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[FreakyCheeseMan]

Because dwarves just aren't crazy enough.

So, right now, dwarves seem to have three states- perfectly sane (or as sane as dwarves get), occasionally tantruming, or Lost and Useless, Forever. Since insanity seems to be so large a part of dwarves lives, I propose more and more varied mental issues dwarves could develop. Partial list here, please pose your own suggestions.

Extreme Cave Adaptation/Claustrophobia. Dwarf is so repelled by sunlight he faints if exposed to it, and acts as if "Dwarves Stay Indoors" is always active for him. Alternatively (and more cripplingly) dwarf gets heavily claustrophobic and has to spend the rest of his life outdoors.

Pogonophobia- the dwarf now flees all other dwarves as if they were hostile entities. This one probably results in a gibbering madman starving to death in the mine, but if he happens to be, say, your+5 legendary weaponsmith, you could provide him with his own room, drop food and stuff in once in a while, and let him continue to work.

Xenophobia- the dwarf remains happy and loyal unless he sees a sentient non-dwarf, in which case he automatically attacks. Keep Urist locked up when the traders come.

Multiple Personality Disorder- dwarf becomes two dwarves. Skills divided between them. Name changes at random. Extra-fun if one suffers from cave adaptation, and other from agorophobia.

OCD- You can do anything with this one. Easiest would be "Dwarf faints at sight of dirt, vomit, vermin or miasma". May also refuse to eat anything but certain foods, or ignore all but a particular type of stone when it comes to working. To make it interesting, have this one couple with rapid skill advancement- so your legendary stonecrafter may also be the hardest person to keep working.

Schizophrenia. Non-noble dwarf believes he is noble, comes up with a list of requirements and demands, and refuses to work. (Or hey, maybe that's just where nobles come from)

Teetotalism- Dwarf refuses to drink alcohol again, ever. All work slowly ceases, but may be kept alive.

Amnesia- dwarf loses all skills.

Short-term memory loss- dwarf is unable to advance any skills.

ADHD- dwarf randomly reassigns his own work orders.

Autophobia- dwarf faints if it's ever by itself.

Obsession- dwarf follows another dwarf as if it is its pet, and faints if separated.


I'm more will come to me later, and I'm sure you all can come up with some, too- I'm seeing a scale from annoying quirk (extreme cave adaptation) to probably unlivable- Pogonophobia. Extra points to ones that are manageable with special living conditions, encouraging the creation of complicated/interesting asylums.

Maybe sometimes these will be permanent effects, other times they'll be warning stages- if you keep the dwarf happy/away from what sets it off, it may recover in a few years, otherwise it stays the same or degrades to the current, death-for-certain insanity.

[Medicine Man]

Most of these sound pretty good,I just don't like a few (including Extreme Cave Adaption)

[TheyTarget]

Schizophrenia. Non-noble dwarf believes he is noble, comes up with a list of requirements and demands, and refuses to work. (Or hey, maybe that's just where nobles come from)
lowly ceases, but may be kept alive.

That actually sounds more like delusions of grandeur(Think you're better then everyone, and at everything, and will attempt things that will kill you because you "know" its easy for you). Which should be added. 

This is actually an awesome idea. I like the crazies. But some of this should be personality features, and some should be things they get from random circumstance like cave adapt, and others should be given out when you fail a mood, or you go to berserk/tantrum state.

[NW_Kohaku]

Technically, the opposite of claustrophobia is agoraphobia - which can mean either a fear of open spaces, or a fear of gatherings of people.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

That actually sounds more like delusions of grandeur(Think you're better then everyone, and at everything, and will attempt things that will kill you because you "know" its easy for you). Which should be added

I was thinking schizophrenia in the "I'm Napolean Bonaparte" sense.

Technically, the opposite of claustrophobia is agoraphobia - which can mean either a fear of open spaces, or a fear of gatherings of people.

Yeah, but Cave adaptation is already an in-game term, so I figured I'd go with that. Should be easier to code, too.

[Deteramot]

Sounds pretty good, although Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a bit more complicated than that. It would be more like this:
Urist McNutjob has to have multiples of three items in his room. Three beds, three cabinets, three dressers, three weapon racks, three socks. Three is the compulsion. The obsession is what the compulsion is trying to avoid. When someone has OCD, they tend to think that if they fail to complete the compulsion, something bad will happen. It could cause fainting and nausea, sure. It could also cause extreme melancholy or even a berserk rage if left unsolved for a long time. The dwarf would slowly become non-functional as it always goes to check on something to make sure it is still fine, or because they arrange everything in groups of three. They would be more a drain on resources than a help, because if something isn't grouped to their satisfaction, they would have to fix it. And stopping them from fixing it could cause them to go insane.

So yeah. While the far more perceived OCD is the cleaning, that is only one facet, and tends to not be the only one. People who gather a lot of clutter (packrats) may have a type of OCD. They are compelled to keep everything by the obsession that something may come up which makes that thing necessary.

It's still an applicable madness, but it would be less beneficial and more detrimental.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

Well, I wanted something that would be easy to program. Clear-freak OCD, easy. More realistic obsessive behavior... less so.

[Deteramot]

True. It would have to be overly simplified. Although, it wouldn't be difficult if you just had the [OCD] flag cause bad thoughts if things weren't going right. It would also have to create a job, maybe called Obsession or Compulsion, in which the dwarf would try to fix the thing that's wrong. Other than that, it's just kind of a slightly annoying thing when he barges into the storeroom, grabs two beds and throws them into his room. And gathers three socks. The main detriment is that he would clog job lists, eat up pathfinding, take things from your stockpiles and probably usually go insane.

That being said, the most simple way would be the obsession being the bad thoughts they get and the compulsion being a random number between 1 and 10.

A part of me thinks these dwarfs would make terrific managers. They'd have your fortress organized in groups of three, six, and nine. It would be nice.

.... Until they went nuts and stabbed somebody for messing up the system....

[NW_Kohaku]

A part of me thinks these dwarfs would make terrific managers. They'd have your fortress organized in groups of three, six, and nine. It would be nice.

.... Until they went nuts and stabbed somebody for messing up the system....

I am suddenly reminded of that episode of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei where the "exact" girl was slicing a cake into perfectly even slices for the 5 people who were going to eat it, when another person showed up, so she sliced the fifths into sixths (technically, 30ths of the original cake) using a compass and some scratch paper, then another person came, so she wound up slicing it down to 210ths, and before people could complain, someone else came, so she freaked out, dumped the whole cake into a blender with some milk, and served everyone a cake smoothie.

[Argonnek]

Would these conditions be curable? We already have a psychologist (last time I checked), so he/she would probably help the dwarf along to make them productive members of society once more.

When taking an intro to psychology class, I learned that OCD is usually cured through slow exposure to what they fear. In the game, however, I wouldn't be that patient. If some dwarf wanted to have multiples of three for everything in his room, I'd wait until he was asleep, remove everything that he had stolen, and lock him in there until he was either willing to cooperate or dead. Whichever comes first.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

Would these conditions be curable? We already have a psychologist (last time I checked), so he/she would probably help the dwarf along to make them productive members of society once more.

When taking an intro to psychology class, I learned that OCD is usually cured through slow exposure to what they fear. In the game, however, I wouldn't be that patient. If some dwarf wanted to have multiples of three for everything in his room, I'd wait until he was asleep, remove everything that he had stolen, and lock him in there until he was either willing to cooperate or dead. Whichever comes first.

My idea, at least, would be that these psychosis would be curable, but only if you kept the dwarf happy for a while- and for them, "Happy" mostly means "Not exposed to whatever sets off their insanity".

So, if you wanted to save the insane at all, you'd have an asylum with a lot of special rooms in it- maybe a fenced-off above ground area, one constructed room out of a certain type of stone (OCD dwarves would need to give you time to build it), one room where a dwarf could be kept in isolation, etc. The asylum might even include workshops, cause useful dwarves might go insane, and you'd want them to keep working.

Some dwarves would get better with time and care. Some will go batshit berserk if the requirements of their insanity are not met. Others might settle into their mid-range insanity forever, and you'd just have to deal with it.

[Deteramot]

Argonnek: I hadn't heard that that was a method to cure OCD. I know there are anti-anxiety pills which help. Are you sure you're not thinking of phobias? I know that that's the preferred method to cure a phobia.

/nitpick.

[Kilo24]

I like the ideas behind this.  Insanity is currently a rather boring death sentence.  The misuse of psychiatric terminology rankles me, however, so I shall be forced into a crusade of nitpicking for a few of these.

Multiple Personality Disorder- dwarf becomes two dwarves. Skills divided between them. Name changes at random. Extra-fun if one suffers from cave adaptation, and other from agorophobia.

Multiple personality disorders (actually known as Dissociative Identity Disorder) actually never present themselves with only two personalities.  It's normally somewhere around five or more, and it's also a mostly Western disorder (suggesting that culture might play a large part in it.)

Having several personalities but also keeping skills the same between personalities would make more sense from a realism perspective.

OCD- You can do anything with this one. Easiest would be "Dwarf faints at sight of dirt, vomit, vermin or miasma". May also refuse to eat anything but certain foods, or ignore all but a particular type of stone when it comes to working. To make it interesting, have this one couple with rapid skill advancement- so your legendary stonecrafter may also be the hardest person to keep working.

It's often characterized by repetitive activities like washing hands.  Spending whole DF days going through bar after bar of soap would work well here; artistic dwarves could throw away their half-finished creations randomly too (but normally have a higher-than-average quality.)  I'd suggest random selection of a few traits here since it can vary.

Schizophrenia. Non-noble dwarf believes he is noble, comes up with a list of requirements and demands, and refuses to work. (Or hey, maybe that's just where nobles come from)

Schizophrenia does not equal multiple personalities (I'm not sure you made that claim, but the misconception's prevalent enough I'll make it here.)  It comes in a few varieties, some of which I'll describe: paranoid schizophrenia, where the victim is highly suspicious of basically everything; catatonic schizophrenia, where the victim frequently stands motionless for hours; and disorganized schizophrenia, where the victim is more generally bizarre-thinking and also doesn't show much emotion. 
Hallucinations, delusions, grossly disorganized behavior/thought, blunted emotions, lack of speech, and lack of motivation are also common between all types (and two of those criteria are needed for diagnosis.)

Amnesia- dwarf loses all skills.

Short-term memory loss- dwarf is unable to advance any skills.

People with amnesia can still learn and use other types of memory.  For example, Clive Wearing, a guy with no ability to record short-term memory into long-term memory (anterograde amnesia) could still learn to play the piano, and would do so despite being consciously sure that he couldn't.  Conditioning also doesn't use the same neural pathways that more normal memory does.

More likely than not, automatic skills that rely on much conscious thought (fighting skills or many other physical ones) wouldn't be greatly affected, whereas other kinds (social or creative skills) would be.

And because I've got Inception on the mind, one of the director's earlier films (Memento) has a very realistic portrayal of the protagonist's anterograde amnesia and designs the whole movie around it.

ADHD- dwarf randomly reassigns his own work orders.

Eh, I'd be more prone to making them very susceptible to distractions.  Like having craftsmen be distracted by other sources of noise, causing them to work much slower, and/or having recent thoughts screwing with work quality too.

A part of me thinks these dwarfs would make terrific managers. They'd have your fortress organized in groups of three, six, and nine. It would be nice.

.... Until they went nuts and stabbed somebody for messing up the system....

I am suddenly reminded of that episode of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei where the "exact" girl was slicing a cake into perfectly even slices for the 5 people who were going to eat it, when another person showed up, so she sliced the fifths into sixths (technically, 30ths of the original cake) using a compass and some scratch paper, then another person came, so she wound up slicing it down to 210ths, and before people could complain, someone else came, so she freaked out, dumped the whole cake into a blender with some milk, and served everyone a cake smoothie.

Okay, the coincidence is disturbing.  I just saw the first few episodes of that last night.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

I like the ideas behind this.  Insanity is currently a rather boring death sentence  The misuse of psychiatric terminology rankles me, however, so I shall be forced into a crusade of nitpicking for a few of these

So, a lot of this I know is different than what I described, but I was going more for what's fun and easy to program than what's necessarily the most accurate. OCD in particular, I wanted one that would be drastic enough that just letting the dwarf wander your fortress would be disaster, but player-controllable things could keep them happy.

...idea. Some maladies make dwarves do things that don't upset them much, but may upset other dwarves- leaving rotting food underneath their bed, which would make the clean freaks panic. Or maybe all dwarves get negative thoughts from seeing the crazies?

I stand by what I came up with for schizophrenia, though you could always pack in more flavors; my uncle has a rather severe case, and I understand that one of the more common symptoms is to believe you hold some highly important position in the unvierse- prophet, secret agent, second coming, mayor, president, whatever. (My uncle in particular has believed all of those).

[Argonnek]

Argonnek: I hadn't heard that that was a method to cure OCD. I know there are anti-anxiety pills which help. Are you sure you're not thinking of phobias? I know that that's the preferred method to cure a phobia.

/nitpick.

The video we watched in class was about many different maladies, it's certainly not impossible that I got two of them confused. Sometimes the distinction's kind vague, though... At least in my mind.