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[PermanentInk]

I had played fortress mode almost exclusively up to now, but tonight I took a little peek at Legends and it gave me some ideas.  The one I really like so far is the idea of all the legend knowledge being managed by an oral history system.  Dwarves would know legends as stories told to one another and remembered to be passed down over time.  So the dwarf who etches a picture of a flaming elephant striking down a dwarf into the wall would do it because he knows that story.  He knows the story because he was there to see it, or he heard it from someone who saw it, or he heard it from a dwarf who heard it from a dwarf whose mother's cousin's dwarf in law's brother says he was there.

Stories about historical events (or other things?  dwarven poetry?) could be related from one creature to another in any social contact.  Dwarves of family relation or long acquaintance would know pretty much all of each other's stories, whereas the merchants might only have time to swap a tale or two on each annual visit, bringing news from lands abroad.  A dwarf (or adventurer) encountering a new engraving might learn the story it represents and add it to its repertoire.

Story content might change over time as well, with individual storytellers forgetting or adjusting aspects of the story.  Perhaps an egotistical dwarf makes himself sound more heroic.  Perhaps a liar makes stories up from whole cloth, claiming counterfeit feats of battle.

I think this would open up a lot of interesting doors to exploring how dwarves have individual lives (and knowledge) that interact in complex and entertaining ways.  What do you guys think?

[Rowanas]

hmmm... complex. Sounds good, but it would mean EVEN MORE work for toady (armok be with him)

[PermanentInk]

Well, a lot of what's there is optional what-would-you-do-with-it-once-you-built-it; the core mechanic seems pretty approachable from a programming perspective.  What's the minimal version of this feature?  I'd say it boils down to:

• Knowledge can be represented in a data structure and translated into string descriptions such as those on dwarf-created images/engravings (I'm presuming this capability exists already to some extent, as used in images/engravings, Legends, etc.).
• Dwarves have a knowledge base of stories/historical knowledge -- basically, just a list of the above data structures.
• When dwarves interact (same trigger as leveling up social skills like Flattery), call a function which swaps some of their stories at random.
• When an event occurs, witnesses record it in their knowledge base.  This would trigger off of the same event that puts an entry into the Legends archive.  You could consider every creature currently on the map a witness, to keep things simple.

I think that's pretty doable.  I don't want to presume too much, since this is off-the-cuff and I don't know much about the code architecture, efficiency issues, etc., but a basic version of the above seems like something that could be coded up in a day or two, especially by someone intimately familiar with the system in question.

Part of what gave me this idea was looking around in Legends mode, since it gives a more explicit picture of what data the game tracks and how it's organized.  It's clear the necessary information is there -- you could even just take a raw text dump of all that information and process it with a script to accomplish the core logic of this feature.  Doing it inside the game would be even easier than that, because you wouldn't have to parse the stuff.

[Sowelu]

I'm pretty sure that this is already in the list of things-to-implement.  I know that individuals or groups actually knowing stories is planned, and it's planned for them to know FALSE stories sometimes.  Makes sense that stories changing over time would be in there too.

[Pilsu]

What would this practically mean? That Legends mode would consist of folklore instead of a meticulous construction report?

[PermanentInk]

Hmm, cool.  Do you know where?  I'm sifting through the list and don't see anything in the v1 arcs or Core items that seems close.  Possible close matches include:

• Req190, CREATURE KNOWLEDGE, (Future): Need to diversify likes/dislikes beyond dwarves, and they need to apply to creatures in adventure mode.
• Bloat27, ABSTRACT KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM, (Future): Implement a more abstract "knowledge" system. Right now it tracks what items a civilization uses and what creatures it has seen, but there could be general things like how good their crossbow making knowledge is or even points of philosophy and law, etc. Knowledge could be transferred, lost and rediscovered.
• Bloat196, VILLAGE STORIES, (Future): Profiles can track the last few spots the creature has been at with the associated years, and they could refer to this while chatting. Certain people could stretch these years out of bounds and talk about ancient things not involving them and write themselves into the story.
• PowerGoal7, THE ONE LEFT BEHIND, (Future): You have a conversation with somebody whose parent died in a war.
• PowerGoal31, YOUR DAD AND JUSTICE, (Future): You wipe the blood off your sword, revealing the name of your father's tribe, which reminds you that justice has been served. Bards sing of this moment through the empire.

Those are the closest I could find after looking through them all, but none are really what I'm talking about here (though they fit with it)

[PermanentInk]

What would this practically mean? That Legends mode would consist of folklore instead of a meticulous construction report?

Well, there's an extent to which this is an infrastructural idea.  If entity knowledge of events was modeled in this way, many possible extension points (such as the ideas mentioned in my original post) present themselves for exploitation.  Legends mode could be expanded, for example, to let you see the stories an entity knows and view their details.

In Adventure mode, this infrastructure would help entities tell you relevant things.  Ask about local history and you'll hear from everyone in town about last year's goblin siege of the village down the river, and how the few survivors straggled to this neighboring settlement and shared their tale of woe.  And of course, there will be those times when a story dies because no one was left alive to tell the tale.

In dwarf mode, existing and future ways in which dwarves express lore (engravings, etc.) would reflect their knowledge set.  You'd be able to observe trends in storytelling.  We already see some of this based on preference -- dwarves seem to love telling tales about local mayoral elections and such.  Storytelling would enrich these trends.  Merchants would come one year and share their stories; the next year, they could come back and you could sell them goods adorned with images based on those stories!

Another cool idea associated with this would be dwarven work songs.  A happy dwarf might sing a song of lore while toiling away in his workshop.  Other dwarves could learn the song (and story) by hearing it, and might react positively or negatively based on the content.  And of course, there's that eternal threat of dwarven poetry...

[Vactor]

Some sort of weighting of events would also have to be fleshed out, right now the entire world would hear about an artifact leather mug for generations while the regicide of a king might be spoken of once.

[Chutney]

Some sort of weighting of events would also have to be fleshed out, right now the entire world would hear about an artifact leather mug for generations while the regicide of a king might be spoken of once.

Well, the king is a noble, and thus unimportant. Artifacts, however, are VERY important.
So that would be working as intended...