Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

YES! (i would use it)

NO! (i would not use it, and i think it is pointless/unethical/gross etc.)

yes, but i would dissable it if it was an init option (all yes voters are assumed to be for an init option, only vote here if you think it should be included but you would not use it)

[DalGren]

Generic waste is one thing, but even if the main post was edited, look at the thread title...

>.>

no comments...

Djohaal. Most of your replies involve criticizing other people's "irrational taboos" and showing an entirely zealotic behavior. And your custom title is "le poo"?
First, respect other's opinions a little, not everyone wants to deal with it. I had to do plumbing for a living and it's disgusting to do, and I know very well all sort of things that come out from excrements of all sorts, thank you.
Second, don't go at it like a personal matter, it seems that whenever someone doesn't want sewage, in a thread named FECES VOTE as I write now, they are against your living ideals.

[Kaelem Gaen]

I'd use it for the challenge factor, I'd even be cool with a "fig-leaf" name  such as "filth" as suggested in another forum.   And it should definately be an init option.

That being said, It shouldn't be a main factor and should only be added in to round out the "Accuracy" or "realism" that toady was going for.  (Also have you not seen the Succubus/incubus mod someone's already made genitals)

On a side comment that'll likely sound like a flame but really just something I find interesting...
Spoiled for ability to completely ignore statement.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So many folks want more textual blood/guts/gore/murders/rapes/pillaging,   yet urine and feces are a step to far? anyone else find that sorta funny?

However I'm also aware not everyone wants the Wound/Gore system to go farther than it already has.

tl;dr  I'm for it  in the face of a challenge, not because I want to play Dwarf Fortress: The Dung Ages.

[thvaz]

What I do not understand is the concern some people have with what others will do in their fortresses.

[Zangi]

Its not about Toady's morals and stuff.  Its about the climate of this forum.
If Toady is the one to put in genitals, it would be an official part of the game.  Its essentially telling people, its ok to talk about genitals and stuff out in the whole DF section.  People pick up on that and it starts to take a nose dive toward hell...
He still has to cover himself. And there are a number of 'parents' and kids under 18 roaming around this forum and playing the game.
Think of it this way, Toady has all the rights to shut down Squeegy's thread.  If Squeegy's thread had proliferated and/or gotten out of hand it, it would have been shut down... and its future spawns would either be aborted with prejudice or still born.

Implementing 'feces' is an idea that should be aborted with prejudice.

And eh, I won't elaborate.

[Djohaal]

I never could imagine sewer management was considered M rated.

[thvaz]

I never could imagine sewer management was considered M rated.

Neither did I. It is as if defecation is a thing only the depraved do!

[Djohaal]

I bet jesus didn't have an anus.

[Urist McDepravity]

On a broader, not-just-feces note, I think increasing the needs of your Dwarves beyond just "sleep, drink, eat, occasional vacation/party, then WORKING FOREVER" would make the game better.  Cleaning the fortress' halls to keep the place glorious, various activities they could do when not working, like reading, listening to the storyteller guy in the main hall, or playing Dorf-basketball or whatever fun sport things Dorfs would do.

Waste is a huge problem - it could contaminate your water supply if you don't dump it proper, and just sticking it in a pit means you've either gotta walk REALLY far to get to the pit, or you've got a filthy, awful pit right next to your settlement.  Having to deal with it - along with all the other myriad problems of just living someplace, and managing a group of people, not just automatons, working until they need maintenance in the form of sleep or booze or whatever - would be interesting.

THAT.
And make stills require water, so contamination WILL be a problem.

[Djohaal]

Actually, you wash a gaping cut with sewage water and survive to tell me the story please.

No penicillin allowed.

[DalGren]

I never could imagine sewer management was considered M rated.

Neither did I. It is as if defecation is a thing only the depraved do!

Only the depraved do it out of place and time. Or talk about it more than necessary.

Actually, you wash a gaping cut with sewage water and survive to tell me the story please.

You used this against me before, why are you using it again, and how is it related to disliking anything? Precisely those who dislike the stuff are more inclined to avoid it, not the opposite. You are being annoying on purpose.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Djohaal: I have repeatedly stated why feces have different connotations for me that are solely in the realm of the immature. And frankly, I regularly purchase online items from Japanese download shops that would probably make a lot of people here gross out and want to burn me on a stake or never talk to me again. Thus, I find the idea I would be a moral crusader quite amusing (especially since I am a genuine atheist).

However, since you suggested reading the OP, I want to return that suggestion right to you:

[...]
for starters:

Pro/for:
drown elves in feces
adds depth to simulation
fun to manage
cool adventurer sewers
point of weakness in a fortress
[...]

Strange, isn't it, that the very first pro argument the OP mentions is the immature usage of feces, namely to drown elves in it. Given how you can (and some people already do that, quite successfully) drown elves in water or magma (if you don't care to loot the corpses), drowning them in feces adds no new option in that field accept saying: "Look mom, poo! Cool! Hahahaha!" There is no new genuine functionality to that. The more mature points only make up the next points (see the quote).

Why is the immature one listed first? Is it because the OP sees that as the core point (i.e. the OP is mostly interested in using it in an immature way)? Or may it just have come first to his mind because those suggesting it regularly refer to that application?

You see, just the OP makes me wonder about how the forum goers will apply this, and it is with worry that I look upon it.

What I do not understand is the concern some people have with what others will do in their fortresses.

Personally, I don't care what you do in your fortress. However, as I have stated before, there is a great probability that drowning elves/goblins/migrants in feces becomes a new meme basically identical to the magma meme and appears in just about any thread, even where it does not really fit and is not a very witty joke. Magma is already annoying in that respect, but it is not linked so strongly to a highly immature genre of popular culture.

And as for the other meme, like murdering elves and slaughtering cats, they annoy me too, and I try to counter them at least occasionally, but they also are not limited to immature ties in popular culture and they are not as flexible as magma or feces.

I wouldn't worry about it if I had the impression that people would quietly drown their elves in feces and not brag about it every day, just as many people probably genocide their cats and kittens on a regular basis. But the way magma appears on the forums and the way this issue has been discussed make me doubt that it would be that quiet a feature as far as the forums go.

Deathworks

[MrWiggles]

Again why does what one person do a in a fort matter for what you do in a fort?

There are legit challenges with waste mgm. There also legit uses for urine and feces, more for urine then feces. Urine has a variety of chemical process for textiles and tanning.

It doesn't matter if a person does post about a poo trap on the forum. You have the awesome ability to not click and read it. And if the forum community finds it poor taste, then it'll create posting about such contraptions as taboo and berate those that do. Bay12, is good at beratement, like most on line communities.

With how the raws are modable, there are innumerable actions that can be mimic which are way worse then a drowning trap of your fill of choice. Most of which will probably get be berated for listing.

I find a soup pot to be more attractive and far darker then poo. It also has a nice ring of european folk tale that I like.

[Kilo24]

Again why does what one person do a in a fort matter for what you do in a fort?...

Postal 2 could be summarized as a game where you could stick a gun up the anus of a cat to use as a silencer; if Dwarf Fortress was summarized as a game that you could drown elves in shit, that would draw a good amount of people in who'd like doing that and alienate people who found it distasteful (i.e., quite a lot of people.)  Never mind that there's a whole lot more to the game as a fantasy world simulator - the fact that it's possible (and that people are going on about it) implies that the developer cared about doing it enough to implement a number of crude possibilities, which associates him and his game with a number of other probably unwanted subculture associated with feces (Beavis and Butthead or the legions of other fecal humor.)

Simply put, what players do and talk about doing with a game has an effect on how it's perceived.    How it's perceived affects what people will want to play it, which affects the community, which is probably rather important to you if you're reading this post.  If people hear about a game that you drown elves with shit in, it gives a different vibe than hearing about a game that simulates a fantasy world in impressive depth (and upon further investigation, it also has a fluid system, mechanics system, and models dwarves accurately enough to poop and make you deal with it.)  And I very much doubt that the latter tagline will stick in people's minds as effectively as the former.  I know that I don't want to see an ASCII "2 Dwarves, 1 Cup" as synonymous with Dwarf Fortress, because the game has far more possibilities than that.  And I can't say I particularly trust everybody-on-the-Internet's maturity to not make and promote something like that.

So, no, I don't really care what people do with the game.  I do care about what they boast about what they did with the game, because that gets tied to the game's image.



To compare, let's imagine that Toady added in explicitly named genitals into the game.  Of course, they'd be handled accurately - some cultures change their appearances (think circumcision), castration would be a punishment as it often was in less modern times, and you'd occasionally get sexually explicit myths (the ocean being created from the semen of the head god - there's plenty of stuff like that in the real-world myths.)  And people who just wanted to see a realistic fantasy world would be happy.  But that wouldn't stop you from occasionally being killed by a spinning XXpenisXX.  It also wouldn't stop people from playing with uniforms for their soldiers' genitals, or raping before murdering whole elven villages.  In fact, quite a lot of people would be attracted by the fact that no other games let you do that and try it out of curiosity.  And when people start boasting about being able to do that, that gives the game a negative image to most people.  Even if Toady only wanted an accurate fantasy world out of adding it, the results would be detrimental.

Adding explicit sexual content is something similar to (but a little more dramatic than) adding feces to the game.  Both are adding in features which, while they are really important for accuracy in the world (sewer management, "cougar sign", and see the sheer tonnage of sexual references in culture, including the more veiled references in higher culture), simply treating them fairly and honestly will be a more dramatic step towards profanity than the majority of the other elements of culture do.  To implement either is a question of what battles Toady's willing to fight to dissociate his game with scatological humor/overtly sexual subculture.  It's not of what would make for a more accurate or better game on your computer, but of how the game will appear to players.  That's kind of important for someone living off of donations for the game.

[Andeerz]

Pretty well put.  It's a shame that that is the case, though.  :/  I still think poop should be in and any resulting fight be taken on, as naive as that may sound.

EDIT:  It pretty much seems to boil down to this...

The only arguments I have seen thus far against bodily waste that actually show a problem from its implementation that cannot be remedied easily, or is in fact not a problem at all in my opinion, are of the kind posted by Kilo24 in the above post and Deathworks earlier.  Kilo24 and Deathworks got a good point with the image of the game thing.  I still think that this is not a strong enough reason to not put bodily waste into the game.  I feel like it's giving in to the very things that I hate about many video games and society in general.  Meh, this isn't the time or place to start some soap-box rant, but:

I know that I don't want to see an ASCII "2 Dwarves, 1 Cup" as synonymous with Dwarf Fortress, because the game has far more possibilities than that.  ...  I do care about what they boast about what they did with the game, because that gets tied to the game's image.

Both are adding in features which, while they are really important for accuracy in the world (sewer management, "cougar sign", and see the sheer tonnage of sexual references in culture, including the more veiled references in higher culture), simply treating them fairly and honestly will be a more dramatic step towards profanity than the majority of the other elements of culture do.  To implement either is a question of what battles Toady's willing to fight to dissociate his game with scatological humor/overtly sexual subculture.

It shouldn't be that treating these features honestly and fairly would constitute a dramatic step towards profanity, although I understand that it probably would.  This is something we as a community should fight against if it ever tries to occur, dammit!  Whatevs... I feel like I've sorta blown things out of proportion now. 

[Kilo24]

Pretty well put.  It's a shame that that is the case, though.  :/  I still think poop should be in and any resulting fight be taken on, as naive as that may sound.

Thanks.

As far as confronting this informal censorship goes, that's a spiky subject to broach.  Enough elements of media with basically no other redeeming qualities have tried to do it to associate poor quality with that idea.  Usually, people are just following conventions or making higher-quality works that they don't want to risk.  It's also a rather sharp slope to go against, too - that notion of tact encouraging euphemisms and evasions starts off rather early in human history where sex and bodily waste are concerned.

I actually wouldn't be that worried by feces being added eventually, once there was a critical mass of features that people in-game would effectively ostracize you for being too crude.  If you could stick a bucket of poo on your head and run around naked in-game, then if the NPCs did their best to make sure you knew you were a disgusting little creature with no regard for "standards of propriety" and basically stop you from ever working in any semi-respectable capacity again, that would alleviate some of the flak (because that's how it would happen in reality.)  Not all of it - a lot of people would probably be amused by the disgust when all they'd need to do is make another character, and the mere fact that you can do it would still potentially be the same problem. 

If it was just the game on my computer with a feces on/off switch, I'd be happy to have realistic crap in the game because it's more accurate, and I'd get over the few personal prejudices I have with it.   But the time required to program it along with the potential controversy and ensuing shift in DF's image is just not worth it for a long while.  Perhaps forever - but there might come a time when the simulation has gotten accurate enough have the lack of sewage/sex be a significant contributor to keeping it in at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley.  If that ever is the case, Toady has my full support in adding it in.  I don't *think* it would happen (I doubt DF will ever get near the Uncanny Valley, mainly due to dialogue and many other human interactions being incredibly tricky for AI), but this is an unprecedented project so I'm not sure.