Reading this Fortress is for "Everyone" post that attacks men makes me sad. https://medium.com/the-fortress-is-for-everyone/community-generation-e77d90081232 They call Toady and friends "boys".
The "boys"? That's the terminology they're going with?!
(The following is conjecture and is my opinion. Please, for the love of everything that is good in this world, do not take my statements as in any way truthful. I'm just ranting about DF, and that's all it is.)
DF, to me, it's like this super-general formula that just so happens to have every possible function as special cases. After all, why else can you just happen to play as a milkfish, for example, and the game works perfectly fine? It's because DF outright doesn't care if you're doing something strange. All it has is this framework that generalizes the notion of adventuring to
all possible creatures. All it needs to know is that you're playing a creature, then it checks the characteristics of the creature to decide what you're able to do, and what you're not.
What the creature happens to be is irrelevant to the game's functionality, as long as the creature is properly defined in the raws.
Why would anyone go through the effort of doing that, when you could just restrict the range of creatures that you can play as and call it a day? It's because I believe that Toady, mathematician that he is, probably isn't satisfied by doing that. Take 3
2 + 4
2 = 5
2. It's very famous, sure, but it's more interesting for him to have a general formula that generates that as
one out of an infinite number of possible special cases. To bring it back to the context of DF, the fact that you can play as a human, dwarf, elf, goblin and so on and so forth doesn't interest him. Why try and figure out how a specific creature plays, when he can instead figure out an algorithm, a way, to take in some set of inputs, the characteristics of a creature, and let
that figure out how it plays based on what it's given?
The generalized version of that problem would then be "given some set of input parameters relating to a game mechanic, is there an algorithm to "process" these inputs into some output, such that the output is meaningful and "reasonable" (game doesn't crash or do wacky stuff) for a "reasonable" range of inputs?" That, I think, is the the driving force behind DF, and the reason why mods that add in all sorts of stuff that would never make into DF officially can exist. It's because for anything you add in, as long as it can be interpreted by the game, the game can just plug it into one of many general algorithms to figure out what it does. From there, what it figures out is presented to the player as whatever you've added in.
I don't know how to conclude this, but I hope that the gist of what I'm trying to say is at least vaguely coherent.