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[praguepride]

Did you read my post about dwarven problem solvers?

And I'd say DF is about surviving a hostile RNG rather then a "world"

I mean, I can't count the number of times I tried colonizing a terrifying biome and it stuck my dudes right smack in the middle of some horde of skeletons.

The worst was the skeleton eagle attack! I didn't even have time to disband my wagon 

I think wizards should be chaos incarnate, but balanced, so they're as useful as often as not. However, I don't think we should be able to micromanage magic like we do our barrel production. Giving full control of magic to the user makes it mundane and boring, it becomes just another ho-hum resource to produce.

Now compare that to someone lamenting about how a dwarven wizard turned all his traps into hositile enemies. And then someone else comes on laughing saying his wizard just spontaneously turned a group of invaders into iron statues. It might be frustrating at times, but that would only make those joyous occasions when the wizard saves your butt that much more special.

It would be ordinary if everyone's wizard was helpful...

[SirHoneyBadger]

Those random events might have some passing entertainment value, praguepride, but what about the player that spent all that time carefully laying those traps?

Your first example negates the traps, themselves. The second negates their worth. Neither is particularly rewarding, whatever the comic currency (which, by the way, would depreciate very rapidly).


I don't mind landing in the middle of a horde of skeletons, because that's the risk I run by colonizing a terrifying biome.  A choice was made.

As far as equating magic to barrel production: Barrels are dull. It's what you put in them.

[praguepride]

And keeping nobles alive is a choice.

And I really don't see your point in your argument. I don't think anyone here would be upset that a dwarven wizard defeated an invading horde by themselves. It's not like a seige won't trigger next year.

And besides, if you're going to nitpick examples then MY examples were talking about completely different things. In fact, the fort in the second example (turning gobbos to statues) didn't even have traps. His fort was completely undefended and the wizard saved the day so 

And anyway, your point about "what about all the time the player put into it..." falls on deaf ears for me. DF can be VERY unforgiving. You can design the most beautiful fortress and then cry because one bad thing triggers an unstoppable tantrum spiral. If you've played any other Bay12 game you'll know that all of them are very brutal, often in random ways. It's what makes losing Fun.


And finally, look at the "legends" of the forums. Quite a few of them are due to random events or extreme player dedication. You don't see people posting and recounting tails about how stuff went exactly as planned

[SirHoneyBadger]

So you're in favor of the player being superfluous.

[Galdemore]

I would recommend not making Dwarf Fortress in to final fantasy and giving this over the top magical energy directly to the player. This game thrives on the player losing his "stuff" when "stuff" goes wrong.

Magic is always boring to me when it is used as a plot device. The very word Magic implies a mystical attribute that is not simply tampered with for personal benefit.

If you're willing to alter the way that the physical universe works, you should be prepared for the universe turning around and biting you in the ass.

BESIDES: All good magic relies upon sacrifice. If you aren't willing to give up your security as a fortress for a little fast acting power, you shouldn't be fooling around with the stuff of gods.

[Norseman]

I think everything good that comes from magic should be good only because of the situation you're in, but would, in any other situation, be bad. Also, I don't think magic should be like the flashy, predictable stuff in Harry Potter. I think magic should be mysterious and hard to predict. You should always feel uncertain if something happened because of magic or because the game just works that way. For examples:

• You're low on food, so your wizard summons a bunch of cougars and carp.
• You're being sieged by humans, so your wizard summons some goblins or a dragon who may or may not get into a fight with the humans.
• Your dwarves are unhappy and keep getting into fights, so your wizard makes the aggressive dwarves melancholy so that they'll kill themselves without causing any further trouble.
• Your population is too large and its lagging the game, so your wizard takes advantage of a sad event to enrage some of the peasants and soap makers, and give other dwarves fell moods.
• There's a fire in your fortress, and lots of smoke, so your wizard causes hordes of batmen to flood into your fortress from the chasm, or causes frogmen to flood in from the underground river, forcing you to evacuate to the surface so your dwarves stay away from that fire.
• Recent events have made your dwarves unhappy, so your wizard stops the rain for a few years, to keep your dwarves from complaining about being caught in the rain. He then causes vermin to infest your food stockpile and ruin most of your food, forcing you to assign many of your idle workers as food gatherers, trappers, and hunters, thereby giving them jobs and making them happy.
• A noble makes an impossible mandate, so your wizard causes a peasant to develop a fell mood with a preference for that noble.

In this way, you would never be sure that it was the wizard who did it, and you might not even suspect that anyone did anything. There would be reasonable doubt about whether or not magic even exists, though statistical evidence would tend to show that the presence of a wizard leads to things dying in a good way.

Balanced in this way, the wizard wouldn't have to be a constant source of annoyance, forcing you to constantly clean up after his random spell-casting. I have no idea why anyone would want a wizard who does nothing but cause random problems. I'd simply tell him to sleep in the high-pressure-magma death-chamber and be done with him. If we're going to have wizards, they should be helpful but fun.

[praguepride]

Just pointing it out, 99% of nobles don't do anything but cause problems. They issue mandates and kill dwarves when you don't listen to them.

When you do listen to them... nothing good happens, other then that they don't kill your dwarves with the hammer, but no actual positive effect happens.

So why should wizards be any different. (not saying they should be as annoying as other nobles. Norsemen basically re-posted my "problem-solving" mechanism that I posted awhile ago, so I agree that it shouldn't be random Fun, but it should be random Fun with a purpose )

[NW_Kohaku]

Hey, I wrote some stuff talking about this stuff.  Figured this deserved some kind of cross-linkage.

[Dvergar]

To be honnest I think magic should ultimately be left up to Threetoe, he and Toady should write(sp) the cannon on which magic would be based. 

NW_Kohaku, your posts are very good, but I think you hold a Tolkinian/Norse view of dwarves.  In myth, dwarves (aka. faes/gremlins/elves/faries/leperchans/gnomes you get the point, they are all the same in traditional stories) are magical creatures just like elves.  They turn themselves invisible and grant wishes with the wiggle of a finger or a nose.

If we were to take the usefulness of future DF magic and put it on a scale measuring usefulness.  I would prefer to have magic generously leaning towards being useless.  A fortress would be most boring safest while maintaining an arcanophobic additude, but vetran players would use magic just as they build 8-bit adders, soap pyramids, obelisks, and obsidian-cast-ocean-floor forts.

[NW_Kohaku]

To be honnest I think magic should ultimately be left up to Threetoe, he and Toady should right the cannon on which magic would be based. 

NW_Kohaku, your posts are very good, but I think you hold a Tolkinian/Norse view of dwarves.  In myth, dwarves (aka. faes/gremlins/elves/faries/leperchans/gnomes you get the point, they are all the same in traditional stories) are magical creatures just like elves.  They turn themselves invisible and grant wishes with the wiggle of a finger or a nose.

If we were to take the usefulness of future DF magic and put it on a scale measuring usefulness.  I would prefer to have magic generously leaning towards being useless.  A fortress would be most boring safest while maintaining an arcanophobic additude, but vetran players would use magic just as they build 8-bit adders, soap pyramids, obelisks, and obsidian-cast-ocean-floor forts.

... I'm not exactly following everything you're saying, here.

Actually, I don't think Tolkien and Norse myth are very much the same... (And DF has obvious references to Tolkien, anyway, whereas I would actually prefer an older myth base.)

Regarding uselessness, the sort of megaproject type stuff is what I was talking about with the spell sensor/triggers and programmable golems and machineries...  In fact, that's most of the magic I was explicitly talking about.

edit: And what's with a guy named "Dvergar" complaining about the way the Norse envisioned dwarves?

[darkflagrance]

A lot of this discussion is hampered by the fact that the non-magic parts of the game are currently very incomplete, and not only does this limit what we can imagine magic to encompass, the limitations themselves impact how we desire the game to be.

[NW_Kohaku]

A lot of this discussion is hampered by the fact that the non-magic parts of the game are currently very incomplete, and not only does this limit what we can imagine magic to encompass, the limitations themselves impact how we desire the game to be.

Well, I think quite a bit of the argument on this subject revolves around the fact that the limitations on the game's current implimentation put little limits on the way we can imagine the game to be.

One person can say "I like the way magic was handled by this author" another can say "I like the way magic was in this game", and another can say "I hate magic, give me my steam powered robots!"  There's nothing in the game that specifically restricts that.

I'd like to think, however, that if Toady really wants to shut down the line of thought that leads to people demanding steam powered locomotives, making magic a more noticable aspect of the game would be a good way to do it.

... Of course, I haven't seen Toady's response to a team of golems that carry cargo carriages on their backs while their wheel-legs roll across rails.

Regardless, it's specifically because the shape of the narrative isn't set in stone yet that I'd like to lobby for the sort of styles that I favor, whether it is a magic system that doesn't restrict magic to insane little people in funny pointy hats, or a multiracial culture, like in the Stonehall thing I put in the mod section.

[nenjin]

One person can say "I like the way magic was handled by this author" another can say "I like the way magic was in this game", and another can say "I hate magic, give me my steam powered robots!"  There's nothing in the game that specifically restricts that.

...

... Of course, I haven't seen Toady's response to a team of golems that carry cargo carriages on their backs while their wheel-legs roll across rails.

Regardless, it's specifically because the shape of the narrative isn't set in stone yet that I'd like to lobby for the sort of styles that I favor, whether it is a magic system that doesn't restrict magic to insane little people in funny pointy hats, or a multiracial culture, like in the Stonehall thing I put in the mod section.

I think every idea author has to get stuff off their chest. But as Captntastic points out, as much work as we might have put into it....chances are Toady is aware of the core of our ideas already, and has decided it's going to be "much more" than that. He's been deving for 8? years after all. And most ideas (including mine) are structured off of the dozens of fantasy games we've already played...and that Toady and others have played.

So yeah, people need to get ideas off their chest and that's what a forum is for. But in terms of what we can actually bring to the table...we offer Toady new, specific Power Goals for DF. The more traditional, or over-used, Power Goal we offer...the less useful it is to him.

Which is why I, in a sort of defeatist fashion, have stopped thinking about the possibilities of magic. Short of a system someone cooked up that Toady would go "Yes!" to and import it immediately...we're basically doing this for self-gratification. I know he reads these threads and collects them for later usage...but still. It's not the same as proposing ideas for a system already in place, where we "get" what he wants to achieve and cook up ideas in a solid framework.

I'd like to think, however, that if Toady really wants to shut down the line of thought that leads to people demanding steam powered locomotives, making magic a more noticable aspect of the game would be a good way to do it.

... Of course, I haven't seen Toady's response to a team of golems that carry cargo carriages on their backs while their wheel-legs roll across rails.

It's the fact he hasn't done that with magic, specifically, that makes me question what he's really thinking. Either a) magic is so far away in development, it's on par with talking about graphics for DF, or b) he is planning something so titanic and mind-boggling that he doesn't even want to start thinking about it until much more of DF is complete...and resists all attempts to make him start thinking about it prematurely. Magic could easily be the Arc that connects to every other Arc in game in some way....and that will necessitate a hell of a lot of thinking, development and coding on his part.