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[Deteramot]

I can already smell the hate boiling. Nobles are generally agreed to be the most worthless wastes of space since Soapmakers. They make horrible demands, order the hammering of dwarfs who could not have possibly completed their mandates, and generally bring a fortress to a spiraling death halt. This, in the nature of things, has lead to many, many people creating extraordinarily complicated ways to kill their nobles. And this, in the most un-dwarvenly tradition, in the most apologetic course of action, is my suggestion:

Punish them.

Not the nobles. Punish the players who kill the nobles.

Put down the hate chisels. Let me explain.

Dwarf Fortress is supposed to be a simulation of a fantasy world. It is, in fact, supposed to be a simulation of a fantasy world builder. How many fantasy stories do you know of where an important noble dies in strange circumstances and nobody notices or cares? You can probably count them on the fingers of one head. So, why not have a punishment system in place? It doesn't have to be super serious, like instant failure of the fortress. It should, however, require ingenuity and resources in order to avoid a worse punishment.

Here's the type of scenario I'm imagining:

The Duchess demands green glass items for the fiftieth time, despite the fact that this map still, consistently, has absolutely no sand. You, pissed off and tired of this ungrateful waste of flesh, decide to stage an "Unfortunate Accident." Namely, you have her pull a lever that drops her thirty z-stories into a pit. Some amount of time later, perhaps with the next Dwarf Caravan, the liaison comments on the missing duchess. Next season, you get no migrants. The next season after, a single dwarf comes with the title of Investigator. He begins snooping around the Duchess' chambers and, depending on how good of Liars your dwarfs are, eventually he investigates the pit and finds the Duchess' rotting body. He leaves hurriedly. Two seasons later, when you would be getting a caravan, you instead get an Inquisitorial Squad. They begin asking questions, and they aren't as polite as the investigator. They rough up your dwarfs a little, find out who killed the Duchess. (In this case, blame would fall on the mason and mechanic who built the floor, support, and trigger.) When they find the culprit, they take them into custody and either a) give them to the Sheriff/CotG/Hammerer, or b) take them away to the mountainhome, depending on what noble it was that died. In the case of the Queen or King dying, punishment should be much more severe, such as also taking your mayor, taking a percentage of your wealth, or even refusing to send caravans for a long time, up to five years. In more extreme cases, like repeat offenses, they may even lay a sanction on you, or even send an "honor guard" who take up the job of law enforcement.

Feel free to add thoughts on the subject. Please keep the hating and calling me an elf to a minimum.

[NW_Kohaku]

HE'S AN ELF! BURN HIM![/i]

Problem is, it's very, very rare for a dwarf to actual kill a noble.  That generally happens when you have a berserk dwarf or something, and they wouldn't live to see the inquisitors, anyway.  Otherwise, it's not the dwarves that killed the noble, it's the player.  You can't blame a specific dwarf for making a mechanism that was used in the lever that was used to open the magma floodgates, the game has no way of using that kind of deductive logic.  Instead, you get what you get from the nobles: no single dwarf is responsible for not making a glass item when there is no sand, so any random dwarf is picked.

This, then, just brings the solution to being either (A) - atom smash the baroness.  They're not finding the body now!  Or (B), kill the inquisitors, too!  (Or, you know, C, savescum nobles when they appear until they have preferences like copper and cabinets)

[Deteramot]

Obviously, the bonuses from taking option C would have to far outweigh the bonuses from options A and B. I would think the solution to A would have to be, of course, having things crushed by bridges still exist. The game would also necessarily have to track things like who constructed what building (which, admittedly, may cause an fps drain (although I imagine not a huge one)). And killing the investigators and inquisitors would lead to even harsher punishment, maybe culminating in Dwarfs attacking your fortress (they have the siege tag in the raws).

That being said, I have to put this in, because if you have a chance to use a quote from Sir Pratchett, it must be done:

Kill the inquisitors? Why not just kill everybody and invade Poland?

[FreakyCheeseMan]

Eh. Investigating is too hard, and there's too many ways around it. You just need to make nobles give the player *some* benefit... common proposal is that their presence leads to you gaining lands and satelite farms.

[NW_Kohaku]

Kill the inquisitors? Why not just kill everybody and invade Poland?

Because we don't have the ability to invade yet, but trust us, when we get the ability to, we will, and those dirty elves will all see their Final Solution in the concentration camps.

As for preventing atom smashing - HERESY!  Besides, even then, there's magma dumping, or just plain walling off the duchess's coffin entirely so that there is no way to find it.

As for tracking "who built the trap that killed the duchess", that's just plain absurd.  Was it the miner who carved out the chamber?  Was it the miner who carved out the channel the magma flowed through?  Was it the engineer who installed the floodgate?  Was it the other engineer who installed the lever?  Was it the other-other engineer who connected the lever?  Was it the other-other-other engineer who built the lever that you set the duchess to pull as bait to get her into the deathtrap?  Was it the dwarf who finally pulled the lever to the deathtrap floodgate, or the dwarf who pulled the lever that started the pump that would fill the deathtrap's magma resevoir?

Or was it the player who ordered all those things of many different dwarves, none of whom were fully aware of what they were doing?  Even if you WANT to track all those things, what killed the duchess was a magma flow, not a dwarf, and the dwarves had no direct hand in introducing the magma flow to the duchess, they simply dug pits because you ordered them to that happened to get filled with magma under someone else's watch, when it happened to have a floodgate that dropped magma onto the duchess's shiney new lever room.

[Deteramot]

That's... a much better plan, actually. Still, I'd imagine that there would still be a large amount of people who feel that the benefits don't outweigh the consequences. In order to make the simulation more realistic, the advantages of chasming a noble has to be outweighed by the punishment.

And yeah.... I can see all the holes in the idea now....

[TheSummoner]

How about instead of messing with that, they haul away your administrative dwarves... the Mayor, the Broker, the Bookkeeper, etc.  You lose the use of those dwarves for a period determined by the inquisition and cannot replace them for the duration.  You can trade, but you have to use low skilled dwarves.  You can't request goods from caravans, etc.

[StephanReiken]

Sounds good, but it could cause inquisitions to come as a part of truely accidental deaths.

Could cause dwarves to despair at the death of their respected noble.

And if It happens too many times, nobles dieing, your civilization could exile you, and if the causes are determined to be the dwarves, or unexplained, go to war with you. Causing you to become your own civilization.

[TheSummoner]

Perhaps it could increase the number and strength of sieges as well... Invaders seeing it as a moment of weakness.  And by increase the strength, I mean the strength of individual units, not just throwing more cannon fodder at you.

[ECrownofFire]

They should just punish you instead of specific dwarves. Just stop sending a caravan for some years. Even if the noble dies by some goblin, you should be punished, because it's your responsibility to protect the noble. Only old age shouldn't punish you. If enough die, several things could happen, you might not get any more, you might get pushed out of your civilization, you might be attacked by the civilization, you could go without immigrants (or actually get more from dwarves wanting to join the "Resistance" or something), you could go without caravans, you could go without human and/or elf caravans (trade embargo), you could be attacked by humans/elves, there's just a lot of things that could happen from this. Before or at the same time this is implemented, we need some kind of benefits to being a barony (for example). You could get more immigrants, more trade, more goblin attacks, maybe some free imports as taxes from the barony you supposedly control.

Really though, we need some benefits to nobles before we get anything like this.

[loose nut]

I don't think the dwarven nobility would be inclined to "investigate" really. It seems more likely that when the replacement noble comes, there'd be a chance (entirely unrelated to the circumstances of the noble's death; nobles should be fairly capricious and cruel) that enforcers (whether from within or outside) imprison and execute a number of your dwarves at random. Particularly if your presiding duke/count/baron eats it, there'd be a chance your mayor is blamed, and either is executed or flees the area to save his own skin.

[loose nut]

Actually now I wonder if the player should be able to order the hammerer/ sheriff to imprison or kill particular dwarves. In the case of a noble dying, you'd send the hammerer to mete out "justice" to a number of dwarves in the area, to keep up appearances when the king's advisor comes along to check things out. "Why yes, Urist the Pump Operator killed our beloved Countess, but as you can see, noble sir, he's been subject to 72 hammerstrikes!"

And then if the advisor doesn't buy it, he comes back with his own enforcers to administer beatings.

Killing the king is a whole different ball of wax and should probably start a civil war.

[Pandarsenic]

The thing is, in the eyes of the dorfs we manipulate, it really is a genuine unfortunate accident.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

My view of dwarven nobles is this:

When the game is complete, they will be a necessary evil- annoying and hateable, but their presence brings you benefit, and their deaths bring consequences. However, both the benefits and the consequences relate to features we don't have yet- namely, your fortresses complicated relations with the outside world. So right now, they're just an unnecessary evil.

This state should be enjoyed as long as it lasts. Rather then coming up with suggestions to limit players murder of nobles, we should just accept that those consequences will come in time, and we should make the most of however many months or years of blissful regicide we have left.

[ECrownofFire]

I agree with this guy. Let's just kill the nobles until something bad happens, it's fun!