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[LSTAR]

I don't suppose I'm the only one who's annoyed by the fact that my soldiers tend to spend arround 400,000 seasons recovering from broken hands after sparring accidents gone wrong. Now, personally, I like this but when half your military is calling in sick due to bruised ankles it does get on your nerves. I'm not proposing Toady change or nerf the system, but I do think there should be some sort of benefit, like an extra rank in toughness, shield or armour proficiency to represent the dwarf learning form his mistake. Of course, in ym fortress, after a couple of seasons all my soldiers would become indestructilbe super-gods...
What do you think?

[ November 30, 2006: Message edited by: LSTAR ]

[Rondol]

I think it'd be better if dwarves didn't get injured so easily in practice. I mean granted they get injured a lot less than in real battle, but seriously. At least let them use wooden swords.

Also considering that your average human (with modern medicine at least) can heal a broken bone in ~6-8 weeks, it shouldn't take more than two seasons to heal a broken dwarf bone. Certainly not more than a year. Mangled... maybe. If ever.

[Toady One]

The erratic healing of breaks is caused by an issue that I won't be able to tackle until I do scars.  I'd like to do scars soonish, but there are lots of things I want to do soonish...

[Pacho]

Make sure you equip your training dwarves with plate suits for reduced damage.  Also, training some wrestling before letting them have weapons reduces damage even further.

Now, about this winter drying of the cave river I read about... =P

[ December 01, 2006: Message edited by: Pacho ]

[Dumatoin]

The carpenter could create wooden sparring weapons, the clothmaker could also disasemble some of the narrow crap the goblins leave behind and pad the weapons with them.

The clohtmaker could also make some sort of practice armour with it(narrow stuff), so the soldiers don't bust up their regular gear.

[Angela Christine]

You could make copper weapons for training, they aren't nearly as dangerous as iron, steel or obsidian weapons.

The tricky part is getting them to switch to training weapons.  You could switch everyone to fighting unarmed.  After they drop their weapons, have a mechanic build a huge weapon trap with every "good" weapon in the place.  Once those are safely locked up in the trap, tell your soldiers to go back to using weapons, the only weapons around should be the copper ones, so that is what they will take.  The problem comes if there is a military emergency, and you want everyone to quickly switch back to you good quality weapons.  You'd need to switch everyone back to unarmed so they drop their copper training weapons, set a mechanic to disassemble the weapon trap freeing those weapons, and simultaneously have another mechanic build weapon trap(s) with all the copper weapons, to get them out of the way.  Then tell your soldiers to go back to using weapons, and they should go pick up the recently released obsidian, steel and iron weapons, but it could take a while.

It would be handy if there were some way to designate certain weapons for training, and have the soldiers automatically switch to training weapons for sparring and then back to regular weapons when they are done sparring.  If there are no sparring weapons available, they will spar with real weapons.  If they are attacked while holding sparring weapons they will use those weapons to defend themselves, they aren't useless, just less dangerous than obsidian swords.  

They could even be built and named differently, to make it easier to tell how many regular weapons and sparring weapons you have; a wooden training sword, a wooden training axe, a copper training mace, etc.  Sparring weapons could be made from wood, copper and perhaps tin?  A few choices of material would make it easier on maps that happen to be short on some materials.  

Alternately, perhaps the clothworking or leather shops could make padded training covers for some weapons.  That way you still train with your regular spear or favorite sword, you just put a padded cover over the pointy bit to prevent accidentally removing your buddy's spleen.  They would still be dangerous, but perhaps only 50% as dangerous as a naked blade.

[Psitticine]

The padded weapons/armor idea sounds like a good one to me, especially as it'd handle some of the narrow clothing issue as well.

[Maximus]

Silver weapons are the least dangerous available, doing only 50% the damage of iron (provided they're not high-quality).  Silver's not good for much else, anyway, given the abundance of gold and platinum.

High-quality silver weapons are good for weapon traps.

[Psitticine]

Will silver weapons ever have any particular purpose, i.e. against certain types of creature?

[Toady One]

The Magic Arc or Artifact Arc would start to see these kinds of effects, randomly.  Anything that's done random can also be pinned to something more standard since some people will want that as an option.

[LSTAR]

Ooooh, scarring? You mean like adding text to a dwarf's description along the lines of "Atir Mugbat has horrific scars along his left leg" or "Melub Gornas has no eyes"?

[Varil]

Good heavens. Think of what adventurers will look like after a cave or two, assuming they survive! There'll be paragraphs of text listing the scars upon them!

[AlanL]

Some scars can heal, so each trip, a certain amount of scars disappear.

[ December 03, 2006: Message edited by: AlanL ]

[Rondol]

Also, not all wounds cause scarring.

[Toady One]

Dragslay (an older version of the adventure mode part of this game) had scarring descriptions, and it's a lot of fun.  It also had infected eye sockets that leaked pus, which was kinda gross.