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[Savok]

Thank you. That's what I've been failing to say.

[Ignoro]

Why are you letting a novice cut diamonds? That's stupid, real life or in a game

I may not have a master gem cutter, or enough gems to train him far, and even a grand master could fail on the occasion (and he would eventually if I trust him with all my upmost valuable gems). The increase in value of the gems is still worth the gamble that some may be lost entirely. Regardless of me still making profit whether or not a few are lost, it would irritate me when a unique one is lost by chance.

Felblood has this well laid out.
1: I already said my opinion on this, but here it is again: Only if you have the choice to allow it for mass production.

2: No, he shouldn't learn what he doesn't know. Gradual local advancement would level out that skill imbalance I was talking about earlier by decreasing the skill gap between Dwarves with time. This is starting to tie in with that 'inventors' suggestion as: how would a fort learn to build master bridges if no one can yet?

[profit]

Just a reminder to all who are complaining that this will affect late game when immigrants arrive....

You do know there are min and max levels you can set on the workshops right?

You can set dabbler to high master to make cut green glass gems and then use a workshop who only accepts legendary crafters make your blue diamonds..

I used gems in this example but its kinda a bad example because I discovered gems have no quality modifiers... oddly...

[LegoLord]

I'm sorry, Lego, I'm sure that you're a perfectly intelligent guy, but this... not quite so much.

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.

Also, large gems are NOT completely based on skill. Only a few gems start out as large, and it takes a highly skilled gem cutter to have a decent chance at keeping them at an unusual size. Or at least, that's the effect that the game mechanics have, which only allow a gem to be cut large x% of the time, regardless how high the skill of the crafter gets.

That is exactly my point.  Don't call me stupid;  I was talking about how the game works.  Jerk.

Still, no. Gems are really hard to cut.

So that should imply that gems are really hard to crush into an unusable powder.  So gems shouldn't get absolute fail.

That seems a fairly solid suggestion for implementation, but there are a few problems:

Carpentry:  Sawdust?  Guy makes a mistake big enough mistake to make the wood unusable for what he's trying to do, and the wood gets completely dusted?

Masonry:  The "stone" items aren't really giant boulders.  The are piles of stones, which are carved into suitable shapes and assembled.  Stone is tougher than it looks too; most of it anyway.  Taking a chip out of floodgate quality stone would take a lot of effort.  It would be hard to destroy it by accident.

Really, I think Ignoro's got it exactly right.

Masonry: Exactly, taking a chip of floodgate quality stone takes a lot of effort. Kinda like the effort we're applying all over the place with hand tools.

So you're now saying it should be hard to completely destroy the stone you are working with, yes?

Even with some sort of fake skill value, there's still no sense of control over the outcome.

Best argument I've heard this whole thread.  I've been trying to work out how to say it, but it just never came out right.  I hate it when that happens.  Not you saying it, just me explaining things poorly.

Like right now.

Then don't have a merely competent craftsdwarf cut a legendary gem! Only a moron would do that.

Excuse me, but how does that solve the problem he was talking about?  You still get random failures for other things.  You will at some times need to have all dwarves working.  Random failures you cannot have any control over would just be a nuisance. 

Oh and Pilsu, if you only have a novice architect, and you need a bridge, badly, and it failed, killing some equally necessary people, where would the fun be?

Granite, I like to have sieges attack my fort, have merchants, megabeasts, everything, and be able to build stuff, so don't use that argument.

Bjlong:  what does my mod have to do with this 

[profit]

Stuff..

What if the chance to fail was only checked if the item made was of the lowest quality.  So.. if you had a dwarf with a bit of skill it would NEVER happen.

That was my idea ages ago because I too thought a legendary carpenter turning a log into splinters trying to make a chair was kinda wrong.  Only rank noobies could create failures, so basically this is just for flavor and not for any real change to the fortress as most people have legendary crafters doing all their work after the first couple years.

As for the bridge failure scenario, although in my version of this i never envisioned it would cause buildings to fail.. What if the failures could only happen at the moment of completion... so if you had a noob building a bridge, when he finished it, it would do its quality check and if it failed it would collapse that instant, killing no one because no one could have walked onto the bridge yet.

Still dont know why this topic gets people so hot under the collar,  I fail to see how it would really affect gameplay one way or the other unless failures were massively extended to include when the item was being used or if all skill levels could somehow fail.

I see this as a realism enhancement that is just barely noticeable enough to add... I mean... a few lost stones training a stonecutter.... a couple extra piles of woodchips training a carpenter maybe...  30 seconds longer to get a piece of plate armor.

3 years into a fortress life... Where you have your workshops set to use skilled labor this would have the effect of..... 

ZILCH, NADDA, NOTHING.

Yeah.. real exciting change and certainly warranted so much discussion.

 

[G-Flex]

Oh and Pilsu, if you only have a novice architect, and you need a bridge, badly, and it failed, killing some equally necessary people, where would the fun be?

Er, that's perfectly reasonable, actually. If some piss-poor architect is in way over his head and trying to design a substantially-long bridge, it makes perfect sense that it might not hold up very well.

[bjlong]

I couldn't think of a better word for it at the time. A never fail mod, basically. I called it a lego mod because the constructions would be like snap-together building blocks, rather than slowly crumbling walls.

[mickel]

Actually, crushing a gem is quite easy. And that's not the only way you can fail when cutting one. Simply cutting it the wrong way will ruin it. And it's not like you can reheat it and bake it together into a new one.

As to why anyone would allow a beginner to cut gems. Well... how else will they learn how to do it?

[irmo]

This brings us to the second issue, that has crept in: Should an accountant, lost in the tundra, and forced to build a shelter from ice cubes, eventually gain enough construction skills to build elaborate bridges from ice?

No, he should freeze to death. The game gives you the ability to start with a mix of appropriate construction and frontier-survival skills. If you don't, and you embark to an inhospitable climate, you should fail.

This has less to do with the skills and talents of the dwarf in question being deficient, than the local level of technological advancement (zero, effectively) being insufficient to support his growth.

Given that we're talking about a small outpost of a larger civilization, and a culture of oral tradition, the "technology level" consists mostly of the skills and talents of the dwarves. This shouldn't be abstracted away.

They are standing on the shoulders of giants in the sense that they didn't invent mining or metalwork themselves, and they are bringing advanced tools to get started. But their "technology level" consists of what they know how to do.

A while back I proposed that an unskilled person shouldn't be able to start doing a job at all unless someone at the site has some minimum level of skill (probably the level above Novice). This represents the need for a trained dwarf to bring the knowledge, without actually tying up dwarves with teaching/apprenticeship jobs. It also makes the bazillion "Soap Maker" immigrants marginally more useful.

[LegoLord]

Oh and Pilsu, if you only have a novice architect, and you need a bridge, badly, and it failed, killing some equally necessary people, where would the fun be?

Er, that's perfectly reasonable, actually. If some piss-poor architect is in way over his head and trying to design a substantially-long bridge, it makes perfect sense that it might not hold up very well.

Which is all fine and dandy in realism terms, but in real life, it is also a pain in the butt when it happens.  Same thing with a game.  And you can't really assign a building to be built by a specific person, and if you could, that would be excessive micro-management. 

Dealing with unusable items produced by failures would also be a pain if you ask me, ignoring the other arguments against the unusable-item-produced suggestion.
"GAAH!  I used all that stone to get rid of all this stuff lying around!  Now there's just more of it, only now I can't even trade it away! AAARRRRRGGH!"

And I like that last idea of yours, irmo.  I suggested something similar awhile back too, but it was more involved.  And really, it knocks out one of the major arguments for failures; any dwarf can do anything (not perfectly, so don't say anything about that.  If it ain't masterpiece, it ain't perfect).

[Boogerman]

If there were other ways to train dwarves with a skill, this idea would work.
Right now, you absolutely have to get your mason making tables/gem cutter cutting gems/architect designing buildings to get any increases in skill, so this idea would just make it needlessly annoying.

[Pilsu]

Oh and Pilsu, if you only have a novice architect, and you need a bridge, badly, and it failed, killing some equally necessary people, where would the fun be?

You're doing something wrong if you ever get into a situation where you quickly need a bridge of all things. It's all your fault thus you don't get to complain. Might as well whine when your novice recruits die because you didn't feel like making them spar yet

Where's the fun in not being able to make some dabbling moron design the bridge invaders use?

As to why anyone would allow a beginner to cut gems. Well... how else will they learn how to do it?

You don't start with diamonds

Being able to buy uncut gems would be nice

[Footkerchief]

Where's the fun in not being able to make some dabbling moron design the bridge invaders use?

I wonder if that was the motivation for this:

Bloat298, IMPERFECT CONSTRUCTIONS, (Future): You should be able to intentionally build submasterpiece buildings and items.

[Flaede]

I think hte motivation for that was more that if you're planning on pulling a lever and toppling that building, you don't want to worry about it having been masterpiecery.

[Pilsu]

Or making rooms for the working class without accidentally making them so nice the king throws a hissy fit and kills himself even if his royal lodgings are much bigger and twice as royal as the rest

Seems kinda silly of a mechanic to begin with though. I can see him demanding to have the best room in the fort but outright demanding that peasant rooms be made worse should probably be something determined in the entity file. I.e. [PRETENTIOUS] tag