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Yes, they are an easy means of getting legendary dwarves.

91 (32.7%)

No, it's in the game and no one says you have to use it.

54 (19.4%)

Who cares play however you want.

133 (47.8%)

Total Members Voted: 274

Voting closed: August 13, 2011, 06:26:01 pm

[franti]

Dwarves are 4-foot alcoholics with poor stress management in world full of man-eating elves, ancient monsters with brain-rotting spittle, and escaped demons.
Let them have their training spears.

[crekit]

Might depend on what your trying to do.

Fighting badgers? Gobbos? HFS?

[Itsapaul]

Works for the X-men, works for me.  Both Xavier and I don't have ~4 years to get these slackers into shape; more like two weeks.  Plus I'm guessing it'd be hard to fix considering that'd involve reworking xp from battle (if not the whole system).

[G-Flex]

Sometimes whole systems need reworking. It happens.

It's been mentioned that sieges come very often. It should also be noted that they come without much reason, either. Even if you're at war with another civilization, they shouldn't be blindly attacking sites with no goals in mind, especially not if they keep losing. Your own fortress doesn't have infinite resources and personnel to waste on pointless military excursions, and neither should other civilizations.

[Mickey Blue]

I think they are without question by definition an exploit.  They are an unintended way to give you a huge advantage in the game you were not meant to have.  It would be like if through a coding glitch wooden training weapons had the same strength as steel. Two other examples of 'exploits' in the game would arguably be buying sand at embark and certainly be 'save scumming'.

That said, given that its a single player game the only person it affects is 'you', so I could care less if people use them and would not 'judge' them for it.  That said I do roll my eyes at arguments claiming they are somehow legitimate and not exploiting the games coding to give yourself an advantage, makes me think that they deep down feel that they are doing something somehow 'wrong' and need to justify it somehow. 

[Jake]

Think about it: if you were to be put in a room, with a floor that shoots out sharp sticks and mallets at random intervals, wouldn't you quickly train yourself to avoid them easily?

You'd get very good at dodging blunt "spears" coming from fixed locations in a predictable pattern.  They don't care where you are, they aren't specifically trying to pierce your vitals, they just go up and down... At best, it would only raise dodging (and not nearly as much as it does), as there is nothing in this exercise that should be helping with Armor, Blocking, or Parrying. 

That, I think, is the fundamental problem with danger rooms as they are now. I quite like the idea of adding semi-random, non-lethal environmental hazards that could be tripped during sparring or other training exercises to train better reflexes and situational awareness, but this shouldn't be any kind of substitute for practice against a live opponent.
Perhaps the easiest way of doing this is to make the Fighter skill much more important, giving a large bonus to attack and defence rolls and only being trainable by sparring.

[LilGunmanX]

Sure, they're an exploit. You know what else is an exploit? Lightbulbs, and elevators, and fire. We use exploits all the time in real life, but we call it science.

Dwarf Fortress is complex enough that there are things with unintended consequences, such as danger rooms. It's not like it dupes gold, or something else that isn't meant to be in the game, it just uses the in-game physics in a way that Toady didn't envision. That's half of what this game is about.

The problem here isn't that it's emergent gameplay, it's that it's emergent gameplay as the result of highly flawed features. Skill gain in DF is not very realistic at the moment, and I doubt that Toady sees its current state as anything near ideal.

This is the best I have ever heard the case against danger-rooms explained before. Well done.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

"Exploit" is an absolutely meaningless, subjective term. (Especially in a single-player game.)

The great thing about Dwarf Fortress is that you can concentrate on the areas of the game that interest you, and hand-wave the areas of the game that bore you.

If you don't find building a kick-ass military Fun (and yes, I promise with the right embark you can have a Legendary fighting force in a year, and have fun doing it!) then you don't have to build a military.

If you don't find agriculture fun then you can eat meat and buy booze from caravans. If you don't find a textile industry fun then you can wander around in tattered rags. If you don't find economics fun then you can make a quarry leaf roast and buy the entire caravan.

My point is, I don't think it's an "exploit" to say "Hey, I'll use a training room" but rather "You know what, I could train an elite Spartan Hoplite fighting force with micromanagement and attention to detail, but instead I'm going to just make a danger room so I can spend more time mining/brewing/potash making/etc. because that is more FUN for me."

Quoted for truth brotha!

It's like, is modding pet_exotics to pets an exploit?  Is modding in your own creatures an exploit?  Is suspending a wall to make dwarves build from the right side an exploit?  It really all depends on how you think the game is SUPPOSED to play.  People who are for training spears say that it's to get around an unplayable military system (and I disagree that it's unplayable, I've got forty-five legendary fighters saying otherwise, but unplayable is in the eye of player, after all).

I mean, to say something is an exploit, there's got to be some kind of significance to that.  Are we going to go around and say, "Oh, your fortress doesn't count, because you used danger rooms/exotic pets/population limits/no temp"?  Why would we bother?  Just so we can feel more proud about our own creations?  Is it necessary that we put down other people for their choices in order to enjoy our own play-throughs?

I don't use danger rooms, I embark on terrifying biomes preferentially, and I avoid traps.  That doesn't mean that if you don't play the way I do that you're cheating.  It just means you enjoy different parts of the game than I do.

[Yoink]

I haven't read the whole thread, but I know the whole danger room scenario reminds me of those 'training cage' things in that False Gods novel from Black Library... Don't remember what they were called, though.

[CT]

Is suspending a wall to make dwarves build from the right side an exploit?

Holy shit you can do that!!??

[Lectorog]

Is suspending a wall to make dwarves build from the right side an exploit?

Holy shit you can do that!!??

Yeah. Designate walls where you don't want your dwarves to stand, then suspend them. They won't get built, and your dwarves will have a preference to not stand there.

[G-Flex]

I mean, to say something is an exploit, there's got to be some kind of significance to that.  Are we going to go around and say, "Oh, your fortress doesn't count, because you used danger rooms/exotic pets/population limits/no temp"?  Why would we bother?  Just so we can feel more proud about our own creations?  Is it necessary that we put down other people for their choices in order to enjoy our own play-throughs?

No, but we can criticize the aspects of the game that make the exploit necessary or possible.

Some exploits in some games are weird, one-off things that are easily ignored. Most glitch-based exploits fall into this category, and they largely don't affect the people who can just ignore them. However, this isn't one of those things. The fact that "danger rooms" even work means there is something wrong with skill gain rates, or at least something highly unfinished about them, and this is felt elsewhere in the game (example: when using weapon traps against things, or... well, seriously, anywhere skill gain is important or consequential). The fact that some people find danger rooms necessary might speak of other flaws.

I don't use danger rooms, I embark on terrifying biomes preferentially, and I avoid traps.  That doesn't mean that if you don't play the way I do that you're cheating.  It just means you enjoy different parts of the game than I do.

Some "parts of the game" only exist because game systems are incomplete, unfinished, or flawed, and sometimes this results in features that are not working as intended or as envisioned.

[Zapitron]

Every defense I've seen ultimately exploits something, usually the attackers' amazing stupidity.  Here is what your defense is counting on them thinking:

"The last 10 sieges who did this never returned, but let's all march down that blood-soaked corridor."

"I forge copper swords by dozens, but none of us knows how to make a mining pick. (Don't ask where I got the copper bars from.)" or related to that, "Goblin keyboards don't have 'd' and 'n' keys."

Is it really a worse exploit for goblins to be thinking this?: "Dwarves are badass motherfuckers, but maybe if enough of us attack those 4 dwarves all at once, we'll take them down." The goblins are wrong this time too, but the plan is less wrong than mindlessly marching into the trap corridor.  That means using this defense is the least exploitive.   

[Nil Eyeglazed]

No, but we can criticize the aspects of the game that make the exploit necessary or possible.

You can-- but let's be honest, this thread isn't about criticizing the aspects of the game that make it necessary (otherwise it would be titled "Do you think military dwarves train too slowly?"), and I don't think you or I think that they are necessary.

Now, as to the aspects of the game that make this possible: yes, we can complain about it.  (And yes, I can complain about people complaining about it )  However, the parts of this game that would be necessary to fix the effectiveness of danger rooms just aren't there yet.  Do you assign an arbitrary xp penalty to trap avoidance?  It doesn't make any sense that goblins would develop dodging any less from a trap than from a swing; either relies on quick reflexes.  Do you build a knowledge system so that dwarves become quickly immune to/gain no xp from on-site traps?  Such a system would be best designed taking into account all sorts of other knowledge; anything designed now would be premature.

Or maybe we could just not care all that much about it, since there are countless other more exciting things we'd rather Toady code anyways, and the solution to the problem (for people that see it as a problem) is absolutely, utterly trivial?

Some exploits in some games are weird, one-off things that are easily ignored. Most glitch-based exploits fall into this category, and they largely don't affect the people who can just ignore them. However, this isn't one of those things. The fact that "danger rooms" even work means there is something wrong with skill gain rates, or at least something highly unfinished about them, and this is felt elsewhere in the game (example: when using weapon traps against things, or... well, seriously, anywhere skill gain is important or consequential). The fact that some people find danger rooms necessary might speak of other flaws.

Yes, the fact that some people find danger rooms necessary speaks to flaws, but I suspect it speaks more to flaws in the difficulty curve, which I'm not sure are things best addressed at this time.  Making the game equally accessible to everyone is not in the ultimate best interests of DF.  In my opinion.

Of course skill gain rates are unfinished.  And in my opinion, and in the opinion of anybody who's saying that danger rooms are exploits, they're also okay.  As in, they're playable.  I care much less that it takes a matter of years to train a dwarf to legendary (and shouldn't it take more, really?) than I do that goblins can send innumerable quantities of moderately skilled foes against me.  That second problem will be fixed soon, and in an interesting way; the first problem will take forever to hammer out, and won't even be that interesting when it's finished.

Some "parts of the game" only exist because game systems are incomplete, unfinished, or flawed, and sometimes this results in features that are not working as intended or as envisioned.

Right.  But who knows what's intended, besides Toady?  The bug tracker is full of "bugs" that dwarves don't dig or construct or deconstruct safely.  Is that intended or not?  (The game would be much less interesting if the dwarves were smarter; I'd probably never cause a cave-in again.)

Look, in a multiplayer game, "exploit" has actual meaning.  It means that you gained an unfair advantage-- that the people you played with can discount what you did, that the game's managers can enact some sort of retribution.

In a single-player game?  No meaning.  It's vaguely a cry for something to be fixed, but so vaguely it's almost not even a suggestion.  As I said before, the solution to people who find danger rooms to be exploitative is totally simple: stop using them.  It's not that hard.  So what exactly is the significance of whether danger rooms are exploits or not?  If they are, and you make them stop working-- it has no effect for people who find them offensive, because those people don't use danger rooms, because they consider them to be exploits.

[G-Flex]

Do you assign an arbitrary xp penalty to trap avoidance?  It doesn't make any sense that goblins would develop dodging any less from a trap than from a swing; either relies on quick reflexes.  Do you build a knowledge system so that dwarves become quickly immune to/gain no xp from on-site traps?  Such a system would be best designed taking into account all sorts of other knowledge; anything designed now would be premature.

These are pretty bad solutions, honestly. And yes, it does make sense that you'd develop skills less from dodging traps, since traps are highly repetitive and, er, mechanical, and don't very much reflect what fighting a person is like. It also doesn't make sense to gain so much skill from walking over a handful of traps that you'd gain significant skill, nor does it make sense to gain more than some amount of skill over a certain amount of time. There are solutions to the problem.

Or maybe we could just not care all that much about it, since there are countless other more exciting things we'd rather Toady code anyways, and the solution to the problem (for people that see it as a problem) is absolutely, utterly trivial?

How is it "trivial"? How quickly creatures gain skill, and how they do it, is an important part of the game and isn't something easily solved.

But who knows what's intended, besides Toady?  The bug tracker is full of "bugs" that dwarves don't dig or construct or deconstruct safely.  Is that intended or not?  (The game would be much less interesting if the dwarves were smarter; I'd probably never cause a cave-in again.)

We can't know, but we can guess, and my guess is that Toady doesn't intend, ideally, for creatures to gain vast amounts of skill by engaging in repetitive trap-dodging, or other similarly silly things.

In a single-player game?  No meaning.

No, it still has meaning. The meaning is that you're using a bug or other unintended behavior to your advantage. This is still meaningful even in the context of a single-player game, even though you aren't competing with anyone.

So what exactly is the significance of whether danger rooms are exploits or not?

Easy. If they're an exploit, and the behavior is unintended, that means that there is something wrong with the features involved. "Making them stop working", in a case like this, is a natural result of fixing those features.