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[Orky_Boss]

Dear Fellow Dwarves,

I have been surfing on the forums and saw the page for dwarf fortress on 1d4chan, and it seems no one likes nobles, and are always finding ways to kill them.

So my question is, why go through the trouble of having nobles to begin with. I mean, if some noble idiots come to you via migrants, then why not flood the world with magma? Why go through the trouble of giving your noble a heater in his/her room that spills out magma when you can just feed them a 240 grain aspiren (A bullet to the head)?

Sinceraly,
The Expedition leader of Boatproblom

[Togre]

Because they're !!FUN!! ?


But more seriously DF is not really about avoiding difficulties, but conquering them for enjoyment.  Often using copious amounts of a warn red fluid.  Hehehe.  Often resulting in copious amounts of a different warm red fluid too. 

So, yeah, nobles serve no real purpose, they are finicky, fickle and complecate things.   But they are nobles.  That's what they do.  And we're dwarfs.  We have nobles.  Always been that way.  And if we didn't have them, do you think the murder and mayhem would decrease?  Nah, but we'd have less enjoyment if the screams came from someone less worthy than a noble.

[Loud Whispers]

The sole purpose of nobles is to make Dorf lives a great deal more difficult, and with all things potentially fortress threatening, DF players do not seek the 100% sure fire way of victory, they seek the most obscene and complicated route to certain !!FUN!!.

[Specter513]

The point of nobles is to force the player to come up with a way to kill them without killing other productive dwarves.

[Korva]

I've never killed a noble -- but then I never deliberately kill anyone who wasn't hostile first. (That one time I wanted to use an unskilled dwarf as a guinea pig for my doctors by dropping him 2 z-levels off a retracting bridge doesn't count. How was I supposed to know the wuss would break a bunch of bones and die before making it to the hospital? ) Nobles are kind of fun and add a little more color and interaction with the dwarves, especially if you build a nice jail and ignore the mandates that bug you. Makes the fort seem more alive IMO. The only annoyance in my book is the fact that they get pissy when a non-noble has luxurious rooms, since I like to reward founders, military and important crafters with fancy quarters.

[Sphalerite]

In the current version, nobles aren't bad at all.  There are no immigrant nobles.  You can pick who will become the Baron, so you have nobody but yourself to blame if end up with a baron who keeps mandating penguin teeth items.  The Baron is required for other civilizations to send diplomats, which is useful if you want to start and stop wars with other races.  (Sadly, elves will require modding for this to work with them).

Mostly I keep nobles around because it adds an extra level of challenge to the game, as merely building a fort that survives is too easy.

[Orky_Boss]

In the current version, nobles aren't bad at all.  There are no immigrant nobles.  You can pick who will become the Baron, so you have nobody but yourself to blame if end up with a baron who keeps mandating penguin teeth items.  The Baron is required for other civilizations to send diplomats, which is useful if you want to start and stop wars with other races.  (Sadly, elves will require modding for this to work with them).

Mostly I keep nobles around because it adds an extra level of challenge to the game, as merely building a fort that survives is too easy.

Well, I'm going to say my current fort is the first one to have survived long enough to find cotten candy and a magma sea (although I doubt my 20-so man militia will be able to stop a siege), and I've decided to dig the candy vien and eventually try to find out wtf everyone means by 'clowns' and 'the circus'. But in my opinion, building a fort that survives isn't that easy (How do you beat zombie badgers with your seven dwarves?)

[Loud Whispers]

How do I break it to you....

Ah screw it, DIG THE VEINS!!

[Tevish Szat]

The Expedition Leader and its replacement the Mayor let you assign other nobles.

The baron and upgrades, along with the monarch, basically serve as a good source of fun mandates and demands to give you goals -- though they should allow a wider range of nobles than the mayor, this is essentially bugged

The Sheriff and its upgrade, Captain of the Guard, lead your Justice squad.  Unless you're working on caring for mandate-y nobles, this is really more harmful than good.

The Manager lets you profile workshops and order tasks

The Bookkeeper counts every item on the entire map and tells you what you have in your stocks

The Broker appraises items and trades for you way better than random nobodies.

The Chief Medical Dwarf allows dwarven medicine to take place

Militia and Squad Leaders are the bosses of your military.

As you can see, most of the folks that appear on the nobles screen are actually moderately hard working members of your fortress, enabling critical game systems to come online... it's only really the "noble" nobles (Baron, Count, Duke, Monarch, their Consorts) that do nothing but make your life a pain.  And, in this edition, they don't tend to be replaced when they meet with unfortunate accidents.  In older editions there were more posts, the mountainhomes would send new magnates, and there probably will be more posts and immigrant nobles again in the future (like the Hammerer for upgraded Justice and the Dungeon Master to let you tame exotic beasties) and more headaches coming from your ruling class. For now things are actually pretty tame compared to the tantruming psychopaths of Boatmurdered or the justice gestapo of Syrupleaf -- nobles that are supposed to be lazy even work when they're told!

[Lordraymond]

Why, their point is to decorate all those nifty spear traps you have at the bottom of that long shaft, of course.

[AWellTrainedFerret]

Supposedly, a Mayor who is very ranked in certain social skills can prevent a tantrum, though I run segregated Militaristic Authoritarian Communist forts, preventing all social interaction in the first place. And my Dorfs are happy, because I said they should be.

[DG]

The shame about noble mandates is that they are not challenging, simply annoying. There is nothing challenging about requesting an item to be built or not trading a certain item. There is nothing challenging about remembering to order a specific material from a caravan if you don't have it on your site. It is annoying to have to keep an eye out for mandates that have become boring after the umpteenth year and micromanaging that when you could be doing something fun instead. I see mandates as a placeholder. Eventually I suspect it'll be automated (if mandates remain in their current form) so that you can just tell your broker to order the specific materials every year if required and when a production mandate is given it will automatically go to the manager who puts it in the queue so you don't have to worry about it. It's kind of lame to fear certain dwarves who have a lot of friends becoming mayor because they like adamantine or something. I hope nobles and mandates gets revisited and a lot of thought goes into it so that it is fun (or at the very least not annoying) and not just an arbitrary and repetitive "challenge".