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[Michael]

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.

Ok, how about this trick:  On a hostile map, build the "special bedroom" in an isolated building outside your fortress defenses.  Then the noble will be killed by the first goblin ambusher party to come along, either in his sleep or while commuting to the fortress proper to eat...

[Pilsu]

That would be the royal guard's fault.

[lucusLoC]

What if there is no fortress guard?

I have to say, this does not sound like a very workable idea to me. To many issues to solve, not enough reward. It would be far more easy, and immersive, to just code up a more elaborate social interaction structure.

[tigrex]

In my humble opinion, dwarves do not have the intellectual or ethical capacity to recognise that pulling a lever will result in the demise of a noble, and neither can they agree or disagree with the morality of such an action.

Holding them responsible for the action is therefore flawed.  Ultimately, the player has committed the act, and since dwarves can only get revenge by lowering the FPS to 1, blaming each other is useless.

Besides, how can any dwarf seek revenge on the lever-puller, when the system works by having the job choose a dwarf?  All of the dwarves were accomplices because all of them would pull the lever if they were asked to.


Finally, I'm of the opinion that my will is law in my forts; I control them and I can delete them.  If elfy dwarves choose to protest my actions, there are plenty more levers that can get pulled...

[ArkDelgato]

In my humble opinion, dwarves do not have the intellectual or ethical capacity to recognise that pulling a lever will result in the demise of a noble, and neither can they agree or disagree with the morality of such an action.

But they should be able to recognize this, and have an opinion on this.
If voices in your head told you to pull a lever, without knowing why or the consequences, would you?
Perhaps once, but never after you get jailed for killing a man with these actions.
Dwarves are commonly seen as pack animals, keeping together. Killing another dwarf is [...:PUNISH_CAPITAL]
If your actions link to the death of someone, you should try to not do that again.

Holding them responsible for the action is therefore flawed.  Ultimately, the player has committed the act, and since dwarves can only get revenge by lowering the FPS to 1, blaming each other is useless.

But the player can't be held responsible for the actions, the player is the train of thought (or something) in the fort. The dwarf that committed the act should be punished. Even if you specified the lever to an unloved cheesemaker, dwarves should start getting edgy at the idea of both killing people, and in turn being hammered for their crimes. Self preservation would make dwarves shirk away from lever pulling duty.

Besides, how can any dwarf seek revenge on the lever-puller, when the system works by having the job choose a dwarf?  All of the dwarves were accomplices because all of them would pull the lever if they were asked to.

You can specify who pulls the lever, but most people don't care, because there is no punishment. If there was punishment, nobody would be inclined to let anyone useful pull the lever. Don't specify the lever, and Murphy's law, your legendary metalsmith has nothing to do, sees a lever, and is branded a heretic and a murderer.

Finally, I'm of the opinion that my will is law in my forts; I control them and I can delete them.  If elfy dwarves choose to protest my actions, there are plenty more levers that can get pulled...

Has ruling with an iron fist ever worked out, ever? People with that general opinion tend to be killed. Rebellion under an iron fist is quite common.

Also a question: Why is rebellion Elfy?
Is it because they would disagree with your opinion on fort-running, and elf is a general catch-all term for bad?
It seems more human to me, elves never struck me as punk-rockers.

[lucusLoC]

how are the peabrains going to know? pull lever and someone dies? what about the lever that opens the doors to the outside, that lets you military out to fight? pull that and someon most likely will die. will no one pull that lever now?

if they know based on what the lever is attached too, then i atach it to a support, wich punches through the bottom of a lake, which drains into a nobles room, who then drowns. drowning has nothingto do with supports. how does the dorf ai fallow that rube goldburg logic?

what if i order the deathlever pulled 10 time with no one in the trap, then kill the noble, then order it pulled 10 more times empty? will that dissasociate the lever with death?

dorfs dont have the brainpower to figure this stuff out, and giving them the brainpower is not worth the effort. especialy if they do not have a choice. and if they did it would just add another level of complexity and weird behavior.

[ArkDelgato]

how are the peabrains going to know? pull lever and someone dies? what about the lever that opens the doors to the outside, that lets you military out to fight? pull that and someon most likely will die. will no one pull that lever now?

The likelihood of pulling an unknown lever would definitely spike down. If this lever is used as an exit, it should be established as an exit, and no one would bat a hair at opening it. If it is a new addition, you may need your architect to give it a few pulls  to re-assure the community. Fear of the unknown and all that.

if they know based on what the lever is attached too, then i atach it to a support, wich punches through the bottom of a lake, which drains into a nobles room, who then drowns. drowning has nothingto do with supports. how does the dorf ai fallow that rube goldburg logic?

Would anyone go through all the trouble to make that, just to kill nobles?
Sounds like a lot of upkeep to have to re-bottom your lake every time someone needs crystal glass.
But, yes, the lever did kill in this scenario too. The dwarf caused the cave in (gives him the responsibility for this, say someone died in the cave in, the puller would be at fault)
The lever causes a hole in the floor (puller is given the jail time for property destruction) and releases the water. The water is now at fault of the puller. The water kills a noble, so noble at fault of puller.

what if i order the deathlever pulled 10 time with no one in the trap, then kill the noble, then order it pulled 10 more times empty? will that dissasociate the lever with death?

Someone would have to just love micromanaging that lake bottom to be re-built to do that 21 times, but no, the deaths would stay on record. If there were two holes in a box, one has killed nobody and contains nothing (0% death rating) the other is usually filled with delicious swiss chocolate, but 1% of the time has deadly scorpions. Would you risk it? Even if it usually doesn't, it still would cause people to shirk away from it.

dorfs dont have the brainpower to figure this stuff out, and giving them the brainpower is not worth the effort. especialy if they do not have a choice. and if they did it would just add another level of complexity and weird behavior.

But they should have the choice. They don't have the capacity to recognize this yet, but they should one day (I am talking about far, far future goals). It should be complex trying to cover up the murder of a well loved political official. People still have conspiracies about JFK, but imagine if it was a conspiracy? There would be hell to pay for doing it.

I guess what I am trying to do is convince people that you shouldn't go around killing nobles for having outlandish likes and demands, and to grit your teeth and go along with it.

[lucusLoC]

there are better ways to have that happen, like the king sending a squad to your fort to "keep the peace"

and there are other ways arround the issue as well. what if my deathlever is attached to my main gate? the noble dies every time a siege shows up, but not pulling the lever means everyone dies. is the puller a hero or a murderer?

and i dissagree that it would be easy (or even possible) for the ai to make the link from lever to support to drowning. it is easy for a player, but the ai would have to be made aware of  each individual link explicitly. and as far as the "property destruction" goes, how does the ai know its actualy wanted? what if i want to get rid of that floor, in a safe, controlled manner? or what if it is a goblin smashing machine? the ai has absolutly no in game way to tell the difference.

[ArkDelgato]

there are better ways to have that happen, like the king sending a squad to your fort to "keep the peace"

Why would the king of Dwarves, who has better things to do than dabble in the affairs of your fort send a peace keeping squad? How would that work? A seige? Would they just kill the one responsible? If so, why not let your fortress law do it?

and there are other ways arround the issue as well. what if my deathlever is attached to my main gate? the noble dies every time a siege shows up, but not pulling the lever means everyone dies. is the puller a hero or a murderer?

Why would you have a lever that kills nobles and is the main gate?
That's poor use of Mechanics.
Regardless, if you did for some sadomasochistic reason link a death lever to the main gate, that has a history of killing goblins and a history of saving the fort, the dwarves personality would come into play.
Is he a pacifist? He wouldn't do it
Is he terrified of goblins? He'd do it

and i dissagree that it would be easy (or even possible) for the ai to make the link from lever to support to drowning. it is easy for a player, but the ai would have to be made aware of  each individual link explicitly. and as far as the "property destruction" goes, how does the ai know its actualy wanted? what if i want to get rid of that floor, in a safe, controlled manner? or what if it is a goblin smashing machine? the ai has absolutly no in game way to tell the difference.

I guess the property destruction is misplaced in my first analysis, but I thought puncturing the bottom of the lake was something not desired by the dwarves.
If it was designed for killing goblins, why is it in the nobles quarters? (Or above a lake that is linked to the nobles quarters) You would have had to re-bed the lake every time you wanted to re-use the trap (more bad architecture).

Without that, the water released by puncturing the lake bed would still be at fault of the lever puller, or at least the architects guild.
Would you blame a construction worker for dropping a metal beam on a pedestrian, or the construction company?

[lucusLoC]

Without that, the water released by puncturing the lake bed would still be at fault of the lever puller, or at least the architects guild.
Would you blame a construction worker for dropping a metal beam on a pedestrian, or the construction company?

my point is not what we the player sees, but what the dorfs see. at most they would see a lever linked to a support. to get the level of dept that you envisoin the would need

1. lever attached to support
2. support attached to wall
3. they would have to make the leap of understanding that loosing the support makes the wall fall, unless the wall is attched to somehting else. this is the first big hurdle, as it requires spacial reasoning.
4. that that falling wall does damage to the surrounding terrain.
5. that taht falling wall drained the lake. more spatial resoning is involved here, as well as cause and effect.
6. that the water from that lake flooded the noble quarters. requires spacial resoning and a working knoledge of how the fluids work.
7. that the flood killed the noble and not something else.

that is a verry high level ai. it is not just linking cause and effect, it is resoning. i would venture to guess that this might be beyond even managment ai, as most of that can be hard coded resopnces to a limited set of inputs. this is asking the computer to understand what you just built, and make a decision to act based on that knoledge.

can it be done? possible, but maybe not within the confines of the game.
is it worth doing? nope. not with all the other things that can be done. if we are going to get ai this good, i would rather it be applied to sieges, and not waste cpu cycles on this.

i am not tyring to be a killjoy, just pointing out reality.

[ArkDelgato]

Dwarf fortress will get there though.
All it takes is time.

We will have complex crime scene investigation, cell division, complex mechanics, and perhaps mixed drinks.

What I was talking about was for a far, far future scenario, which focuses on game balance.

You shouldn't be able to get away with killing a person, even with a crazy rube goldberg machine.

[RedWarrior0]

However, the dwarves would still get the idea: lever pulled, noble died.

Edit: Ninja'd

[tigrex]

It is my belief that a court should accept 'Rube Goldbergian' as a plea in murder cases, and weigh in both the awesomeness and the bizarreness of the device used when sentencing.

Back on topic.  If this is a far-future suggestion, it stands to reason that nobles will be significantly altered.  Next release should have forts choosing a baron from within their own population.  Hopefully noble-killing will be a less popular sport in the future, when dwarves can read your mind and refuse your orders.

[Pilsu]

Dwarven law seems curiously uninterested in the people who assembled the drowning chamber now linked to the farm irrigation lever. Who cares, just behead the farmer!

An AI capable of handling this kind of thing intelligently would baffle the leading roboticists of the planet. Even making dwarves decide whether a casualty in a spike trap incident during a siege is justified would be daunting, let alone handling Rube Goldberg murders. And as said already, the dwarf didn't have a choice in the matter to begin with

[Sunken]

As a roboticist who is trying to glean a Ph.D. degree from spatial reasoning, I have to agree; it will probably be at least fifty more years before the state-of-the-art reaches a level where any artificial system can do the reasoning necessary for the lake scenario above, barring a complete paradigm shift in AI (which I'm hoping for daily...).

Sure, you can program very specific cases - you can have dwarfs learn that pulling a lever is highly correlated with the death of *someone* within a short time period. To learn the pattern of *who* might be killed, or *where*, or even by *what* is really challenging. To try and learn *why* (the causal chain) - that's just fairyland level AI.

All that said, I'd gladly put a career into it... it's really interesting stuff and would be awesome in a game.

As for assigning blame and justice, that's beyond AI - philosophers and lawmakers still can't agree on the proper principles for these things to this day. That can be decided on arbitrarily by the game designer though, obviously.