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[Shades]

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.

I'm fairly sure that is just one of the many ways to tan animal skin. I'm not sure what the best way is mind you.

Edit: yer it looks like you need hardwood ash to get lye and with that and water you can tan skin.

[therahedwig]

The version I've heard most often required using dog-poo and urine, I guess it might be different per region?

Checking that link, I'm thinking that you shouldn't forget that with the water method you'd need salt. Considering geographical issues and the value of salt in old times, the nasty preparation might also just be the cheaper one.

[Stove]

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?) 

Making alcohol from wild yeast is really not that dangerous. Lambic beers are fermented with wild yeast from the air. If there's any truth to that story, it probably has to do with gruit - sometimes deadly nightshade and other poisonous herbs were used, and the wrong proportions could have disastrous consequences.

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.

I was actually going to come back here and bring up plant gathering, but you beat me to it. (And then I was further delayed by a fire alarm in the middle of writing this reply, and the evacuation of the building I was in!)
The way plant gathering works really doesn't make sense. Apparently every unskilled dwarf has knowledge of all plants and mushrooms, and the dabblers just tend to destroy most of what they attempt to harvest for some reason.
Potentially, each level of the herbalism skill could allow a plant gatherer to identify an additional set of plants and mushrooms, and progressing to the next skill level would require a teacher or book. Achieving legendary herbalism skill might even require rarer books on herbalism (or a really good teacher), and allow a dwarf to gather very hard-to-identify wild mushrooms with great value and medicinal properties.

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.

Hopefully, even with these skill mechanics implemented, most of the skills that are crucial to a brand new fortress wouldn't be hard to come by. Mining and woodcutting could be performed by unskilled dwarves just as they are now, for example.

[Shades]

Don't forget also that the dwarves clearly take notes, I mean we even have a record keeper, so there is no reason most of the raw knowledge wouldn't be available in book form.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, it is the historical reason for wakes.  Also, the term "saved by the bell" comes from the medieval practice of tying bells above graves with strings for the buried person to pull if they had slipped into a bad-booze-induced coma, and woke up in a coffin.  A gravekeeper would be posted to work "the graveyard shift", staying awake at night to wait for someone who was buried alive to ring the bell, so that they could try to dig them from their early grave before they suffocated.

Medieval alcohol was dangerous stuff, made by completely untrained people with ad-hoc equipment in their barns or backyards, fairly similar to bootleggers of the early 20th century, but with even less knowledge and poorer equipment.


As for herbalism, if we talk about what makes a skilled herbalist in the abstract, it is someone who not only can identify what plants are edible, and which are not, but also where they are most likely to find them, and as such, they are able to focus their searching on the most likely spots to have gatherable herbs.

In practice, this means poor herbalists would just not find as many plants in the same location.  They might walk right past an herb they should have harvested, or not look in the right spot in the first place.

I guess you could make this work by having herbalists search designated areas where the shrubs that have edible plants are hidden, and they can only find them if they succeed at a skill check against the difficulty of any given plant.  Possibly, the worst of herbalists would misidentify plants, and wind up confusing "magic shrooms" for regular edible mushrooms, for all kinds of Fun consequences.

Still, given the system we have now, you could abstract "not finding it" by walking up to the bush, and having it dissapear when they fail their skill check, which is the "somehow destroy the plant" option.  It's not an ideal solution, but it can make some sense, as it means that poor herbalists will go into the same area to search, and turn up less food, which is what we want to have happen.

[Stove]

Well, it is the historical reason for wakes.  Also, the term "saved by the bell" comes from the medieval practice of tying bells above graves with strings for the buried person to pull if they had slipped into a bad-booze-induced coma, and woke up in a coffin.  A gravekeeper would be posted to work "the graveyard shift", staying awake at night to wait for someone who was buried alive to ring the bell, so that they could try to dig them from their early grave before they suffocated.

These sound like folk etymologies to me, and folk etymologies are almost invariably false. What is your source for these claims?

Medieval alcohol was dangerous stuff, made by completely untrained people with ad-hoc equipment in their barns or backyards, fairly similar to bootleggers of the early 20th century, but with even less knowledge and poorer equipment.

Poisonous bootleg alcohol from the prohibition was either contaminated by toxins such as lead from materials used in homemade stills, or deliberately adultered with methanol. Medieval alcohol could have conceivably been contaminated with lead (which would result from the general ignorance at the time of the dangers of lead), and there were times when, as I said, poisonous herbs like nightshade or henbane were added, but that was by no measure the standard recipe. For the most part, alcohol was very safe to drink, even safer than water, which is why beer was the standard everyday drink.

This is becoming quite the tangent.

As for herbalism, if we talk about what makes a skilled herbalist in the abstract, it is someone who not only can identify what plants are edible, and which are not, but also where they are most likely to find them, and as such, they are able to focus their searching on the most likely spots to have gatherable herbs.

In practice, this means poor herbalists would just not find as many plants in the same location.  They might walk right past an herb they should have harvested, or not look in the right spot in the first place.

I guess you could make this work by having herbalists search designated areas where the shrubs that have edible plants are hidden, and they can only find them if they succeed at a skill check against the difficulty of any given plant.  Possibly, the worst of herbalists would misidentify plants, and wind up confusing "magic shrooms" for regular edible mushrooms, for all kinds of Fun consequences.

Still, given the system we have now, you could abstract "not finding it" by walking up to the bush, and having it dissapear when they fail their skill check, which is the "somehow destroy the plant" option.  It's not an ideal solution, but it can make some sense, as it means that poor herbalists will go into the same area to search, and turn up less food, which is what we want to have happen.

I figure that higher herbalist skill could also grant a better speed for performing the job (which it already does, I think) and this would have a similar result to being able to look in the right places (that result being a higher quantity gathered).

It would be nice, as well, to be able to command a plant gatherer to go search for a specific plant, and the skill level might influence how quickly they can locate the requested plant. This would not involve designating bushes for plant gathering.

[Max White]

No realy, one of the things that make DF great is the lack of any arbitary skill requirments. It is part of the flavor.

[NW_Kohaku]

Sect 1:
Hmm... Having heard this by word of mouth, I had to Google, and here's result no 1: http://www.rip.ie/menu.asp?menu=329

At least, according to that, it is a word myth.  Well, the more you know...

Sect. 2:
Actually, I hope that with burrows, we can leave designations behind some day.  The point of having to designate forests and shrubs was that we would want to prevent dwarves from venturing too far away from safety when they went out to gather wood or wild plants.

With burrows, we can do this automatically - just cut down any tree or gather any shrub that's in your burrow, and I can guarantee it's within the "safe zone" I already had in mind.

[Stove]

No realy, one of the things that make DF great is the lack of any arbitary skill requirments. It is part of the flavor.

The skill requirements wouldn't be arbitrary. Arbitrary suggests random and without reason. I'm saying the skill requirements should be carefully considered with regard to both realism and how it would affect game balance.
The fact that it is equally easy for an unskilled peasant dwarf to cut down a tree, tan a hide and build a functioning crossbow in one try without failing is rather absurd.

Sect 1:
Hmm... Having heard this by word of mouth, I had to Google, and here's result no 1: http://www.rip.ie/menu.asp?menu=329

At least, according to that, it is a word myth.  Well, the more you know...

Folk etymologies are a pretty common type of urban myth. Fortunately there are plenty of entertaining real etymologies to make up for the folk etymologies that turn out to be false.

Sect. 2:
Actually, I hope that with burrows, we can leave designations behind some day.  The point of having to designate forests and shrubs was that we would want to prevent dwarves from venturing too far away from safety when they went out to gather wood or wild plants.

With burrows, we can do this automatically - just cut down any tree or gather any shrub that's in your burrow, and I can guarantee it's within the "safe zone" I already had in mind.

Considering that trees can actually obstruct passages, I would vote for keeping tree-cutting designations, even if you can just tell woodcutters to go logging at their own discretion within their burrows.

[Max White]

The skill requirements wouldn't be arbitrary. Arbitrary suggests random and without reason. I'm saying the skill requirements should be carefully considered with regard to both realism and how it would affect game balance.
The fact that it is equally easy for an unskilled peasant dwarf to cut down a tree, tan a hide and build a functioning crossbow in one try without failing is rather absurd.

But it is possible for an unskilled person, in real life, to do any of those things, within certain limitations. For those limitations, see the five points I made in ym first post. Although when I say to a lower quality, that may be to a state where the product becomes unusable, and that had been adressed.

[therahedwig]

But, we've been saying a bazillion times already that those products would be useless.

Alchohol can be poisonous(someone in the cooking thread mentioned that the first batch of alchol from certain products can even make you blind).
Bows would break instantly(seriously, to make a proper crossbow or general bow, you need to know about wood flexibillity and how to align the fibers of the wood. Let's not even begin on how many people wouldn't know how to treat a bow)(This is stone-age level of complexity btw)
Tanning, all we would know is that they throw the leather into vats of some kind.... and then what? I think the result would probably degrade instantly.

Drawing, you can draw yourself to mastering hyper-realism, but with the wrong materials, your paintings are more prone to fail, to decay or even to lose their colours quite quickly.

But don't worry too much, if you embark, you can have a competent brewer who already knows enough about making safe alchohol, but only beers and wines, but not whiskey. A competent mason who already knows how to make decent, closing doors and gates, but maybe not hatches etc. And perhaps somekind of apprentice system could be implemented, so that the 'master' can teach dabbling students the finer bits.

Like, you can take a dwarf you want to be a mason, assign him either a master-mason or a book about masonry.(or have masonry demonstrating sessions, whatever floats your boat)

I personally like this idea because it would give the game pacing, and would also be an awnser to all the 'tech-tree' suggestions.

Perhaps, you can even commision masters of certain proffesions to show up! Maybe you can even have your dwarfs learn weaving from a high-master elven weaver!

Come to think of it, if guilds ever return, they would get quite nicely with this, oh and we would need the economy or similar 'dwarves' demand systems to be implemented, otherwise there's no point to figure out how to get distilled alchohol.

[claer_runway]

why would one delibarately put methanol in booze? you don't want to kill your customers.

[irmo]

But it is possible for an unskilled person, in real life, to do any of those things, within certain limitations. For those limitations, see the five points I made in ym first post. Although when I say to a lower quality, that may be to a state where the product becomes unusable, and that had been adressed.

Which is to say that there are skill requirements to do a job successfully--if your novice smith tries to make steel plate armor (or something else difficult), he's almost certain to make defective armor that's unusable and can only be recycled into something else. That's how it should work.

[Shades]

Which is to say that there are skill requirements to do a job successfully--if your novice smith tries to make steel plate armor (or something else difficult), he's almost certain to make defective armor that's unusable and can only be recycled into something else. That's how it should work.

This I'd agree with to an extent but that should be reflected in quality or outcome, not in the ability to attempt the job.

[NW_Kohaku]

Why not rework the "skill check" system a little? 

IIRC, skill checks involve the computer rolling 5 sets of "dice", a 1d5, 1d10, 1d15, 1d20, and 1d25.  (That is, random number between 1 and 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 respectively with even distribution.)  Then comparing each roll to the skill level of the dwarf in question - if the dwarf has 3 ranks in the skill, and rolls a 4, 7, 2, 12, and 20 for each of the five "die rolls", then the dwarf's skill only beat one of the rolls, so the product gets only one rank up in quality, moving to "Well-crafted".  If a dwarf has maximum possible skill (20), then only the fifth roll can possibly be lower than the skill rank of the dwarf.

Instead of this, we could use a more complex system, where we could potentially have more than five rolls, and skill checks for different actions skew the check in or out of the dwarf's favor when they are performing them.

For example, a standard skill check could be functionally similar to before by having 7 skill rolls, following 1d5, 1d10, 1d15, 1d20, 1d25, 1d30, and 1d35, and then adding 10 to a dwarf's skill level for the purpose of that one roll, ensuring he couldn't fail the first two, but having a chance at the next five.  (Actually, not exactly the same, but I guess I can work on this a bit more later...)  Instead of assuming you always succeed at the skill roll, you fail if you do not make any checks (but a skilled dwarf would always beat the minimum roll on almost anything), make an "inferior" product if you only pass one, make a normal product if you pass two, a well-crafted product if you pass three, and so on until you hit masterwork. 

You could then make the "hard" stuff have less of a bonus to the skill level of the dwarf, or an outright penalty if something is very hard.

Inferior products may or may not work properly.  An inferior door might not be made pet-impassible, for example, although you could still jam it locked or leave it open.

Inferior rolls in herbalism or the like end up with nothing, while a failed roll at herbalism might wind up with a poisonous plant misidentified and sampled, causing a symptom on the herbalist-wannabe.

Against this, we might have some sort of "apprenticeship" or "book" system for the peasants, but have it limited in how much it can train up to a certain skill level before they must graduate to doing, instead.  (Of course, this idea has been brought up a hundred times in books threads all over the place.)