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Magic

44 (19%)

Magitek

38 (16.5%)

Steampunk

65 (28.1%)

WE DON'T NEED NO WEAK CONTRAPTIONS! (Normal)

28 (12.1%)

All of the Above (Moddable)

56 (24.2%)

Total Members Voted: 231

[Brian]

What if magic were something that wasn't enabled until you became the dwarven capitol? I'm thinking because you'd see an occasional bit of magic prior, such as in a siege or a caravan escort, but once you become the capitol, you're now the one in charge of keeping a different sort of beasties at bay, and can start training in some basic magic arts. I don't know if I'd rather the magic introduce any new elements to game (flame swords that spread heat to body parts they hit), or simply modify existing concepts (increased dodge, speed, endurance, etc). Maybe add the ridiculous (resurrect a dwarf) but implement it such that even a 20 year old fort would have to make a terrible sacrifice to implement it.

[ZebioLizard2]

And I have to wonder why you included "all the above" in the first place, if you have a choice "A" (magic), choice "B" (steampunk), choice "AB" (magitek, the combination of magic and steampunk), and a choice "O" (screw them both)... "All the above" seems like it's just a way to say "I don't want anything to have any overarching order or meaning to it".

Ah I'm sorry, the first three choices are for PURE, as in you can mod them in or out, but you won't see the other three.

All of the Above implies that all three will be added, while one may be the "main" one, but all three will be moddable in.

I'll clarify it now.

Also, I expected most people to tl;dr the stuff I write in general, but I'm a little surprised nobody wants to comment on the last post I did...

I did rather skim it, but my time is limited in reading the forums, and so I cannot debate a post that long right now. (College, Essay, English teacher is old, historical, and paranoid enough that if five words match in a paper he'll declare it plagiarized and bring a lawsuit...)

[NW_Kohaku]

Ah I'm sorry, the first three choices are for PURE, as in you can mod them in or out, but you won't see the other three.

All of the Above implies that all three will be added, while one may be the "main" one, but all three will be moddable in.

But the thing is that if you add in magic, you can make steampunk out of that when you mod magic in the raws. 

Again, it's not hard to mod "fire-breathing golem" into "steam-powered automaton with a flamethrower".

The difference is, as Quatch said it, what's in Vanilla.

EDIT: Also, I hit "magitek", but that was on the assumption that it meant that "all the above" was moddable (because there's no reason it shouldn't be if there is magic and technology already in the game).  I also think that if you explicitly said "picking magic or technology explicitly forbids other people from the ability to even mod into the game what they want", then I think the voting would be tremendously different, and favor "All of the Above" far more than anything else, because there's almost no reason I could see someone saying "no, I don't want you to have the ability to modify the game to make you happy in a way that doesn't hurt me any".

[ZebioLizard2]

You'd be surprised, some people would prefer no such thing as magic explicitly, or technology at all, and I guess I might've fudged it up a bit. Sorry, but you are allowed to change your vote so it's simple enough to do so.

[Jayce]

Keep it in the mines of moria atmosphere.

[NW_Kohaku]

Keep it in the mines of moria atmosphere.

... I really wish there were more options for fantasy than "Clone of LoTR" and "Clone of Warhammer" in more peoples minds...

Why enslave this game to the shadow of Tolkien, when we could actually be creative, and make a better fantasy? ... Or at least one that hasn't been told a million times already.

[Jayce]

Like?.

[NW_Kohaku]

Like doing something different. 

If it was "like" something, it wouldn't be different, but if you really want an example, I've had a mod on hold for a while after I made a prototype for a couple months now... http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=50726.msg1074466#msg1074466 here.  Dwarves cross-breeding with friendly, intelligent giant spiders. 

There, difference achieved.

For what sort of thing magic or technology or magitek could be like, we could go with anything I've said in the past few pages of this thread.

This is fantasy, it's supposed to be creative, there's supposed to be an infinite number of directions we can travel down, so why do people insist that there must be absolutely no deviation from Our Dwarves Are All The Same?

[dragonshardz]

*bows to the mind and eloquence of NW_Kohaku*

Also, TVTropes! \o/

[HonkyPunch]

I didn't take the time to read the whole thread, so I don't know if it's been suggested yet, but I think it'd be spiffy if magic was handled in sort of a regional way, for example in world gen there could be a number of magical "sources" that are invisible, almost like magnetic fields, and you could use magic by learning to draw energy from them. Example, magic would be more bountiful in a more magically charged zone, and therefore you could cast more spells, and more stable spells over all. the sources could vary, I.E. cold zones, hot zones, water zones, earth zones, for the varying elements; Volcanoes having strong fire/heat based magic, and glaciers having strong ice/cold magic. The magical value could be set in world gen, effectively allowing you to turn off magic for a straight up dark fantasy setting, or turn it on for wizard battles. If it was a world gen parameter, it would be possible to gen a world with very little magic, etc.  Magic, in ff8 fashion, could be stored for later use, but possibly would be less powerful if not used, as there could be spell 'decay' and how many/how powerful the spells you could store would be based on your magic affinity/memory. The power/stability of magic could be determined by the creatures magic affinity, which would be a generated stat, I.E your dwarf could be born with an incredibly high affinity, and be chucking spells around like a natural, while most would have to study/train a bit to reach that level. Stability could be based on a multitude of things, such as focus, intelligence, magic affinity, etc, basically in that casting spells within your range is a bit less troublesome, but casting high level doomsday spells could have very adverse effects, perhaps such as causing insanity. (in call of cthulhu/cthulhu d20 fashion) Perhaps if there was spell decay, if you let too many of them decay it could adversely affect your creature. Continuing with spell stability, suppose you cast an ice spell at a target, but it's out of your league or your dwarf has ADD. In this situation, the dwarf could accidentally miscast, freezing himself, missing the target, or possibly freezing one of his organs. Miscasting a high level fire spell (Perhaps summoning a fire storm) could cause a massive explosion that could gib any dwarf in the immediate area. (maybe dead/evil zones could have evil magic, so that there could be necromancers so that the undead would have an actual source? Perhaps there wouldn't be any undead unless there was evil magic? It'd be crazy if there was a necromancer raising an army of undead and sweeping across the country side, eventually conquering the world, being even better if you, the player could, in adventure mode.)
(Perhaps magic could be entity based, too? Maybe entities, such as god like creatures that civilizations worship, could invent spells? or teach magic to the mortals? Perhaps by devoting worship to an entity you could gain favor and magical prowess? Maybe it could be something like, there are the elements of the earth, the different types of magic (there wouldn't have to be only elemental powers, ala final fantasy, with space, time, and forbidden magic such as death spells, gravity spells, and those that shift time in your favor) and for each of these types of magic, there could be sets of deities or creatures that represent them, and could be randomly generated (fire dragon, ice buffallo, death kobold) type things that you could show favor to, or learn magic from?)
i dunno, just my thoughts.

[Vercingetorix]

TL;DR: Magic is feasible based on the way DF works and exists currently, technological change not so much.  The last paragraph describes a way by which changing technology could be included based upon a customizable "age" concept that categorizes the world's technology based on worldgen factors.  This would allow new types of gameplay within the same, classic DF setup.

-----------------------------------------------

Something I just thought of in regards to the two has to do with the inherent limitations of technology in DF.  Simply put, technology has to be plausible or else it's ridiculous; this basically means randomly-generated technology is going to be impossible to implement and so any use of technology will have to be confined to a reasonably realistic tech tree or fixed set of options that is predefined with specific steps towards different advances.  This will mean, unfortunately, that no matter what technology will eventually stagnate and there would be no room for additional discovery in the DF universe.

Magitek subverts this somewhat with the use of magic, but still falls prey to inherent limits with in-game technology.  On the other hand, magic is pretty much limited only by the number of potential actions/effects/syndromes/materials and whatnot within the game; its effects could be completely randomly generated and  could continue to be so indefinitely, producing a continually changing magical world that would remain vibrant for as long as magic-users are alive.

However, with technology one route could be setting up categories that reflect different technologies up to the 15th century that characterizes DF (although some of the mechanical technologies and their potential are straight out of the 16th or 17th, even later); over time, as the world grows and changes it could trigger changes in technology level comparable to changes of age (and regress as well).  Technological changes could also be realistically expected to be much slower due to the presence of magic, so it would be entirely plausible for a DF world to continue for centuries or even millennia with only incremental improvements in technology alongside major leaps in magical knowledge.  You could have a fort set in the world's equivalent of the Stone Age, or the Iron Age, or whatever; attempting to build a fort without agriculture or the ability to smelt metals higher than copper would be a major challenge simply to survive, let alone build any kind of social structure.

This could also open room, if possible, for modders to expand upon this technological base by adding new technology levels to reflect anything they want, be it Stone Age DF or Urist Meier's:Alpha Centauri.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, again, there's already a Fallout Mod. 

If you give players a "magic only" idea, then someone's going to make a "magic crossbow" that shoots lasers and has charges on a battery instead of arrows, and "magic armor" with deflector shields.

The only thing modders need is the ability to turn certain procedural things off, so that certain things aren't random, and a flexible enough set of tokens to play with.  (Which seems to be what Toady is heading for...)

Also, I'd have to point out that agriculture is incredibly basic stuff, people have been tilling the land with wooden plows long before they figured out how to work with copper or make bronze.  Of course, I've already had the argument over what technology we have already that you can actually scratch OFF the list.

However, while I may have gone off-message, again, if we're talking about how much technology (or magical technology based on a psuedo-scientific "magic" which has predictable rules, and is functionally just an arbitrary but consistant alteration of the laws of physics, which is what I really would enjoy most, and think would best provide the right kind of gameplay,) can expand gameplay, we need to go back to the question of "What do we want out of the game?"

We have a lot of people apparently voting for "Steampunk", but I have yet to see someone give a serious explanation of what that would entail, exactly.  The only thing I've seen were references to Warhammer, really, and I don't play Warhammer, so I can't really say that helps me get an idea of it very much. 

Regardless, since I think that "steampunk" probably means stuff like out of Arcanum, then I'll have to point out that stuff like chemistry in Arcanum is basically the same thing as the alchemy stuff I've already talked about, and there really isn't that much difference between a steampunk spiderbot and a magical golem.  In terms of the actual game changes, steampunk would just be a more limited version of the magic system, so I don't see, (unless someone wants to jump in with some explanation for why this conclusion is wrong,) how "steampunk" is anything other than "magic we don't call magic" in terms of how the stuff actually gets coded into the game, provided the magic doesn't have some of the wacky random features, or that those features can be turned off, like having your spiderbot assembly plant suddenly summon a gremlin by mistake...

[Jayce]

Im okay with the whole fantasy dwarf thing i kinda like it,the only mod i would like to see would be colonize an alien world fortress mod,the underground caverns already remind me of the surface of an alien planet.

[cupido]

I'd like to see magic in form of something related to mountains and mining. Like creating a 7/7 magma or water tile, causing a landslide, golem construction, revealing underground layers, or, once lighting is in, illuminating an area by magic. I don't care too much if it's by magitek, pure magic or alchemy. But just generic D'n'D spells wouldn't fit the game well.
As a bit of a different take on magic, what about creating special magic floor patterns (like a cross in bauxite in a microcline square (yuck)) out of rough stone, blocks, wood, metal bars and gems? The patterns are randomly generated at worldgen for this one world or the patterns are always the same but the effect is randomized . Then you can buy the looks of the patterns in books or research them. The effects for those who step on that floor or are inside their range could be happy thoughts, instant pregnancy, berserking, setting on fire, depressing them (why not let the goblins commit suicide?). Yeah, it's just an idea for a different approach, but who wants to ruin his fort with ugly floors...

[Cheese]

Shamanistic magic? Certain gods will grant the ability to move terrain and some are more powerful than others, perhaps armok holding blood and magma magic and the most powerful level, but it would require great sacrifice.