are supposed to be good at this stuff in general.  This suggests that it is culturally important to dwarves and children are at least shown crafters at work.  Children in forts tend to wander around a lot since they "do as they please," so they probably see this stuff on their own, too.  Then you consider that jobs a creature can do are based on its home civilization, not its species.  A dwarf raised by kobalds can't be a mechanic.

Oh, and pilsu.  A no-quality set of small gems is not a handful of flawless gems.

Finally, @ G-Flex:  That has already been suggested, and while it is an interesting idea, no-quality items fill in the role you describe.  That's essentially what no-quality means - shoddy.  Though I would like it if the overall mood of the fort was unhappy, they would be described as shoddy (pessimism due to hard times), but that's just flavor.

[tsen]

Lego, two things:

1. The game might tell us that the craftsmanship of the dwarves is unparalleled, but it does not mention *why*. Assuming that dwarves pop out of the womb with a set of tools and a full knowledge of how to execute complex tasks is silly. Trades take a lot of time to learn, even if there is a natural proclivity. However--assuming there are apprenticeships added, I think that the dwarven race should have shorter apprentice periods because of their general familiarity.

2. After a certain point the smaller gems are useless, and if they cannot be cut they serve no decorative purpose which makes them effectively worthless.

[LegoLord]

Lego, two things:

1. The game might tell us that the craftsmanship of the dwarves is unparalleled, but it does not mention *why*. Assuming that dwarves pop out of the womb with a set of tools and a full knowledge of how to execute complex tasks is silly.

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.