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[ShinQuickMan]

And i found out why throwing is ridiculously overpowered right now - you're getting a marginally less powerful attack at a tiny fraction of the time spent shooting a bow: hitting a wolverine with an arrow from a bow will propel it away, but at adequate/competent bow skill it will also take about six turns, as opposed to the single turn used to hurl a rock.

That, and you actually get to keep the ammo you throw. VERY important when you're dealing with masterwork iron arrows or better; those things are deadly!.  Seriously, I one-shotted a Roc by throwing  a +steel bolt+ at its head, and I was still dabbling in throwing/archery!

[Aerie]

Fuck yeah.

[Someguyfromcrowd]

I modded dragons to be playable and set them to be twice the temperature of lava at all times.

I just ripped off both of a villager's arms and threw them at him, then killed him by biting off his tongue and hitting him with it.

While everything was on fire.

[Lightning]

I threw a barn owl 1 z above me and somehow it fell to the ground.

[Larix]

I believe "throw" is meant in the way discussed here, considering thrown creatures adjacent to me can end up landing on the square of my character.
The weirdest i've managed to have happen was a bird that was killed in the air - and stayed in the air. I.e. the corpse just floated there, one z up. No big loss, i think it was one of those birds too small to butcher.

I considered to play a pure commander - a character who'd only lead troops into battle. Getting started was a bit tricky, because my skillset was so civilian no soldier would follow me before i got my first quest finished. I achieved that by luring the offending naked peasant into the nearest hamlet, where the entire population descended on the poor crazy person. Fast forward a bit and i took on another bandit camp - got spotted and the first bolt caused me to dodge off a ramp, so i switched to 'stand ground'. The next bolt wasn't dodged but rather absorbed into my lower spine. Yay, paraplegic adventurer. Unfortunately, companions are pretty dumb and only really work if you lead from the front.

Well, i vampirified her, and she's still smacking stuff silly with her fine iron carving knife, although i had to get rid of my companions so i could actually hunt down stuff to feed on.

Surprisingly, archery _is_ useful after all - for sniping bandit camps. Just go stealthy, stay out of detection range and keep shooting until everybody is on the floor. You'll have to move in for the kill on most, so having very good ambusher skill is strongly advised - prone crossbowgoblins can still shoot you once you're detected. Having at least one usable leg is also strongly advised, but with very legendary defensive skills, i can handle camps with ~20 elves, two or three of them masters, with my puny 430 crawling speed.

The human settlements are in serious trouble - one hamlet is completely and a town about 95% abandoned (only buildings with people are a temple, the keep and maybe six shops); it's gotten so bad that the various local bandits have started infighting: a human and elven bandit were in the catacombs, and both bosses were killed by elf-vs-human violence before i met them. And some of the olm men in the sewers were killed not by me but rather by the reptile men blowgunning them down.

[Eric Blank]

I began an adventure as a dragonwoman, just out of curiosity towards the plight of the scaly menace.

So, I begin my adventures in the icy north, on the edge of a cobald village nestled in the foothills of a mountain range. The stray alpacas there seemed to like me well enough, so after leaving I opt to travel to the nearby town, which was situated on the divide between a glacier and the same mountains as the outlying village. Being as I hate actually walking through towns, I traveled right up to the town keep. When I arrived, I got the idea to check my whereabouts one last time before getting horribly lost, only to discover "you cannot travel until you leave this site." Now, I knew I was still on the perfectly travel-able glacier and the town itself wouldn't hinder travel... Unless It registered me as an enemy of the civ to whom the town belonged. Lo and behold, I enter the town keep, and am immediately greeted with some loser hunter yelling "PREPARE TO DIE!"

Que twenty minutes of running amok in the keep whilst the cobalds apparently have some sort of civil war/loyalty cascade. People were killing each other left and right, and I wager that's the only thing that kept my poor idiot adventurer alive. Regardless, a "Sacred Silkiness," who was also a vampire, happened to smash my foot, leaving me crippled. The good thing about dragonmen is that they can breath short jets of fire, and are themselves immune to it. So, I toasted the bastard and managed to survive while passing out from pain repeatedly. I'm pretty sure I ended up murdering every religious leader that didn't get murdered by rebels, so that could leave this civilization in a wee bit of disarray. I also managed to melt a few holes in ice, revealing bits of the subterranean dungeons. Walking around in the dungeons revealed that these holes in the roof didn't provide any extra light whatsoever, which I think may be a bug. One of the religious leaders I killed actually fell into a hole my firebreath opened up underneath him.

I found a crutch, in some great stroke of luck, and hobbled on out of the keep, sneaking as I tried to avoid drawing the guise of the other locals. And the pets. There were cats and turkeys all over the place, amongst the bodies and injured cobalds. Not sure who won that little revolution, or if it's a taste of things to come for these cobalds, but I high-tailed it straight south across the glacier and eventually made it beyond the bounds of the town. There, I found a lair bordering the town and killed it's resident, whom I presume was a werebeast or something. Didn't put up much of a fight.

So, here I am in a hole on a glacier, in the middle of a hostile nation, with the nearest safe haven probably being... Probably nowhere, given that dragonmen are almost universally hated as thieves. Life as a bandit is going to be fun.

[fungee]

Apparently she doesn't need it to survive.

[Eric Blank]

lol, nope! The funny thing about organs and tissues in DF is that they're 90% dead weight, and being horribly disfigured poses no inconvenience whatsoever as long as your arms and legs, eyes, lungs, heart, throat, and brain are in functioning condition. And you didn't bleed to death in the process of receiving the injury. Modded genitalia just so happens to be exceptionally worthless, and the "outer brain" in masterwork mod there is equally useless.

Sometimes I cut off my opponents' breasts/phallus and leave them to run away screaming. As long as they don't bleed out, they won't miss it.

[Nathail]

Sometimes I cut off my opponents' breasts/phallus and leave them to run away screaming. As long as they don't bleed out, they won't miss it.

Ah, the many benefits of spore-based reproduction.

[Aerie]

[Larix]

Goddammit, another full party wipe. I had 11 companions and got jumped by what felt like 30 bandits, although they were probably only 28. I really see no way to keep anyone alive when odds get stacked _that_ high against me - surrounded and somewhat outnumbered would be nasty, but skill and tactics could see you through. This way, however, the raw numbers do all the work for the opposition. Spending a few ingame years grinding up your companions against wildlife might improve their survivability (from minus 200 to zero percent in this scenario, but what the hey), but i definitely don't have the patience for that.

I threw in the towel for now; currently, the ambush-generation code means travelling with companions is much more dangerous than travelling alone, and trying to play a pure commander, who never gets a kill of their own and instead relies on companions for the killing (although disabling foes is perfectly o.k.) is basically unplayable when it comes to trying to smoke out the bandit camps: you must take along at least a dozen companions to have anyone left to do the kills, and that means you keep getting your whole company wiped out by ridiculously huge ambushes. It /might/ get worse with increasing fame, mind.

[Aerie]

It seems realistic to me. If you were a bandit leader, would you only send ten guys against a legendary superhuman hero that's killed dragons and titans without breaking a sweat?

[Larix]

If i were alone, they'd only send two to four. If i'm in the company of a dozen low-level companions, they send twenty. (Oh, and this character hasn't a single kill to her name.) I disabled the entire ambush with my warhammer and shields without getting a scratch - everyone had both arms and at least one leg broken, about half had their lower spine smashed for good measure. I'm mainly annoyed because there were so many i couldn't keep a single companion alive with my best efforts - to actually deal the killing blows to all those fucks.

The problem is that the game appears to roll the ambush event and _then_ assembles the squad by generating bandit after bandit until you're massively outnumbered, instead of maybe rolling an ambush squad with a given strength and number and then checking whether they feel courageous enough to take on your group or decide your company is too strong to take on.

As i said, travelling with companions is currently more hazardous than travelling alone, because larger groups _force_ larger ambushes instead of (realistically) discouraging ambushes.

I'm mainly miffed because i feel the balance is off - companions range from boringly overpowered (single targets) to worse than useless (wandering areas with ambush-capable groups). It wouldn't be so aggravating if you could release companions without having them murdered and had more control over their behaviour/equipment.

Enough complaining - i mostly emptied a tower full of _friendly_ necromancers. I wasn't sure if attacking them would make their parent civ or whatever hostile, so i recruited all who would come along and drowned them in the nearest river. Good riddance to the corpse-buggerers.

[Flanderbland]

Currently exploring an old fortress of mine which fell to goblins. Goblins who, apparently, are pretty bad-ass. Seriously, I stabbed one in the heart ("tearing the heart"), and he just kept on going, mauling one of my companions in the process. Thought he'd bleed to death quickly, but he didn't go down until I decapitated him several turns later...

It's slow going, made worse by the fact that they've crippled both my legs, and due to scatter I have no idea where the 20ish crutches I made in my fortress are. The fact that my companions wandered off while I took a rest isn't helping either (they're still nearby, but it's a pain to round them up...).

But it's all good fun!

Edit: Found a crutch! But I still can't stand up... Do you need two?

[Larix]

Crutches - one is enough, but you need one usable leg (and at least one grasp); if both legs are disabled, you'll be crawling on the ground forever. When both legs are still completely present (if you lost both feet, there's nothing appropriate to stand on), you might have suffered motor nerve damage in both legs _or_ nerve damage in the lower spine.

Just for troubleshooting - the crutch is in the open inventory, not in a container, and you're trying the 's' for 'stand up' command?