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[3]

But they don't have personalities. Nor do personalities do anything.

Incorrect and incorrect. As far as I know, lack of personality tags on a creature with CAN_LEARN just makes the creature have a completely random personality. This can lead to all sorts of things, especially if the creature's in a position of power (see Footkerchief's post above).

In addition to affecting things such as when and where wars are begun, personality tags also have some minor effects on creature behaviour - from my experience angry creature berserk more quickly in combat, and stress-susceptible civ members get unhappy faster.

But this is hardly relevant. Most of what I would've said is said above.

[praguepride]

But they don't have personalities. Nor do personalities do anything.

Incorrect and incorrect. As far as I know, lack of personality tags on a creature with CAN_LEARN just makes the creature have a completely random personality. This can lead to all sorts of things, especially if the creature's in a position of power (see Footkerchief's post above).

In addition to affecting things such as when and where wars are begun, personality tags also have some minor effects on creature behaviour - from my experience angry creature berserk more quickly in combat, and stress-susceptible civ members get unhappy faster.

But this is hardly relevant. Most of what I would've said is said above.

This is all I could find about personalities on the wiki.

Note: Races without the tags for a certain field have a full range of values, presumably with an average value of 50.

In my observations, personality effects good/bad thought generation. So sure, an angry/depressed person might be more prone to tantrums due to lower morale, but again I repeat that the impact of personalities are not reflected in this tag.

For example, this tag would operate very similarly to the [CURIOUS] tag, that causes creatuers to randomly seek out and flip levers. Only instead of levers, they would seek out corpses to chuck around.

Again, I repeat that personaliy traits will eventually impact all this stuff, but until then, tags are the way to go. Because tags define behaviors directly.

Let me try an arguement from a different angle: Personalities are spectrums. My proposal is an ON/OFF switch.

There is no "moderate" sadism, although it COULD be suggested that there be different degrees of sadism, but what's the cut off? WHat point would they start playing "dress up" with the skins of their victims? And do you want random animals to suddenly become sadistic (due to random trait generation)? Because I'd think this should be something that only the evilist of evil baddies should have.

So, to fit this in properly where you don't have random creatures being sadistic basterds, you'd either have to

(a) - go in and set min/max sadism levels for every creature
(b) - set it as an on/off tag. This is what I'm proposing as the alternative would be a ridiculous amount of work.

[Dakk]

Yes, but the plan is to make them do things. Putting all this behavior into a tag wouldn't make sense now that the personality system is in place. It would be backtracking - like adding a button you had to click in order to fix a bug. There's no reason for it. Your suggestion fits with the personality system well, and these are behaviors a sadistic creature should have. There are certain cases where a dwarf/human/etc. should degenerate to possibly do these things (corrupted by dark forces, witnessed his entire family brutally murdered and butchered, etc), and that should be handled by a range of sadism levels, not an unalterable static race-level tag.

^
Pretty much this.
Really, there's lot of sugestions that consist of adding in temporary new features because the actual planned features won't be handled for some time. While thats all fine and dandy, the personality system is being expanded right now, no reason to add a placeholder for something Toady currently working on.

Personalities actualy do work as of now, but they don't do anything awesomely noticeable now. The most they do is alter the way your dwarf gains/loses stress on a certain activity (I think).

[3]

The thing is that random creatures entirely should have the capability of being sadistic - just like they have the capability of being anything else. The random nature of personality tags exists for this precise reason. There are a few other things to keep in mind, as well. For instance, the following:

We've got procedural cultures coming soon. What this will mean is that dwarf civs won't necessarily have the same laws and ethics as they do now - when modding, for instance, a user can specify all the ethics they want to keep at a static value, and the game'll procedurally figure out the unspecified ones based on the situations the civ encounters, the traits of its leaders, etc., etc..
By suggesting that sadism should be an "on/off switch", as you put it, you're completely removing an entire facet of that procedural generation. In addition, if you're so worried about how complex the integration of sadism as a personality component would be (I'm sure you know this is not a good community wherein to argue against overse complexity), consider the implications of it not being a personality component in a fully procedural environment - using the procedural culture example above, there'll have to be a check specifically for whether the civ is sadistic or not and measures in place to stop inappropriate ethics and laws from forming, and so on. Why not just put it under the existing model? Your only counterpoint being...

So what, something like this should wait 5 years until personality traits actually do something?

Or something along those lines. And yes, it should. Mind you, currently, the only thing barely resembling sadism is the ABUSE_BODIES tag, which should be mainly redundant in the next version, due to the aforementioned procedural civs.

There is no "moderate" sadism, although it COULD be suggested that there be different degrees of sadism, but what's the cut off?

Easy enough in theory. Take an existing personality facet:

Code: [Select]

91 - 100 Is constantly active and energetic.
76 - 90 Is very energetic and active.
61 - 75 Is very active.
60 - 40 n/a
25 - 39 Is relaxed.
10 - 24 Lives life at a leisurely pace.
0 - 9 Can't be bothered with frantic, fast-paced living.

Code: [Select]

91 - 100 Is obsessed with physically and mentally abusing others.
76 - 90 Is rather amused by the suffering of others.
61 - 75 Is somewhat harsh on its/his/her enemies.
60 - 40 n/a
25 - 39 Is uneasy around cruelty.
10 - 24 Is highly disturbed by the abuse of others.
0 - 9 Is absolutely disgusted by and intolerant of the abuse of others.
It... sorta works.

[darkflagrance]

The other thing, of course, is that 'sadism' might have different interpretations in different cultures. Perhaps dressing up in the skins of their victim is perfectly normal ritual practice for trolls and they don't consider it particularly sadistic. However, the rare individuals who enjoy taking the skins off the victims while the victims are still alive...

Actually, I see [SADISM] as a culture tag rather than a behavior tag, the same way our ethics system now is a cultural ethics rather than an individual ethics.

I imagine a robust ethics system would procedurally generate a set of normal cultural behaviors for a civilization, and create a unique continuum of moral and immoral acts, and then personality traits would determine whether or not individuals were normal (causing them to prefer normal activities), depraved (causing them to prefer immoral activities), and perverse (causing them to prefer normal activities except for a few immoral ones).

[3]

The current personality implementation almost fits those requirements already. There's nothing there that suggests that the "triggers" for personality traits need be absolute.

[praguepride]

Ok, let's take a break from the tag vs. personality trait.

Other then chucking bodies around, what else could be done by the AI that would be considered "sadistic"

[Pilsu]

Skulls are not morbid objects; they are leftovers. Decorating your troll cave with chicken bones would get stupid, fast. Chucking around the chipmunk chunks you found in that log you squeezed out in that corner is not morbid, it's playful and a little bit disgusting. Point is, in order for bones to be morbid, they need to belong to something you cared about and for a quasi-intelligent predator the bones of it's prey would not be such.

Anything smart enough to realize the significance of a child's arm to a sentient creature would not just throw bones about randomly like some chromosomally challenged child. The ones that would do that are not teh evulz, they're just.. easily amused. They might as well be throwing around a pine cone. Sadism by it's very nature requires intelligence to the point that you realize that you are causing pain to another creature, often by abstract means. Other types of playful, enjoyment seeking behaviors typically just involve something vaguely stimulating such as a cat that torments a bad tasting shrew until it dies. That kitty cat might be an asshole but since it's not smart enough to realize that, it can't be sadistic in any meaningful way. Creatures playing with objects or their prey needs to be kept separate from sadism even if we can easily confuse the two. Creatures with actual sadistic tendencies would likely have objectives beyond just being assholes and would not be stupid enough to stick around to yank the dicks of their unconscious victims. Recreational torture should not come in the way of their other, real objectives, otherwise you'll be seeing half the invading goblin army get distracted pulling the nails off some woodcutter and throwing them at some sap who was outside picking berries. While psychological warfare has it's place, sadism has little to do with it and throwing around heads is not realistic combat behavior for anything smart enough to enjoy the lamentations of the enemy's women.

Not sure what I would do about the tag issue. It's a fairly crude measure, giving it little sophistication but on the other hand, if you tie it to the empathy personality trait, any species with sadistic tendencies towards it's enemies would invariably also like to pick on it's own kind, making any existence of society dubious. If you tie it to culture, you can't apply it to creatures that do not form civilizations beyond small packs. Something has to give here.


Does anything just throw objects around for the fun of it? That's just aimless and silly.

[Aspgren]

Does anything just throw objects around for the fun of it? That's just aimless and silly.

I'm not aimless or silly! Throwing stuff is fun and quite artistic. A throw is a moment in time that won't come back. Chuck a half full soda can across the sky and watch it fall. Watch it spin. Watch it spew the soda into the air ... that moment, those movements will never come back. It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing you're watching.
Sure you can chuck -another- soda can but it won't be the same throw, the same fall. The same experience. It's just going to be a -copy- that can't possibly be 100% accurate. You need to appreciate the throw for itself, not for the throw that came before it. It's a great way to enjoy the "little things" as well as the "here and now" if you can stand being a bit childish.

... 

oh! on the topic of sadism. I watched an old swedish movie for class some years ago. In it a guy said "The greatest pleasure that can be achieved is to betray those close to you." .. and I'm not sure what that counts as. Sadistic? Sure. But since you -care- for those you hurt it's also masochistic in a way. A pervertion of sorts.
 Can you really have sadism without including masochism?

[kotekzot]

Masochism would explain why the goblins are so eager to trigger that 10 whip weapon trap which they just saw tear their buddies apart.

[praguepride]

The thing about skulls is a kind of seperate issue. I thought adding a [MORBID] tag to them could make certain behaviors more appropriate. Undead might cluster around [MORBID] items (i.e. items that have to do with death: corpses, bones, chunks, and limbs).

This would help identify that trolls would be more fearsome by creating stacks of skulls as opposed to stacks of stones or berries. It is not directly intregal to the [SADISTIC] tag I proposed but the two can interact with each other (i.e. [SADISTIC] tagged creatures would be more attracted to [MORBID] items.


mor·bid 
–adjective
1.suggesting an unhealthy mental state or attitude; unwholesomely gloomy, sensitive, extreme, etc.: a morbid interest in death.
2.affected by, caused by, causing, or characteristic of disease.
3.pertaining to diseased parts: morbid anatomy.
4.gruesome; grisly.

These are the parts of the actual definition of morbid that I got the term from. Now, this is not morbid to the Troll (or whatever animal), this is morbid as it concerns to the player.

"Oh look, that troll slaughtered my migrants and then built a fort out of it. How morbid/sadistic!"

So you're right, the creature might just like fresh corpses because it likes the smell of blood. IT isn't morbid as it concerns to itself, but from a player's perspective that would definitely be a grisly animal, one that likes to nest in the bodies of the creatures it kills. So, it would get the [SADISM] tag that attracts it to [MORBID] acts.

You COULD get all philisophical and say that it's not being sadistic/morbid because it's just acting to it's nature, but then why give the [EVIL] tag to demons? They can't help it that they just love to tear faces off and rape people's souls, they were just born that way