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[Pilsu]

Seems like a pretty hamfisted way of causing grudges

[Rowanas]

Christ, Pilsu. Someone said that they thought we'd get along (after a suggestion I made elsewhere) and I'm starting to think it was an insult. You might just be playing devil's advocate, but please, stop being so bloody negative. Bring a little joy to the forum.

[King_of_the_weasels]

Seems like a pretty hamfisted way of causing grudges

Wouldn't being hamfisted be very dwarven?

[Aquillion]

I dunno. While it'd be fun to play with, it'd be very difficult for Toady to set up the code to understand who killed who.

I think it's something worth doing eventually, though.  A more robust system of assigning blame for events will be necessary when the adventurer skills arc comes out, otherwise adventurers will be able to murder anyone they want using pits and collapses.

What is needed is the ability to assign 'responsibility' for an object or area to a dwarf.  So, for instance, let's say I build something.  Responsibility for the structure (and its component parts) is assigned to me.  If it falls apart on its own and one of its blocks kills someone as it falls, I get blamed, because those blocks have me stored as the responsible party.

When you pull a lever, you take on responsibility for whatever is at the other end, and its component parts.  If you hit a building, or throw something, you take on responsibility for it.  When you dig or destroy a support, you take on responsibility for the surrounding earth (so cave-ins that happen are considered your fault.)

There would also be some rules for 'chaining' responsibility between objects in various logical ways.  For instance, when water or lava passes through a floodgate, anyone who is responsible for that floodgate also becomes responsible for the liquid (so anyone who I drown by opening a floodgate is my fault.)

When you light something on fire, anything that catches on fire from that becomes your responsibility, in a chain, though if someone else throws a flaming object, they assume responsibility for it (because throwing something makes it your responsibility, of course.)

This may result in some odd cases where the wrong person gets blamed, but I think they would tend to be realistic-feeling cases of misplaced blame -- I throw something at the pillar, it collapses for unrelated reasons, I get blamed.  I light something on fire and trick someone into throwing it, they get blamed.  Not so weird.

Possibly responsibility could also have an intensity (how likely what you did is to cause immediate responses -- pulling the lever is a more intense response than digging the channel the water flows through) and a durability (pulling the lever two seasons ago doesn't make you eternally responsible for the lake.)

Perhaps someone should have to see you to start assigning responsibility.  But you get the idea.

[Michael]

I dunno. While it'd be fun to play with, it'd be very difficult for Toady to set up the code to understand who killed who.

I think it's something worth doing eventually, though.  A more robust system of assigning blame for events will be necessary when the adventurer skills arc comes out, otherwise adventurers will be able to murder anyone they want using pits and collapses.

It would be cool, and indeed adventurers-with-dwarfskills may be somewhat broken without it.  But I don't think it's feasible.

Perhaps it wouldn't be that hard to hack up something that can figure out the regicidal contraptions in use today.  But once such a system is "on-duty", players will start obfuscating their noble-drowning setups.

For example, instead of binding a lever to the kill-noble function, use a pressure plate armed to react to friendlies.  Use forbidden doors to seal off the plate, but when it is time for regicide, open the doors and close others to force traffic through the sensor.  Or pit an animal on the far side of the sensor.

Or you could build a dwarfputer that periodically floods the special bedroom, and simply don't assign it when you are in a tolerant mood.


But if it could be accomplished, one other cool thing would be to have nobles value switches in their offices according to what they do.  A farm-flooding switch would have no value, the main entry or trade depot bridge control has some value, and a working P:FTW release lever would be equivalent to an artifact.

But I doubt it will ever be.  Not unless we develop technology to remove the souls of our worst criminals from their brains, install them into computer chips, hook them into DF, and make them roleplay the nobles....

[Pilsu]

Christ, Pilsu. Someone said that they thought we'd get along (after a suggestion I made elsewhere) and I'm starting to think it was an insult. You might just be playing devil's advocate, but please, stop being so bloody negative. Bring a little joy to the forum.

Grudges are a matter of personal relations. Manufacturing grudges by ordering a dwarf to execute his friends in a flooding chamber doesn't really make sense. For one, he only did that because you specifically made him do it and second of all, why does everyone else know about it? Pull lever, receive grudge is pretty hamfisted. No need to take it personally. I suppose technically the player isn't supposed to do that but the issue of instant psychic spreading of information remains. I doubt I'd admit to everyone that it was me that pulled the spike trap before Urist got out of the hallway. I could see a dwarf feel guilty about it but grudges pretty much require that the information is spread. I suppose some dwarves would confess to it based on personality

How would the game track cause and effect? If it can do that, would the dwarf even pull the lever?

[Rowanas]

See, you should have posted that first. Your second post gave a clear indication of why you thought that the proposal was a foolish one, while your first just sounded like a flat-out "lern 2 play" comment. I happen to agree with you, I just don't like the way that you often give no reason or suggestion along with your put down.

[Winterbrass]

I've only been around for a couple of weeks - lurking until I joined the other day - and even I can tell that that is just Pilsu's 'thing' - being... well, the way that Pilsu is. On the other hand, that generally involves being right as well as being a jerk.

[Aquillion]

It would be cool, and indeed adventurers-with-dwarfskills may be somewhat broken without it.  But I don't think it's feasible.

Perhaps it wouldn't be that hard to hack up something that can figure out the regicidal contraptions in use today.  But once such a system is "on-duty", players will start obfuscating their noble-drowning setups.

For example, instead of binding a lever to the kill-noble function, use a pressure plate armed to react to friendlies.  Use forbidden doors to seal off the plate, but when it is time for regicide, open the doors and close others to force traffic through the sensor.  Or pit an animal on the far side of the sensor.

Or you could build a dwarfputer that periodically floods the special bedroom, and simply don't assign it when you are in a tolerant mood.

That's the beauty of it.  The way my idea works, you could rig it so someone always bears ultimate responsibility for anything the dwarves have touched at all.

Dwarfputer?  Whoever built it is ultimately responsible, and that responsibility gets carried to things it triggers.  Floorplate?  Possibly the same, or possibly the last dwarf to walk over it.  For pets you can assign blame to their owner if you have one, or you can just let blame stay with the last person to hold responsibility for the plate (generally, the builder or the last person to walk over it.)

The point isn't to perfectly assign blame in all cases, the point is to find someone to blame, just like with failed noble demands.  Doesn't really matter who gets punished as long as someone gets punished.

Of course, the dwarf to get punished might be dead already.  The game could carry blame to their next of kin if they have any and it really wants to, or it could just have the noble responsible for dealing with this get frustrated that there's nobody they can punish.

Either way, the point is to give the player some sense that something horrible has happened in their fortress, and the dwarves are doing something about it -- it doesn't have to be a perfect response, just a realistic-feeling one.  Spazzing out, holding a show trial, and arresting a random person on trumped-up charges of being a kobold-sympathetic revolutionary would be perfectly fine.

[Rowanas]

Eurgh. No thanks. If EVERYTHING has an associated punishment with it then the player will be unable to do anything except keep the fort in perfect running order and follow the rules. That sounds crap to me.

[corvvs]

One interesting thing about the "responsibility flag" decaying with time idea is that the builder of a contraption might not get blamed for its effects if it was part of something that someone else triggered. BUT he might blame himself!

Cue cries of "No! It wasn't intended to be used for evil!!" Thus eventually the player using the magma pump chamber to kill nobles might drive his chief engineer to melancholy and suicide.

[RedWarrior0]

Of course an init option would be nice.

[JUSTICE:NO]

[Vester]

One interesting thing about the "responsibility flag" decaying with time idea is that the builder of a contraption might not get blamed for its effects if it was part of something that someone else triggered. BUT he might blame himself!

Cue cries of "No! It wasn't intended to be used for evil!!" Thus eventually the player using the magma pump chamber to kill nobles might drive his chief engineer to melancholy and suicide.

That would be perfect.

I mean, can you imagine building a titanic, colossal, beautiful statue of gold and microcline (heh) then finding out that they're going to throw baby cows off it for fun? I would break in half from the abuse.

(The above situation assumes that you still have something sane and good on the inside, as opposed to, say, an adventurer.)

[Rowanas]

Or anyone reading this thread, or in any way connected to DF.

Toady (armok be with him) MUST have times when he looks at what we've done with his creation and think "Fuck it, this pack of child-limb-snapping, noble-tricking, dragon-pillboxing, Mermaid-harvesting, deathmaze-inventing jackals can go ruin someone else's game.

[Aquillion]

Eurgh. No thanks. If EVERYTHING has an associated punishment with it then the player will be unable to do anything except keep the fort in perfect running order and follow the rules. That sounds crap to me.

Only things that would require a punishment, like noble deaths.  And only when they're not killed by an enemy, of course.

And it would be like failing a mandate now -- one dwarf would get punished, through the usual justice system.

Anyway, my idea is less about punishments for everything and more about ensuring that the game can theoretically find someone to blame for anything.  It can then decide whether or not to punish itself -- but optimally, the AI should at least have the capability to recognize responsibility.  Players avoiding suffering from that responsibility by finessing their nobles or some in-game thing is fine.

Players exploiting the limitations of the AI to keep them from realizing that the guy who pulled the lever or who started a fire directly in front of them is not fine.  Therefore, a system of causal responsibility is necessary; deciding when and how that responsibility will be noticed and used is another question.

But optimally, the player (and in-game NPCs) should never escape responsibility just because the AI is too stupid to recognize it.  That's weak.

And when we can't be optimal and assign blame perfectly, we should at least make the AI look like it's behaving intelligently -- grab a reasonable candidate and blame them.  It will look cool from the player's perspective if they get the wrong person blamed in a reasonable fashion (I cause a collapse, the architect gets blamed), rather than looking like they only got away with it because the AI was limited.