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[iyaerP]

I don't kill immigrants.


And I have a danger room, but that was only to train up my worthless swarms of immigrants so that I wouldn't have just my starting military as invincible badasses. Had a close call where my A-team was all asleep/eating/faffing about during a siege once and only held by the skin of my teeth so I decided to make backup squads. Who were dangerroom trained.

And I don't cause noble accidents unless they ask for

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

slade or adamantine.

anything else goes. If I can do it, I do.

Although I feel I must add the qualifier that I am relatively new and this is my first successful fort, so I feel no guilt about taking "easy" routes

[Jacob/Lee]

It's less of a self-limit, more laziness.

I never make plant cloth. Ever. All pig tails that get grown (which is a small fraction) are brewed to dwarven ale.

[Eric Blank]

I don't often consciously limit myself, but there are some things that make me a less efficient, clumsier player.

-I never quantum stockpile things. I rarely remember to atom-smash them either.
-I still allow myself to use up/down stairways even though they're both more difficult to defend and have been proven to hit your CPU harder than a ramp spiral.
-I don't use danger rooms, I'm just too lazy to set them up, and don't care much about my military as long as the enemy retreats in the end.
-I've never actually implemented a lever-operator bunker, it would make responding to a crisis easier and faster but I never bother.
-It takes me for-freaking-ever to get around to producing weapons and armor.
-I don't use war animals very often.
-I usually pick evil or savage embarks, places I know will put my dwarves at risk.
-I don't make impressive defensive traps often, I rely on a militia and a drawbridge airlock to deal with my problems.
-I don't usually clean up after the merchants kill each other/are killed by invaders, or really anything else. My fortress' landscape is almost always littered with corpses and random crap. Then the kobolds come...

[rephikul]

- No coffin
- No danger room
- No magma
- No total wall in
- No free lunches i.e. buy from caravan, improve then sell back to caravan; reactions without reagents etc
- Elephant soap for all construction whenever possible
- Aluminum for all buildings & furniture whenever possible

[Internet Kraken]

Walling off caverns is for the weak, beardless, and above all elves. You don't want to be a filthy elf do you? Then tear down those barriers and face those Forgotten Beasts LIKE A REAL DWARF!!!!

That's the main limit I impose on myself. Only allow the caverns to be walled off in extreme situations.

[Max White]

I will sometimes dig down and use a cavern in the same way others might use the outside world. That is to say, the only way into the fort is by walking through the cavern.

Deaths in the few years are a little high.

[Vercingetorix]

I usually don't use caverns if possible; this limits embarks to sites with realistic and easily acquired water and usually means limiting space to a few solid z-levels (or mountainous sites).  My goal is to have as realistic expeditions as possible depending on the overall goals I want for the fort; this can either increase the difficulty or decrease it depending on the facts and circumstances.  I also try to stagger development to more accurately match the population; getting magma requires much more know-how and resources than the initial seven can muster even if they're perfectly capable of doing so with the tools available.

If I want a particular challenge, I may even wait until I actually get a dwarf with a given labor skill before I can use the skill; this makes for example architecture, brewing or metalsmithing more useful skills to bring since there's no guarantee I'll get them in a migration wave by the time I need them.

Also, the fortress shuts down for the month of Obsidian so the dwarves can celebrate, make plenty friends, and make potential tantrum spirals if things go awry.  It also helps shake up the mayoral scene pretty frequently because of all the socializing.

[TolyK]

I like to use intellect, usually starting with ballistae and high-quality few-weapon traps, going on to above-ground mazes and automated traps (I love using water). Cage traps are for my (purposefully inefficient) trapline for animals, if the line exists at all. And inside my fort too.

or, I get all my dwarves axes and send them in against enemies:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I lightly quantum stockpile but atomsmashing is a no-no. cave-ins are sometimes used. the world on a support is not (unless I'm doing something crazy XD or testing).
No killing migrants.
No sealing myself away, though sometimes I give myself the option (never took it)
Seasonal autosave and backup is for crashes ONLY ('xcept nuttin')
No training room, mostly because it takes so long in realtime (my fps on a 4x4 with 7 dwarves is at most 50)
some other stuff I forgot

[Korva]

No harming cats. I'd rather let my fort starve than butcher a kitty.
No stealing from caravans. My dwarves may be semi-suicidal drunkards with less brains than a kobold, but they're no brigands.
No use of traps against megabeasts and semi-megabeasts. They must be fought, walled out or killed by cave-in. (So far, I've mostly opted for the "avoid them" route. Chicken, yeah.)

I've also begun to implement a "no trading goblin junk" rule because it's silly that people will happily give you valuable goods for stinking, blood-and-vomit-covered, no-quality plunder that they probably can't even wear. And I'm seriously thinking about looking up how to mod out clothing for goblins since a siege or ambush can cause bad clutter which is annoying to clean up when you have other things to do, but leaving it lying around makes me worried about FPS.

Finally, I don't like to deliberately harm anyone. I like to treat my dwarves/critters as if they were "real". The exception is that I'm looking for a way to provide training for my medical dwarves that doesn't depend on ambushes, and I'm annoyed enough with soldiers-in-training who give birth that I may order them into the danger room anyway.

[Ashery]

I adhere to several of the restrictions posted above, but the only unique one I can contribute is that I don't use stairs save for multilevel digging operations.

[Sandrew]

"Don't be a dick."

Which is my general rule for practically every game I play. I rarely use exploits and try to play in a way that I can consider fair. I treat my dwarves well, I don't lock down my fortress, and the only exploit I use is dumping all my crap in single-tile garbage dumps, though I should probably make vast waste stockpiles for sub-par furniture.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I also wall off caverns in the early game. I usually don't open them afterwards, not even when I can most definitely handle whatever's inside there.

[TolyK]

^ Perfect

[Lord Shonus]

I don't do anything that is abusurdly impossible, except for quantum dump zones (which are almost unavoidable when dumpind, I don't use them for storage), free-energy machines, invincible walls (I aways leave a path open to compensate.)

[expwnent]

For a "no goblin junk" rule, you could always just give away all the goblin junk for free (trade it for something worthless). Should help the FPS.

[TolyK]

actually I usually just offer it to them.

*Hey, Mr. Elven trader, would you please take this junk offering to your king?*
*Thank you so much!* (to helper) *Wow, these dwarves are very kind!*