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Author Topic: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements  (Read 11817 times)

Stove

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Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« on: January 30, 2011, 11:41:26 pm »

As it is, skill levels (for labours) only determine things such as:
The rates at which higher-quality items are created
The speed of job completion
The quantity of items obtained (planter, miner, herbalist)

Basically, skill level only determines quality and efficiency. All jobs are performable by unskilled dwarves. I feel that this is severely unrealistic and takes away significantly from the challenge of the game.

Certain jobs should have a minimum skill level to even be attempted by a dwarf.
For example, constructing a mechanism might require a dwarf with at least "Competent" level Mechanic skill. As a consequence, if you don't have a dwarf with the required mechanic skill, you're in a difficult situation. You can't just train a dwarf by constructing lots of mechanisms, after all.

Training a dwarf's skill level up from zero would therefore require other methods:
Learning from another skilled dwarf, or learning from books. Some skills could be bootstrappable through simpler jobs (such as making stone blocks to learn masonry). Practicing simple jobs might not increase skill past a certain level, though.

So your mechanicless fortress needs a mechanic. Your options are to buy a book on mechanics from a caravan or wait for a mechanic to migrate to your fortress. If a better immigration system is implemented, you might be able to request a mechanic, and books haven't been implemented yet, so you might be left pretty well screwed the way things are right now.

Most crafts and furniture would have a minimum skill requirement. 

More care would be taken when choosing starting dwarves. A highly skilled dwarf would be worth far more to a fortress than it is now. This seems like such an obvious suggestion to me, but I haven't seen anyone suggest it, and searching didn't turn up anything. Am I missing something? Anyone know if Toady has expressed this idea already?
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Max White

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #1 on: January 30, 2011, 11:45:34 pm »

Well I have never carved a statue in my life, but I have no doubt of five things.
1) I could if given the stone and workshop.
2) It would be of low quality.
3) It would take some time.
4) My second one would most likely be a little better.
5) I would almost certainly hurt myself several times in the process.

Now 1 though to 4 are all covered by DF, however, 5 is not, so maybe instead of 'Oh, you have no masons? Then no tables for you!' it should go along the lines of 'Oh, you have no masons, well if you start training one, he might cut off he's fingers, or even hands, or poke an eye out, but he will get there!' in order to make skill more realistic and valuable, but without arbitary level requirments.

NW_Kohaku

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #2 on: January 30, 2011, 11:53:00 pm »

Well, perhaps, instead of "basic" quality items being functionally identical to masterworks in virtually every case besides weapons, armor, or for the purposes of item value, there could be "inferior quality" levels for dabbling dwarf screwups that just don't work properly?  That would let you build a "what were you drinking?" quality level door that can't shut properly or be completely useless, but would at least give dwarves experience towards gaining a skill level.
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Stove

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #3 on: January 31, 2011, 12:22:00 am »

Well I have never carved a statue in my life, but I have no doubt of five things.
1) I could if given the stone and workshop.
2) It would be of low quality.
3) It would take some time.
4) My second one would most likely be a little better.
5) I would almost certainly hurt myself several times in the process.

Now 1 though to 4 are all covered by DF, however, 5 is not, so maybe instead of 'Oh, you have no masons? Then no tables for you!' it should go along the lines of 'Oh, you have no masons, well if you start training one, he might cut off he's fingers, or even hands, or poke an eye out, but he will get there!' in order to make skill more realistic and valuable, but without arbitary level requirments.

Constructing statues and tables might very well be among the "bootstrappable" jobs for the mason skill. But you probably wouldn't even know how to begin constructing a viable floodgate or quern.

I think job failure and inferior products as NW_Kohaku suggests should certainly be implemented as well, and I'm pretty sure I've seen this suggested before (which is why I didn't mention it in my post).

I suppose it could be done in such a way that all jobs are performable by unskilled dwarves, but certain tasks require a minimum skill level for it not to fail or produce a useless item - but then you'd have situations where underskilled dwarves perform a task they can't do when you actually wanted another dwarf to perform the task, unless you take measures to prevent it from happening, or the game prevents it by default.

That would let you build a "what were you drinking?" quality level door that can't shut properly or be completely useless, but would at least give dwarves experience towards gaining a skill level.

Failing a task over and over wouldn't necessarily improve your skill, though. If you don't know a thing about mechanics, repeatedly failing at attempts from scratch probably won't work very well.

The minimum skill required, bootstrappability, and maximum level trainable to would have to be decided for each individual skill-based task.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #4 on: January 31, 2011, 01:11:42 am »

I've gone through some arguments that became pretty heated on similar things before, so I don't want to get too into this discussion, but...

There's a major difference between knowing something through academic knowledge and being able to perform it well through what is perhaps best called "intuitive knowledge" (the training of subconscious, muscle memory, coordination, and general picking up of tricks and shortcuts to the point where you can perform a task without requiring serious conscious thought, perhaps best explored in the book Blink by Malcom Gladwell). 

Perhaps the most obvious example would be something like knowing how to draw - everyone knows what a picture should look like when they think of something to draw, but the refinement of skill takes years of practice and mastery. 

Learning to play guitar takes learning to read music academically, but you can't just read a book to learn to play guitar, you have to practice.  In fact, reading music and most languages take plenty of practice, because just looking at some vocabulary terms isn't going to let you learn to fluently speak a language, you have to use it to the point where you can think the words and know what they mean without mentally translating them to your native language before you are truly fluent in a language, and that takes practice.

Learning how to make a gear or tie together a mechanism would take some sort of academic knowledge, but being able to file down a stone to make perfectly interlocking gear bits by hand is an intuitive skill.

The skill system that DF has currently is designed in a way that replicates the acquisition of intuitive knowledge, but essentially assumes all academic knowledge is inherently learned.  Trying to increase intuitive knowledge through academic means only works up to a certain point - you can only learn so much about a guitar or just seeing explanations of what sheet music mean before the only way to learn more is to play or listen.

Even something as basic as math is something that you have to learn through practice - you can't learn calculus without first taking algebra, and practicing doing algebra problems until the language of algebraic math is something you can understand without having to consciously think about the rules of algebra, or else calculus is simply too dense a subject to understand.

This is a bit roundabout, but what I think might best represent this concept would be to have skills work the way they do now (representing intuitive knowledge), but have some sort of prerequisite academic learning that would have to take place before you could perform jobs that really do take some academic knowledge.

This has to be done with some care towards gameplay, though.  The game is already pretty heavily front-loaded in the difficulty department, and making dwarves less capable early on when the fort is in the only time it is ever truly threatened, while later on, there are no concerns can become problematic.
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Stove

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #5 on: January 31, 2011, 03:25:39 am »

I've gone through some arguments that became pretty heated on similar things before, so I don't want to get too into this discussion, but...
Were these arguments in reference to Dwarf Fortress? If they were, maybe those threads are relevant and worth linking.

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There's a major difference between knowing something through academic knowledge and being able to perform it well through what is perhaps best called "intuitive knowledge" (the training of subconscious, muscle memory, coordination, and general picking up of tricks and shortcuts to the point where you can perform a task without requiring serious conscious thought, perhaps best explored in the book Blink by Malcom Gladwell). 

Perhaps the most obvious example would be something like knowing how to draw - everyone knows what a picture should look like when they think of something to draw, but the refinement of skill takes years of practice and mastery. 

Learning to play guitar takes learning to read music academically, but you can't just read a book to learn to play guitar, you have to practice.  In fact, reading music and most languages take plenty of practice, because just looking at some vocabulary terms isn't going to let you learn to fluently speak a language, you have to use it to the point where you can think the words and know what they mean without mentally translating them to your native language before you are truly fluent in a language, and that takes practice.

Learning how to make a gear or tie together a mechanism would take some sort of academic knowledge, but being able to file down a stone to make perfectly interlocking gear bits by hand is an intuitive skill.

This is where teachers and books would come in. They can augment experience gain from intuitively learned (bootstrappable) tasks, but would also be necessary for tasks that require further knowledge that can't be learned intuitively (non-bootstrappable).

Quote
The skill system that DF has currently is designed in a way that replicates the acquisition of intuitive knowledge, but essentially assumes all academic knowledge is inherently learned.  Trying to increase intuitive knowledge through academic means only works up to a certain point - you can only learn so much about a guitar or just seeing explanations of what sheet music mean before the only way to learn more is to play or listen.

Even something as basic as math is something that you have to learn through practice - you can't learn calculus without first taking algebra, and practicing doing algebra problems until the language of algebraic math is something you can understand without having to consciously think about the rules of algebra, or else calculus is simply too dense a subject to understand.

This is a bit roundabout, but what I think might best represent this concept would be to have skills work the way they do now (representing intuitive knowledge), but have some sort of prerequisite academic learning that would have to take place before you could perform jobs that really do take some academic knowledge.

This sounds like it would require keeping track of the academic knowledge for specific tasks. For example, the dwarf might have a weaponsmith level of Skilled, but may or may not have learned how to make crossbows.

Alternatively, we could define a certain set of tasks of one common skill which require a certain skill level for success - and reaching that skill level requires the aid of a teacher or book. That probably sounds confusing, so here's an example:

Making a sword, mace, pick or axe requires Adequate Weaponsmithing. Making a crossbow requires Skilled Weaponsmithing.
To reach Adequate in Weaponsmithing, a dwarf needs a teacher or book present while practicing making swords, maces, etc. The same thing is needed to reach Skilled.

Just throwing this idea out there - I'm not sure if it's more or less feasible than the other ideas. I'm also not sure if if the "minimum skill level" for a task should correspond with the level at which the success rate for the task is non-zero, or the level at which the failure rate is zero.
I do think, however, that the quality rates (as displayed in this table) should be offset by the minimum skill level.


Quote
This has to be done with some care towards gameplay, though.  The game is already pretty heavily front-loaded in the difficulty department, and making dwarves less capable early on when the fort is in the only time it is ever truly threatened, while later on, there are no concerns can become problematic.
Really, Dwarf Fortress isn't a difficult game. The difficulty is in learning the interface and how to play. After that, it's often too easy.
Choosing skills for starting dwarves should be assisted with an interface to see what tasks your dwarves can succeed at, and warnings when you try to embark without crucial skills.
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Shades

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #6 on: January 31, 2011, 03:43:33 am »

Constructing statues and tables might very well be among the "bootstrappable" jobs for the mason skill. But you probably wouldn't even know how to begin constructing a viable floodgate or quern.

Why not? You know what basic function is. You a know floodgate is basically a door to let water through and a quern involves something to do with rotating stones grinding. From there both is easy, sure the floodgate will leak and be liable to jamb, but some kind of sliding board system on a pulley should work. And I'm sure the ground wheat would be bitty and grainy until you work out how to set the parts close enough to finely grind but again it should work.

Possibly construction quality should effect more things, like poor querns meaning poor flour but there is no reason you shouldn't be able to do it.

In fact out of the non-medical fortress tasks only tanning a hide stumps me on where to start. I have no idea of the reaction, although I know it's something to do with water, skins and ash? so maybe after a few attempts I'd have something that once dry didn't just fall apart.

The medical ones seem a little more complex, sure setting a leg is easy, although you'll set it poorly, but surgery is a major undertaking and you'd probably end up killing people without training. But then so do the dwarves so it's probably covered.

Personally I think the current system is fairly true to life, other than that it doesn't make sense that grinding out stone mugs makes you any more skilled at building floodgates and the like.
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Max White

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #7 on: January 31, 2011, 03:49:19 am »

What did I miss? Oh, thank you shades.
Interesting fact: First meal I ever cooked was spaghetti bolognese. I had never cooked before, and had little to no idea what I was doing, but I knew I had hard pasta, sause, ground meat and some herbs. In the end the pasta was over done and the sause not even nearly thick enough, but I made a meal darn it!
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Stove

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #8 on: January 31, 2011, 04:31:08 am »

Why not? You know what basic function is. You a know floodgate is basically a door to let water through and a quern involves something to do with rotating stones grinding. From there both is easy, sure the floodgate will leak and be liable to jamb, but some kind of sliding board system on a pulley should work. And I'm sure the ground wheat would be bitty and grainy until you work out how to set the parts close enough to finely grind but again it should work.


A floodgate and a quern stone seem like simple enough objects in concept, but they require a certain degree of precision before they can function well enough to be able to honestly call them a floodgate and a quern stone. And I for one have no idea how I would achieve the degree of precision necessary for a quern to function as anything but a lumpy jagged rock.
But examples aside, NW_Kohaku's post explains fairly well what I'm getting at: Some tasks require knowledge that can't be gained from simple practice.
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Shades

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #9 on: January 31, 2011, 04:34:56 am »

A floodgate and a quern stone seem like simple enough objects in concept, but they require a certain degree of precision before they can function well enough to be able to honestly call them a floodgate and a quern stone. And I for one have no idea how I would achieve the degree of precision necessary for a quern to function as anything but a lumpy jagged rock.

At a basic level you could just grind with two rocks in your hands, you work up for that. We've established they won't be good versions but they would still be workable. As far as I can see this is true of everything.

But examples aside, NW_Kohaku's post explains fairly well what I'm getting at: Some tasks require knowledge that can't be gained from simple practice.

What tasks? And how do you think the knowledge was gained in the first place?
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Stove

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #10 on: January 31, 2011, 10:42:46 am »


What tasks? And how do you think the knowledge was gained in the first place?


You already provided the example of tanning. The methods and technologies that would require "academic" knowledge were acquired through the gradual innovations of civilizations over the course of history. It's a bit far-fetched to suggest that a Dwarf is going to sit there and reinvent all the innovations of a civilization through sheer genius and experimentation.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2011, 10:45:58 am by Stove »
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Shades

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #11 on: January 31, 2011, 10:51:40 am »

You already provided the example of tanning. The methods and technologies that would require "academic" knowledge were acquired through the gradual innovations of civilizations over the course of history. It's a bit far-fetched to suggest that a Dwarf is going to sit there and reinvent all the innovations of a civilization through sheer genius and experimentation.

And in that example I gave a way I'd try, you learn through doing. Trying to repeat something you have seen done or heard about and have so know of it is far different to inventing initially.

They aren't trying to invent these techniques after all. The system we have now is very real life other than the grinding one task makes you good at others, better at others would be fine but good doesn't make sense. Limiting your abilities based on a skill level just makes no sense and is way too 'gamey' compared to other aspects of the game.

So again give an example.
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[Dwarf Fortress] plays like a dizzyingly complex hybrid of Dungeon Keeper and The Sims, if all your little people were manic-depressive alcoholics. - tv tropes
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #12 on: January 31, 2011, 10:55:46 am »

Were these arguments in reference to Dwarf Fortress? If they were, maybe those threads are relevant and worth linking.

Sadly, I doubt it, it was on IRC, and the argument was over whether or not intuitive knowledge even existed, and ended with the other side essentially just not believing me and refusing to listen to anything else I said.

What tasks? And how do you think the knowledge was gained in the first place?

The tasks that most require academic knowledge are those that relate to utterly non-intuitive actions, such as basically anything related to chemistry, as the tanning example above points out.

You can read that bit on how it was done here, and it's far more disgusting than you think.  There's a reason tanners were "untouchables" in many Asian cultures.

You can almost say the same about things like brewing, but at the same time, people really knew nothing about brewing, and drinking alcohol was a horrifyingly dangerous practice.  (The Irish concept of a "Wake" was created because of the alcohol-making process.  Before burying someone, you left them on a table for a couple days, just to make sure he was really dead, and not just unconscious from some sort of poison in the booze caused by letting the wrong kinds of microorganisms into the fermentation process.  Oh, and did I mention that they used lead as a sweetener for centuries?) 

So, yes, you can become a doctor the Dr. Zoidburg way, by just cutting people open and being surpised by the way that you didn't expect that organ to be over there, but it's probably best they understand some of the principles of medicine, first.  (Of course, real medieval medicine involved asking the patient what his zodiac sign was, and then doing a horoscope to figure out which humor was out of line...  Basically, Zoidburg would be an improvement.)

People did eventually learn how chemical reactions worked, and really had science took off when they managed to put together enough experiments to create an accurate enough model to generate the Scientific Method for really understanding the world in academic terms, but that's outside the scope of the game.  Mostly, chemistry was discovered in ancient times through accidents and sudden sparks of insight.  Cheese was just milk that happened to get the right kind of culture in it by mistake, and someone had the bright idea to try it again and again until he figured out tricks to replicate it reliably.  Yeast was much the same.  It's slow, painful, and probably involves killing a few people, but you can do it.

Keep in mind, though, that trying to learn herbalism by eating every mushroom you find to see if they are poisonous or not is likely to get you killed before you master the knowledge.

Try to separate in your minds what parts of knowledge are academic and what parts are intuitive, though.  "The fly amantia mushroom is poisonous/hallucinogenic" and "Fly amantia is red with white spots on top" are academic knowledge, but remembering what it looks like in terms of being able to mentally visualize it, instead of just remembering a text description, and knowing what sort of plants it tends to grow near all tend to be intuitive forms of knowledge. 

Academic knowledge, the kind you just store as data or learn from a book, is usually easy to forget.  Intuitive knowledge is something that comes from literally laying down new pathways in your mind to perform certain repeated functions better, and are things that are very difficult to forget. 

You can forget the exact component serial numbers of your car very easily, but the skill on how to drive it is intuitive, and to be a good driver, you have to be able to know how much to push down on a gas pedal or turn a wheel without having to stop, hesitate, do a conscoius calculation, figure you need to turn the wheel 10 degrees right to merge into the next lane, and then suddenly remember you need to then turn 10 degrees back to the left once you get there to correct your course.  Correcting the steering wheel for the purpose of staying in your lane or how much you turn the wheel to merge lanes, or how much pressure you put on the gas are things you don't need to conscoiusly think about because practice has built neural pathways that let these functions become performed only semi-consciously.  Your conscious mind only needs to be there for ensuring that the subconscious is aware of the right stimuli (looking at the other cars around you), and the higher-level functions, like "where am I going, anyway?"

Academic knowledge can guide intuitive knowledge, certainly.  Especially in something you could call "philosophical understanding", which was why medieval medicine was so horrifying - it was built around a horribly mistaken Socratic philosophical framework that refused to believe in the operation of the organs, or even trial and error, and instead worked on some hypothetical humors system.  In a sense, your philosophy on a subject is the way in which you even approach learning that subject, and it is therefore the most important academic knowledge you can learn.

Again, this is kind of going on a really massive tangent to prove a point, but setting up the... well, actually, it's basically a philosophical viewpoint on how people learn, if I were to introspect a little... is the most important starting point for discussions of how to model the learning process.

If you wanted to discern what skills are things you could never do without some sort of academic knowledge, or at least sitting down and pondering and experimentation, then just look for things that are totally unintuitive.  The construction of and use of some tools is unituitive, as are some fabrication techniques.  Wooden cabinets are fairly difficult to make intuitively, especially if you start out with nothing but a boulder, and are told to make a carpentry shop and all your tools from it.  Anything involving chemical reactions or biology is not necessarily intuitive, either. 

Still, I'm sure there's not much better method to learning glass blowing given the technology they had than to just start grabbing sand, and testing what things made good glass. 

You might want to take it from the other direction - what things would you just have to sit and watch and learn from seeing or doing, instead of reading it in a book to understand its principles, knowing how little principles were understood at that time?

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Really, Dwarf Fortress isn't a difficult game. The difficulty is in learning the interface and how to play. After that, it's often too easy.
Choosing skills for starting dwarves should be assisted with an interface to see what tasks your dwarves can succeed at, and warnings when you try to embark without crucial skills.

Incidentally, also something I've gotten into pretty heated debates over. 

Perhaps it would be better described as "front-loaded complexity", then.  The game essentially has no real logical progression in complexity, there are just a pile of things you have to do to get everything set up, and nothing really flows from one to the other, they just all have to get done, and the best you can do is prioritize them.

It's only "hard" in the sense that the game comes with no tutorial to make the absolute flood of information and options the game sends the player discernable, but it's "easy" as soon as you understand what you are doing.

Still, unless our starting 7 have every bit of knowledge to start all the industries they'll need, then what you're doing is chucking one more thing in the pile of things that dwarves need to do the instant they start a fortress if they need to not only get picks, start mining, find ores, find fuel, set up smelter, set up furnace, set up smithy, learn how to make every piece of equipment by reading books, and then start moving raw materials through the assembly line to start getting the first pieces of metal whatever produced.  When you're trying to get a military started from scratch, that's one more step in a chain that already has multiple components, all of which you have to perform the instant you hit the pavement.  Then, once you have it built, you never have to worry about it again, really.

I'm not saying it's insurmountable, but I always try to work towards distributing the complexity of the game.  Right now, the game has you build everything immediately, and then basically just lets you sit back and watch your fort run itself after the first two years are over, since your job is basically done.  It's what I've been trying to do with my two major suggestion threads, anyway.
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Shades

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #13 on: January 31, 2011, 11:07:00 am »

But again your coming from the point of inventing these things.

It doesn't matter if I don't know how to form the reaction as long as I have some vague idea of how to go about it. I know can work with ash and water, among other methods so start there and play. That will take me to dabbling level and I slowly learn what I need to do different.

Likewise brewing, we have hops a fermentation stage with some kind of yeast and water. We can probably get the yeast by grinding cereal crops in some way, might need to malt them first not sure. Either way again because you've see people do it or heard vaguely how it works you have something to work with.

We aren't inventing from first principles here, these dwarves come from a mountain home and at least one of the seven will have some idea of how it might work.
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Its like playing god with sentient legos. - They Got Leader
[Dwarf Fortress] plays like a dizzyingly complex hybrid of Dungeon Keeper and The Sims, if all your little people were manic-depressive alcoholics. - tv tropes
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right. - xkcd

NW_Kohaku

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #14 on: January 31, 2011, 11:10:54 am »

Except it's not just water and ash, it's urine and dung and animal brains.  If you start with the thought that it's water and ash, you're probably not going to make much headway.
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
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