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[Pilsu]

I don't much care for a system telling me a dwarf who just lost all his kids to goblin rape squads is ecstatic just because she has a nice room. Pretty much anything is better than that. Mood should affect behavior, not just act as a gauge on how close someone is to suicide and permanent insanity, triggered by such horrible events such as seeing 3 cockroaches in a row and not having an extravagant dining room to soothe the memory of this soul crushing event. Considering how fickle dwarven mental health is, I don't think it's a stretch to claim the system as is entirely, fundamentally broken

Mood could affect productivity and behavior instead. The system bears quite some resemblance to the moodlets in the Sims 3 come to think of it, how does that game handle mood?

[Felblood]

Maybe we should split happiness and mental health into two separate values, for dwarves that are grieving, but coping thanks to their own quality of life. That way things that sadden people can prevent them from being ecstatic, without making them go insane all the time.

"Urist McSurvivor has been miserable and depressed lately, but he seems to be coping extremely well. He lost 2 friends to tragedy, recently. He lost a brother to tragedy, recently. He slept in a room like a personal palace recently. He was comforted by a pet recently. etc. etc."

He'd be exactly as stable as the ecstatic mourners we have now, he'll just draw a lot less ire from people who hate the current format.

Justice to murderers and honorable deaths could help people cope, without actually making them happy, since I like to tie my posts to the actual topic of the thread.

[irmo]

If happiness/mental stability/morale gets reworked, I'd like to see something like the system for wounds. That is, instead of one number that indicates how wounded or not-wounded you are (such as lesser games might have), track several aspects of emotional health and allow each one to be injured or healed by events. For example, "Aesthetics" would be hurt by living in an ugly environment, encountering vermin, producing shoddy goods, etc., and helped by seeing things of beauty. "Security": hurt by being attacked or seeing friends get attacked, helped by killing or wounding an enemy, seeing a Fortress Guard on patrol, seeing well-made doors, traps, and arms, etc. Other categories could include Comfort, Friendship, and Work.

For most of these, there could be a "failsafe" behavior that would trigger when the accumulated injuries reached a certain level. (Security: Acquire a set of armor if you can, and then go to the barracks and spar with the soldiers. Comfort: Drink a lot of really good booze in the best dining room you can find. Aesthetics: Go walking in a statue garden or legendary meeting hall. Friendship: Hold an impromptu party with your family and friends.) This would be disruptive (like being On Break, you can't cancel it and it takes the dwarf off work for a while) but would rapidly heal much of the damage.

If that's not enough (personality traits would influence the exact limits), the dwarf has some kind of freak-out. For example, a guy who loses three masterworks in a row might blow right past the failsafe and go into an Aesthetics-fueled rage. The cause of the injuries would be tracked, so he can direct his wrath at the people who broke his stuff if they're available.

[Pilsu]

Both are really good but I don't think having a separate environment aesthetics gauge is necessary. Righteous anger's targets can be tracked directly. If the system gets refined a bit (IE bolts and weapons breaking not causing hissy fits), it could even cause grudges. Dwarves make friends too easily as is, especially with kids. Having several gauges would either make dwarves throw hissy fits over trivial things like poor furniture while they eat food fit for a king or at the other end, are so easily sated that the gauge does nothing at all. There are better ways to prevent constant ecstasy resulting from something silly


How would you handle major tragedy in the two gauge system? Should the short term mood be capped for some time, slowly trickling to the long term one? How slowly? How much bad treatment would it take to make an ecstatic dwarf plunge into madness? "Ecstatic" should probably have much, much higher requirements, it's not a very good baseline..

Personally I think being sad should have actual effects beyond just madness. If your lifelong spouse dies, you're not gonna want to make swords and other useless garbage. Depending on personality the dwarf could mope in his house or some secluded spot. The angrier ones would pick fights and start yelling at those tangentially responsible, IE skilled miners when cave-in was the culprit. Basically, the game would apply a debuff, say Depressed that stops the dwarf from working or slows it. Having friends to comfort you could lower it's duration, assuming the dwarf in question is sociable enough to not drive them away. Seeing dwarves have personalities, I suppose not every dwarf should react like that. Dwarves that get easily depressed would do so much easier than stoics. A complete stoic wouldn't care about anyone dying whereas a depressive one would collapse into a heap from relatively minor things like parents dying of old age

Dwarves that don't care about anything anymore would of course be immune. That tag would probably have to mean something though, killing bunnies shouldn't steel your heart to death of comrades

[Felblood]

If your lifelong spouse dies, you're not gonna want to make swords and other useless garbage. Depending on personality the dwarf could mope in his house or some secluded spot.

I'd just like to point out that, just like in real life, those extreme reactions are dangerous and unhealthy. Standoffish dwarves or ones with depressive tendencies might should do that, but most dwarves should seek solace in things they enjoy, rather than hiding under the bedsheets. Urist McMourner should cuddle his  cat, lose himself in his work, go down to the dining hall and meet some new people, or have a quiet gathering with his family.

If Urist does want to sit in his room and mope, while his few remaining happy thoughts time out (including his work satisfaction) and his will to live fades away, sociable or highly aware friends should come to him, and try to comfort him. If they are unskilled in persuasion or he's simply that taciturn, he can rebuff them.

Really, this opens up dozens of ways for the various social skills and personality traits to interact, in ways that can, in turn, grow into interesting, story like patterns of events. Otherwise, it is exactly the same as what we are simulating right now, except with a more fine grained level of detail.

As to dwarves having various "fail-safes" that trip if they get to many bad thoughts in a similar category, I think this is a good idea, but it might be too limiting. I don't think I'd be good to break things down into too many categories, or have it be possible for a single large thought to effectively eradicate several small thoughts.

That is too say, the categories should be relatively few (There's no reason to separate the quality of a meal from the quality of the dining room, as they're part of the same experience, etc.), and they should have either a very wide range or no caps at all.

[Pilsu]

Tying it to social skills doesn't always work. Anyone who's made a friend would probably have the raw skill level to pass the check. As is, social skills are purely learned and individual capacity is totally ignored. At any rate, comforting shouldn't just make the debuff go away immediately. That's just video gamey. More likely, having friends that care would boost your sanity, not instantly make you feel better. Duration of the blues would certainly go down

Yes, not all dwarves should mope but most of them should react aversely in one way or another

[nil]

If happiness/mental stability/morale gets reworked, I'd like to see something like the system for wounds. That is, instead of one number that indicates how wounded or not-wounded you are (such as lesser games might have), track several aspects of emotional health and allow each one to be injured or healed by events. For example, "Aesthetics" would be hurt by living in an ugly environment, encountering vermin, producing shoddy goods, etc., and helped by seeing things of beauty. "Security": hurt by being attacked or seeing friends get attacked, helped by killing or wounding an enemy, seeing a Fortress Guard on patrol, seeing well-made doors, traps, and arms, etc. Other categories could include Comfort, Friendship, and Work.

For most of these, there could be a "failsafe" behavior that would trigger when the accumulated injuries reached a certain level. (Security: Acquire a set of armor if you can, and then go to the barracks and spar with the soldiers. Comfort: Drink a lot of really good booze in the best dining room you can find. Aesthetics: Go walking in a statue garden or legendary meeting hall. Friendship: Hold an impromptu party with your family and friends.) This would be disruptive (like being On Break, you can't cancel it and it takes the dwarf off work for a while) but would rapidly heal much of the damage.

If that's not enough (personality traits would influence the exact limits), the dwarf has some kind of freak-out. For example, a guy who loses three masterworks in a row might blow right past the failsafe and go into an Aesthetics-fueled rage. The cause of the injuries would be tracked, so he can direct his wrath at the people who broke his stuff if they're available.

I like this idea, very much in the spirit of the game.  Perhaps Toady could do something riffed off of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: basic needs (nourishment and health) must be met before one tries to fulfill intermediate needs (security and social stuff) which in turn are necessary to fulfill higher order needs (aesthetics etc).

[Felblood]

I don't mean to say that being comforted by a friend is going to make all Urist's problems seem irrelevant; I just want a system in place to ensure that a moping dwarf isn't a completely lost cause. We need a system that at least gives him a chance to stay sane until he's done grieving, even if he decides to mope, or people are going to lock them in and let them starve.

Urist McMourner has been miserable and depressed lately. He had a good sulk in a room like a personal palace recently. He was consoled by a friend recently. He lost a child to tragedy recently. etc. etc.

Likewise, I'm not saying that the current system of social interaction is balanced for something like this. Tying a new mechanic like this into it would require a lot of non-trivial tweaks. At the very least, It'd have to wait for meetings to get re-tooled.

[chucks]

From the devlog, Toady has done work on priests.  I'm not sure how much of the grieving/upset/happy system needs to be changed, but it would be very cool if the priesthood could be tasked with attending to the confessions, grievances, upsets, and mourning of your population.

It could be as simple as having a mild happy thought to a very happy thought (depending on the level of the priest's social & religious related skills with some mild randomness thrown in), to a complete overhaul of the system.  Upset dwarves could be comforted by friends, but being comforted by a friend with minor bonuses due to the friends potentially low or mid level social skills vs. being comforted by an official dwarf with the market cornered on the whole word from the divine stuff and high level social skills would make a difference.

It would be something like the fortress guard, but something like the fortress priesthood.  Not so useful of small and would only require 1 or 2 fulltime dwarves in a medium size fortress, but a large fortress could definitely have some very interesting cathedral megaprojects.

I also have no doubt that someone will find some way to make a dwarvish inquistion, and I would love to see movies of it on DF map archive.

[Byakugan01]

<snip>I also have no doubt that someone will find some way to make a dwarvish inquistion, and I would love to see movies of it on DF map archive.</snip>

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH DWARFISH INQUISITION!
On a more serious note, it would be nice to have a priesthood that helped to console dwarves. I just lost a fort to a tantrum spiral that resulted from one dwarf getting killed by a carp as they went to go and collect wood (damn it, I thought I had exterminated the damned things already! TWICE!). Having some kind of church/confession stand/way to seek spiritual guidance for the dwarves available might have prevented that, since their only source of respite seemed to be in going berserk one by one. ALL of them.

[Pilsu]

I don't mean to say that being comforted by a friend is going to make all Urist's problems seem irrelevant; I just want a system in place to ensure that a moping dwarf isn't a completely lost cause. We need a system that at least gives him a chance to stay sane until he's done grieving, even if he decides to mope, or people are going to lock them in and let them starve.

Urist McMourner has been miserable and depressed lately. He had a good sulk in a room like a personal palace recently. He was consoled by a friend recently. He lost a child to tragedy recently. etc. etc.

Likewise, I'm not saying that the current system of social interaction is balanced for something like this. Tying a new mechanic like this into it would require a lot of non-trivial tweaks. At the very least, It'd have to wait for meetings to get re-tooled.

As discussed earlier, short term unhappiness wouldn't make them snap no matter how terrible things are. It'd have an effect on the long term sanity so if the dwarf is consistently losing everyone she cares about and living in a dirt hut, she'd be sure to snap eventually. Insanity would probably be rather rare, the new penalty for poor treatment in the short term being poor productivity

I don't much care for priest's comforting being more effective than your friends. A good funeral ceremony would go a long way in reducing unhappiness though. More so when it's a soldier that died in battle and gets a hero's burial. Speaking of which, I wish I could chisel dead soldiers' names on a wall in memory of their sacrifice.. Also, the level of religiousness should have an effect. Dwarves that don't much care for religion probably don't want to talk to the clergy. Alternatively, a good priest might even make them more religious in search of comfort

[mickel]

Of course, the way that people cope with personal tragedy differs a lot, and it would make sense for it to be that way with dwarfs too. Maybe dwarfs who lost, say, a spouse, might set out to create a work of art in memory of their loved one? Dwarfs seem predisposed for that sort of thing.

[Rakeela]

Nonreligious dwarfs who get 'comforted' by a priest seem like they ought to have a risk of getting more upset.  Perhaps dependent on some skill of the priest.  Either they get more cheerful, or they get more upset, or they ignore the priest.
Was comforted by a priest lately. (good)
Was annoyed by a priest lately. (bad)
Talked with a meddling priest lately. (neutral)
Dealt with a meddling priest lately. (Fell)

Okay, maybe not the last one.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Rakeela: That brings up a good point. How do dwarfs view their clergy? What's the relationship there?

I'd suggest atleast the potential for a little fear/awe, possibly to the point where the question of whether a priest is "meddling" (even when clearly he *is*) may not be addressed--atleast consciously.

Remember that they aren't us, not in species, or culture, or even psychology. When it comes to something like religion, things could get very interesting, from our perspective.

[hector]

Rakeela: That brings up a good point. How do dwarfs view their clergy? What's the relationship there?

I'd suggest atleast the potential for a little fear/awe, possibly to the point where the question of whether a priest is "meddling" (even when clearly he *is*) may not be addressed--atleast consciously.

Remember that they aren't us, not in species, or culture, or even psychology. When it comes to something like religion, things could get very interesting, from our perspective.

This could also tie into how devout the Dwarves themselves are, seeing as that's already being tracked.