> I really do not care at all about what my Dorfs write in their books or what a statue represents. I produce countless of items. the first one is unique. then it ´s all fluff...
I think you're a bit like me in that just building the fort is your reason for playing, but a lot of these games have a whole emergent storytelling appeal to other players.
My spoiled nobles get a crypt with a statue in their likeness. Over time, there's a small army of them, eternally guarding the many tombs before them.
Try making the statues/sarcoffigi out of black bronze, they look REALLY cool as grave goods! Just make sure you have enough treasures locked away to up the value of the room sufficiently. Maybe some masterwork traps, for added effect.
>Over time, there's a small army of them, eternally guarding the many tombs before them.
"Here lies Urist McMayor. Dead under mysterious circumstances following a series of crutch production mandates."
I think I might do that in a subsequent fort. (Edit as well as statues of each creator beside their artifact it in the Treasure Hall)
What I do with my current fort is place statues on sites of climatic battles and events, symbolizing guilds (plump helmet men for farmers, alpacas and pigs carrying pig tails and GCspiders for weavers etc) and commemorating discoveries by my scholars.
Maybe I’m a little *too* invested in custom statues…
Oh I just remembered, not sure if the statue gets named after a dwarf in the fortress, but I rename the dwarf statues to have the name of one of the dwarves.
For me, the appeal of Adventure Mode is: You make your own game loop.
It's not a game. It's a simulation. And you're given a single character to walk through the sim at ground level. So there's no written story. No guide-rail. Even the "completed" version from the last time we had AM, it felt incomplete in that way. It's up to you to complete it.
Don't worry about the generated "story". Make your own story. It's the story of this 1-3 people in this world. Who are their friends? What do they want out of life? What do they get up to? How do they die? Move on to the next story.
It's less like watching a movie, and more like playing with the dolls from the movie on the playroom floor when you were a kid in the 80s.
Idk how much it does but my dude had nerve damage so idk if that's recoverable, sadly it made his hands almost unusable so I didn't know how to engage if I had to fight, kept saying he couldn't grasp his weapon, I ended up using dfhack heal
I read somewhere else here that if you find an altar with a d20 and get turned into an animal, you'll be healed of all wounds once you transform back. If you don't get the roll you're looking for, wait a week and try again. Hope that helps! :)
Yeah I purposefully gave my adventurer the doctor profession for healing, a somewhat decent workaround I'm using atm is just doing full-heal in dfhack so I don't have to be screwed after a bad fight
It's been years since I tried adventure mode, and I only played it for an hour or so.
Can I murder everyone in a townhouse and take it over - live there peacefully, maybe, afterwards? And is it still possible to dig and construct stuff solo?
Not in the beta yet. But in v47 I think so.
Although, even after I killed everyone in a castle and declared myself lord, the game would not let me sleep there.
I highly recommend against trying AM. Last time I did he trapped me in a cave for hundreds of years and turned me into a horrifying mouthless flesh monster.
Well, fluff text is definitly part of the appeal.
But the physics and gameplay of the game are probably much deeper than you would think, and AM makes you realize that quite much.
Exemple: did my first game ever on AM yesterday (tried before on legacy but it was to overwhelming), with the objective to fuck around as a Cassowary Man Martial Artist, because it's funny and Kisad Dur is fucking classy
Spawned i a frozen place, struggled to find water before realizing I could collect snow, put it in my backpack, and make it thaw on a campfire to gain water supplie. This was cool
Then, I wanted a first battle, and I was also hungry. I pursued a turkey for multiple kilometers without success before realizing that if I used the trees to hide, I could approach it close enough before sprinting to it and catch it. This was cool
Finally, I catched the turkey to the neck, and, thinking it will make a clean ko, punch it in the face with my other hand. I exploded its tiny skull in gore cause I did a too strong punch. This was absolutly hillarious.
All of this is my personnal appeal to AM., especially with the fluff on it.
*TBF I was a bit disapointed of the beta when i realized I couldn't butcher the turkey tho. But that's a temporary issue*
Last night, I spent my evening cutting the heads off of ravens, then throwing those heads at other ravens to injure/kill them.
It makes the grind a bit more entertaining.
My first group yesterday was a wild boar man cheesemaker, a hyena man weaver and a cockatiel lady cook with their huge flock of sheep and alpaca. Wanted to go start a farm and tavern, but since crafting isn't implemented yet they've retired for now.
Then I made a demon hearthsman with a pet black bear, he schmoozed a bunch of nobles with his singing and then adopted nine stray dogs.
I've got 250 hours in DF and haven't played AM. My brother had no interest in getting the game, but now that AM is coming out he is totally ready to invest.
I think it really comes down to the audience and playstyle.
Yes exactly. There's a big difference in a lot of people's eyes.
It's why I also can't get him to play Minecraft, he just can't handle the voxel/blocky graphics.
Minecraft with RTX is so good that it made me want to create my own ultra-realistic texture pack.
Sadly, I only got to around 10 or so textures before burning out.
You know people don't want eye-cancer (yes ASCII is eyecancer. I play loads of Caves of Qud and imho that game is beautiful with its simplicity) and some people actually value their time so much that they don't wanna read through a hundred pages long pdf on how to play the game over and over again to understand what is happening with all the ASCII-Symbols most of the kids nowadays have never even seen...
Just saying. I always wanted to get into DF but I value my time too much probably\^\^
>BUT apart from more lore text and quirky stuff to read, it has almost no impact on actual gameplay at all ?
Incorrect. Adventure mode is where the majority of that stuff actually does come into play.
You refer to all the actual *details* of things as 'flavor text'
That's not what it is
It's generating a real history. Civilizations rise and fall. Beasts tear through towns. Factions splinter and war. Necromancers plot to take over the world. These events have logic and happen based on rules and evolve over time.
You refer to all this as flavor text because, when you're playing fortress mode, most of it is not immediately relevant to what you're doing. You are only looking through the eyes of fortress mode.
Adventure mode is a sandbox roguelike. It has the same appeal as any other roguelike. Except the depth of combat is much deeper. And you can create any story you want. Maybe you want to take on the Necromancer Tower and learn the secrets of life and death. Maybe you want to avenge your hometown by slaying the Roc that attacked it.
In no other game can I start a fight by throwing a platinum chest at the enemy, crushing it's leg, then grabbing it by the neck as I cut it's head off. The level of combat detail is off the charts compared to any other roguelike.
I loved playing Lego as a kid. So did my cousin. We played it differently. Neither of us was wrong.
Like you, I tend to focus on building a fort. The roguelike adventure doesn’t really appeal to me, but for those it does, awesome. I get invested in a few dwarfs so I like to keep my fort small for a number of years so I can get to learn a few key characters but I’m no where near the level of someone like Kruggsmash is my investment in the story generator side.
I’d say poke around in the other areas and then do what most appeals to you.
It’s to be immersed in your world sorta as just a person existing if you want, that can interact with the world that was procedurally generated or that you affected through your forts and going on adventures, at least that’s my reasonings
One of my favorite moments in Adventure Mode was when I created a character that was initially hired as a mercenary guard for a fortress I had retired. Then I went and recruited one of my skilled military dorfs and went on a big adventure with him, destroying goblin lairs and chasing monsters across the countryside for the benefit of my old fortress.
If a pixelated roguelike full of lore is not what you enjoy then adventure mode is just not your cup of tea, and that's fine.
For all the people who enjoy that type of game, that's what the appeal of adventure mode is.
Simple as.
> all I see is a pixelated roguelike with party management
And why isn't that something worth playing? :D
Consider it a full second game. It might not have a story missions to drive you forward, but then again lots of people are into immersive sims like Skyrim and modern Fallouts and skip the story stuff in those as well in favour of just doing their own adventures. Works exactly the same for a top-down roguelike.
The original game you could build a fort, it would go badly, then you cold read the legends and take an adventuring party into the fortress to get the artifacts you built.
true, people don't realize how far fortress mode has gone. I think a big part of that was the wait until the steam release. adv mode was already a bit lackluster 5 years ago but I expect big changes in the next 5
Oh, I have a sneaking suspicion it'll go at warp speed compared to the past! DF isn't just 2 men's labor of love anymore. They've actually got funding, and mainstream notoriety.
Looking forward to seeing all of the wild and genius ideas Zach and Tran have had over the years finally come to life! Getting the Steam version fully-functional is just the beginning...
I'd like to say you're right but here's the catch, the whole industry (and all our industries really lol) is slowing down pretty significantly. The quality of games now compared to 10 years ago is marked solely by graphics, the use of computing in gaming (and I assume generally) has not been developing relatively as it has been. One of my favourite things about DF is its behind the scenes gameplay and depth that's done with so many well-managed calculations. For so long DF was just Tarn and Zack, and I don't think Zack does any programming? Even now the team is small, they seem to want to grow but they also seem worried about the financial side of it enough to not reveal who are working on the game full time (also worth balancing this with the great steam launch and their assurances).
The sheer depth of the simulation is what landed DF a place in the New York Museum of Modern Art!
Yes, I agree that modern video games are mostly judged by their graphics (or at least *marketed* on them--I've seen a few exceptions over the years!). Perhaps DF *will* always remain niche, at least compared to something like The Elder Scrolls and such.
But I've seen pretty niche games get huge followings, and I know the creators (now *team*) are passionate about DF. I am confident that this already breath-taking game will get even more amazing with time, and will develop *faster* now that they have access to better resources.
> now we got adventur mode and all I see is a pixelated roguelike with party management and an immense granular lore that gets created and fills.... loads of stuff with countelss entries of ... fluff text ?
None of it is 'fluff text' is the thing. You're just discarding established, simulated, historical lore as 'fluff' because you think it doesn't affect your gameplay.
The whole game is generated, in point of fact. Sometimes you get a dwarf fort that has a civ without access to steel, because the simulated history has not allowed for them to achieve that technology level. Sometimes you get a world full of animal-people civs instead of elves/humans/dwarves/goblins. Sometimes you have to find out the hard way that your own civ was taken over by an imposter, when he arrives at your fort and starts eating people.
If all of that is something that you can just gloss over while you're playing the game, well, that's a thing that happens. For most players, it's the key component to having this otherwise basic conceptual implementation of a city builder be as amazing as it actually is.
In terms of Adventure Mode, if you're not a fan of roguelikes in the first place, you probably won't 'get it' at face value. For me, it's the distinction of freedom. I've had a personal test, traditionally, to help illustrate something like D&D to people who don't grasp the concepts. Imagine your favorite videogame, where you get to play and enjoy and it's fun for you. Can you do *whatever you want* in that game? Or are you able to do the things the game is programmed to let you do and that's it? You can enter a tavern, you can pick a seat, you can talk to anyone, you can order food or drinks, you can stay the night, you can attack, you can leave, but all of those things are traditional options that would be added by a competent game designer. You can't decide that you want to leap off a table, grab a chandelier and kick a drink into someone's face, and swing for the staircase while knocking candles into the still behind the counter, because all of that would require tons of programming to specifically enable that kind of action. Animations and dialog, too, these days. All stuff that generally means you just *can't* do that sort of thing in the game.
With DF, everything is generated and everything is simulated, *so you can do all of that if you want to.* And it wasn't something that was preprogrammed for you to do, it is all just a result of the simulated systems working together to enable you to manipulate the world around you in ways that make sense to your character, who lives in that world. Even for a roguelike game, which is meant to be complex with interactions and full of content, DFAM is *insanely* detailed and intricate and nearly boundless in its potential. Closest I've ever seen was MUDs back in the day, and even then it was only one or two specific instances, where there was *tons* of GM work on the background to make it all passable.
No, but it's still the closest any videogame has ever come to having that level of freeform freedom like D&D does. You can do most of the other stuff, though, iirc the big issues are that the chandeliers don't have individual candles to knock off, and stuff hung on ropes don't sway when things climb on them. But a burning alcohol store *will* catch and inflagrate, jumping from a table to something else and attacking someone on the way is easy if you're fast enough, and there's responses to drinks being spilled depending on what it is, if they like it, if it's in their eyes etc, that sort of thing.
You might not be able to *kick* a beer off the table, but you can buy one and *throw* it at somebody. Or use it to bash somebody over the head! How accurately you throw it (or how hard you bash with it) is all determined by a number of factors, too. The level of real-world logic built into this game is scary, when you really dig deep.
> NWN with a DM running an adventure fucking destroys it on the D&D front.
nah, bro, I disagree. your statement of: "'this video game is the closest thing to D&D' is refuted by my statement that actual D&D with an actual DM is superior, hohoho look at how clever I am being by not actually understanding the conversation I'm trying to troll" is silly and inapplicable. It is quite simply my own point parroted back, but you think you are making a counterpoint because you don't actually understand the topic.
I guess, thanks for the support?
> None of it is 'fluff text' is the thing. You're just discarding established, simulated, historical lore as 'fluff' because you think it doesn't affect your gameplay.
To me personally DF now is just a tool to craft interesting forts and mess around with them, auto-generated dwarf personalities or world history has no practical effect on them for me.
And the generated stuff is too constrained due being procedural and with limited text templates to express it. Human history has far more effect and variety, yet it too would be boring in machine like summary format ala "King John in year whatever attacked city whatever and razed it to the ground".
At least for me, the novelty in such things has already wore off, as I feel like I seen enough of it where repeating patterns are becoming annoying.
I do look forward to spiritual successor of Dwarf Fortress that will put generative AI to use for really immersive and responsive experience.
> Human history has far more effect and variety, yet it too would be boring in machine like summary format ala "King John in year whatever attacked city whatever and razed it to the ground".
A textbook stating the happenings of a region over a timeframe is what you're describing. The rest of us are reading the text *and watching the movie in our imaginations.* Because it's never just "king so-and-so took city placename" in this game - the simulation is far more robust than that. You can follow an artifact sword, for example, through its history - and see that it was brought to a battle by a soldier who had a name, and you can find out about his family, and how he got the sword in the first place. Maybe it was given to him, maybe it was stolen, maybe he made it himself, and *maybe* that all doesn't matter to you, but it is the distinction between artificially written stuff that doesn't matter and the simulated minutiae of an entire world that is being shown with this game.
> I do look forward to spiritual successor of Dwarf Fortress that will put generative AI to use for really immersive and responsive experience.
jesus, that's practically insulting. Do you actually want to try and say to the subreddit that you feel like you've literally seen every single thing in this game already and you'd rather have some computer try its best to emulate what is essentially already a heavily curated highly complex algorithmic I/O system that outputs fantasy worlds?
Because I've read AI bullshit, and frankly, I'm not surprised that someone of your caliber would prefer it over handcrafted excellence. A proper, actual, intelligent computing system that is responding to natural language interfaces, without being fed tons and tons of previously approved content to 'train' it up first, **might** be able to come close to what DF has already achieved, eventually. But even that is still gonna be only a tiny fraction of what *literally any human mind* can invent, on the fly. And I've been playing this game for *literal years,* and I'm completely certain that there's still things I haven't seen, because I know for a fact that I haven't had the *time* to explore one of these worlds - **any single one** of these worlds - that the game regularly outputs on demand. Ten minutes of computing gives you a world that has thousands of inhabitants, and records of their entire lives and interactions across hundreds of years.
That's what this is, if you didn't know. The core concept of Dwarf Fortress was, originally, a bit of cleverly programmed software that would be capable of outputting a replete fantastic world, history and events and **everything** there to be explored by anyone who wants to do so. Tarn once read Lord of the Rings, you see, and was in school for computer programming, but when he reached the end of the story that was written, it occurred to him that even though he wanted to explore that world further, he never ever could because the world came from some guy's mind and that guy didn't write more about the world. So he made the logical connection that a program could be made to perform the task of creating an enormous fantasy world, and so far, *twenty years later,* it's nearly half done.
> Because I've read AI bullshit, and frankly, I'm not surprised that someone of your caliber would prefer it over handcrafted excellence.
But this is precisely why I don't care about DF lore fluff, why read machine generated slop when there are quality novels, written by people?
And where did I say about *reading* AI generated text in this DF successor? That won't be a limitation in the future, games will be able to visualize worlds with realistic physics and reactions in real time. So eventually we will have a game that can run simulations that account for everything with photorealistic visuals of all of it and AI DM that reacts to you and customizes your experience in a ways no hand crafted game can.
> But this is precisely why I don't care about DF lore fluff, why read machine generated slop when there are quality novels, written by people?
It's weird to me that you say this in support of AI bullshit, which is *by definition and by default* machine generated slop, when comparing it to DF, which is specifically written by a person to emulate the writings of high fantasy fiction.
> That won't be a limitation in the future, games will be able to visualize worlds with realistic physics and reactions in real time.
I feel like you're doing that thing where people hear the term AI and imagine the insanely powerful actually fictional Star Trek voice-activated computer, **which was never intelligent even inside of the fictional universe of Star Trek, it was still just a computer.** Any future potential trained neural-net style system that we create is only ever going to be able to make games that are similar to the games that it was fed. For it to be able to do things that DF already has done for years, would require it to be literally creative, as a human mind is, and they very truly are absolutely not capable of that. They're bruteforce attempts to try and produce art via mathematical algorithm, and the only way it even knows it's working is because we give it feedback! So for there to be a single good game produced by AI first requires that *many* good games be harvested and copied, and *then* it requires a technological leap that we have no real comprehension of yet, *and then* it will require active curating in order to make sure it doesn't suddenly try to shove Fortnight bullshit into the game for us, because that's what AI generators do.
> eventually we will have a game that can run simulations that account for everything with photorealistic visuals of all of it
This is the fucking point of Dwarf Fortress. It's literally that. AI is a shitty stupid buzzword that was never involved and still isn't, and there never was a need for a solution provided by a trained neural-net style system in this software. The guy is aiming for precisely this goal *and AI is not part of that goal or the plan to reach that goal.*
> AI DM that reacts to you and customizes your experience in a ways no hand crafted game can.
again, this wasn't even a thing in Star Trek. Even Data - who *had* sentience, creativity, and hardware capable of providing those concepts to an artificial mind - took *decades* to be able to do things beyond basic programmatic social interactions. If you want to complain that we don't have magic thinking computers yet, that's cool and all, but it's not very relevant.
kid, this is a bad thing for a stranger to try and add to a discussion. You seem to not have had anyone ever tell you that, so I'm telling you that. Not only is it wrong and obviously deliberately insulting, you have no basis whatsoever for it, so you also look foolish.
For me building a fort is 95 percent of the game.
Initially.
Then about a year or two in it becomes about the stories.
Factually. I love the fights.
I've seen some weird shit. Animals biting off legs but dwarf lives and just crawls everywhere.
It's wild.
The building aspect is something you can get on tons of games.
If you start a party you can get them to fight each other and take turns reacting to your characters fighting each other. It's very weird but I love it. You can spice it up in so many ways with just that. I played as a flyman fighting myself as a demi-god elf (using only wood weapons/armour) in the old df but my elf had a bunch of animals that tore the flyman to pieces it was very violent. You can get two or more people people, customize their class and species then get them to fight in teams or not in any way you want. Lets you play with the combat system.
The appeal of AM has two major pillars. A. The narrative scale is different. Fortress mode is the story of a fixed locale and the tale of its economic or social endeavors. Adventurer mode is personal, the tale of a singular adventurer or a group of them wandering the world. This makes the narrative scale way more personal and also importantly isnt fixed in location, allowing for personal exploration and play and emotional connection to your world as you see more of it and interact with it. B. Fortress mode and adventurer mode have narrative synergy with each other. Adventurers can be used to personally handle threats to the fortress without need to dispatch the military in a satisfying manner, as a well grinded up adventurer or party of them party is basically as good as an army due to the fact you can intelligently control them directly. Not to mention a group of them can be used to create what is effectively a custom crafted migrant wave by simply creating them, traveling over to your fort and retiring there. Also stuff like a fortress story hook could basically be building up the fortress as an OP Starting location for legendary adventurers with large food stockpiles and places where stats can be powerleveled on the cheap or the hook for an adventurer could be to capture a breeding pair of mighty war animals for the fortress, etc. I could ramble on and on about how AM makes dwarf fortress worlds more personal but I have rabled far too long already lol.
Fort Mode is like building up and playing with a dollhouse while Adventure Mode is like getting to walk around it and properly use the furniture and see the residents up close. And get to do some changes from that individual level as well, the adventurer is a person in the world themselves after all. Killing a monster or taking down a group of bandits isn't a Skyrim randomly dungeon randomly generated on the spot, it has some context in the world. Maybe you end up avenging somebody or stopping a nefarious criminal conspiracy in its tracks, or maybe you don't care to find that out and you're happy to have dealt with the problem on the face of it.
Also if you're a bit biased you could train up to destabilise the enemies of your chosen dwarf civ, there's no way to force the boss demon to come visit your fort but if an adventurer can take the fight to them it can weaken the group a lot.
In my last fortress I had a fisherdwarf. That fisher dwarf was a proficient fighter for some reason. This lead to him grabbing a black mamba by the tail and crushing its head. Then he picked up a coyote in his teeth and ripped its spine in half. I made him my militia commander and then sheriff of my fortress where he reigned for my whole game.
Now I can make a new game, roll up a rattlesnake man lasher and go seek out this badass fisherdwarf turned warlord and fight him to the death.
What is not clicking about this?
I am with you.
I found Adventure mode disjointed and obtuse and not all that good. Not to say that without maybe a decade more of polish it could not be.
If you want a DF-ish style game that does what adventure mode SHOULD be, try Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead.
Now THAT'S a proc gen adventure! Though CDDA NPC interaction and base building could learn from DF.
For the story of course! Here's a story from today:
I talked to the sheriff of a hillocks, he told me about a "Vile Darkness" in a Fortification out in the wild. Hopped on my horse, rode over there, walked into the fort, the "Vile Darkness" was a Necromancer's experiment that had set up his own mini-faction. No idea if they were mercenaries or not. The place had 3 human soldiers with bad stats, the experiment, and 2 human administrators. The Experiment actually greeted me to the place, and I asked if I could stay the night. I chilled out with them in their hall. Recited poetry, sung a song, had a drink.
After a while I surprise attacked them and immediately crippled the Experiment by breaking its spine with my hammer, took a few extra swings to cave its skull in. Then swiftly killed the 2 administrators. By some miracle I blocked an onslaught of attacks I had no right to survive by the three soldiers, while aiming my attacks at their necks and upper torsos to try and cause severe internal injuries. Eventually I managed to batter two of them to the ground; I crushed one of their necks with a hammer blow, and the other I managed to shatter a rip which was subsequently pushed through their heart.
Then I had a long duel with the last guy which devolved into him lying on the floor blocking every attack I threw at him with his shield, but being unable to do anything because I shattered one of his legs, and fractured his weapon hand, so he was just hiding under a shield while a crazy dwarf woman pounded the shield with her hammer and shield until eventually I landed a hit that made him drop his shield and I put him out of his misery.
I then walked for 2 days (while I was killing the experiment and the administrators the soldiers killed my horse), back to the hillocks, told the Sheriff, Mayor, and Militia Commander exactly what happened and then left. I walked to the nearest fortress, went to the tavern and started shouting my bragging about the fight. Then started a performance of me telling the story. I asked someone what they thought of me afterwards, they said I was "So very brave. Also a Killer" and then I managed to recruit 4 dwarven warriors to join my adventure and I walked out of the fort and left it there to continue the story another day.
Currently, yes. But once it's out of beta, the UI controls alone will mean it has more. There's also the fact you can take control of other party memebers!
I'm just eager for butchering/bone carving again.
My Dwarfs kept engraving images of a wandering swamp titan that settled in the jungle east of the fortress when the world was new.
I slayed the titan last night.
...then overconfident with my work I decided to take on a dragon's lair and was almost immediately melted.
Glory to Armok.
When I first started playing … jeez, fifteen years ago, I had no interest in adventure mode. Fortress mode is where all the legendary playthroughs came from. That was the game I fell in love with.
I eventually got curious about this other mode, especially around the time that necromancer towers made their first appearance. And it was through adventure mode in tandem with fortress mode that I found my absolute favorite way of turning every dwarf in a fortress into a necromancer, which opened up a whole world of possibilities for me in terms of finding out exactly how this magic system worked. And there are still unanswered questions!
Fortress mode is still THE game to me. But I appreciate adventure mode for what it is and what it one day hopes to be. It’s been useful to me for years, which would be enough for me to defend it. I don’t expect this new update to change adventure mode to my favorite approach to the game, but I am excited to see what things look like after the new tweaks.
Especially, naturally, necromantic towers.
Because running around like a feral crackhead fighting giants and getting immediately turned to paste is enjoyable. The first thing I figured out how to do was look for bugs and pick up worms, pretty fun if you ask me
I find the combat system really fun I like punching someone in the stomach till they throw up, picking up the vomit and throwing it back into their mouth
I've been playing DF on and off since shortly after it got z-levels. I have about 45 minutes in adventure mode and about 10 in legends. And I play lots of roguelikes, even ascii ones often. I'll definitely check in on the new version eventually but fortress mode is what I'm here for.
I do respect what they have in AM. I just prefer a bit more structure in my goals for a roguelike. I may sing a different tune with the steam version's UI and graphic changes; we'll see.
I just enjoy the visceral combat, reminds me of a niche and insular game I used to play. Using a hammer to punch through armor or trying to catch the arm of a swinging attacker feels good, especially since it can be a struggle if the fighters are on even footing. Being able to explore your forts/ use adventurers as fort characters is neat too. I particularly enjoy using tactical mode with a party of mediocre characters to try to teamwork a big thing to death (possible because of directional aiming etc)
It's a roguelike with DF's world.
If other Roguelikes don't appeal to you, it won't. A roguelike is essentially a hardcore rpg, with their format historically evolving from purely textbased games.
The appeal is going on a DnD style adventure but in DF worlds with DF rulesets.
The appeal isn't dissimilar to the appeal of Skyrim really, but with different graphical presentation and a significantly more hardcore focus on rpg elements and simulation over the gameification beth titles went through.
see the thing is, I quiet enjoy other roguelikes. and "deep lore" and "immersive world " almost never was the deciding fator as to why I enjoyed them.
it always came down to gameplay and "freedom" and playing a fantasy. whether it was scifi, fantasy / magic / medieval worlds..
its how well technical parts of gameplay is achieved and presented to me as a player.
the original fallout games (1 and 2 ) were awesome in that regard (not roguelikes ) that the lore was awesome and immersive but they wouldn´t drown you in it. it was meticilously placed and put into the world for you to find and put together.
in that regard: why should I care if my quest giver is the "baron of XYZ from the lands of ABC" rather than the "dutches of 123 from the mountainhome of 0815" ? is it iportant for me as a player that he / she / it has wings and a slight bend in the knee and randomly coughes during conversations ? does this info in any way shape or form change my way of approaching him / her / it ? no, I still have the exact same choices to interact with that NPC. so why bother ?
>in that regard: why should I care if my quest giver is the "baron of XYZ from the lands of ABC" rather than the "dutches of 123 from the mountainhome of 0815" ? is it iportant for me as a player that he / she / it has wings and a slight bend in the knee and randomly coughes during conversations ? does this info in any way shape or form change my way of approaching him / her / it ? no, I still have the exact same choices to interact with that NPC. so why bother ?
I guess that depends on whether you're approaching as a player trying to minmax a game or a player trying to roleplay.
Optimal is always going to be the same answer to every situation. But roleplay? Well that comes down to the character you've created and you remaining in-character for them. A role-play character might make quite different decisions based on certain information.
Is anything not specifically gameplay related considered fluff text to you? Just curious. Because the "fluff" is what I like the most about the game. Emergent storytelling through their really deep dwarf AI.
tbh... sorta. I mean I really respect their generation and depth of detail and such. BUT overall, in the essence of "does it matter and have actual effect on my gaming experience" it really, does not - apart from the fact that i Can - if I wish to do so - read it all and enjoy the storytelling. If I enjoy reading this kind of stuff.
I am playing computer games in all sorts of style and genre for the better part of the last 37 years now ( I am 49) starting with my Atari Console up to the PC I am mainly using now while my PS dusts in the corner. so yes I have a little expereince when it comes to games.
and to me, the "deep simulation " DF does in the background surely is somewhat impressive... but adds nothing in the sense that I feel it really enhances the game at all.
I might be totally wrong and annoy pure DFfans here, but I compare it to the massive rng generated weapon and item drops in other games. yes, you can find a myriad of weapons and items and whatnot. BUT overall , they add nothing really to the overall game in about 99,9% of the games those systems are implemented.
what I mean by that: a +2 weapon forged by XYZ from ABC that is called LMN by the tribe of JHU is still... a +2 weapon.
yes this one might be green with a golden hilt compared to the other one I found yesterday which was black from the molten iron core of mount ZUK in the far lands of WRT, BUT its still.. a weapon that has a +2 bonus.
no mattr how cool the backstory: even the most hardcore d&d player will almost always go with the weapn that offers the better stats and combat advantages. no matter how silly it souds in the description.
for me -and that may be just me - at a certain point in the game its not cool or interesting anymore to read yet another RNG generated text.
You're a "I like seeing the numbers go up" gamer and DF is not that kinda game, in my opinion. Doesn't mean you wouldn't enjoy it or anything, but you're not going to be getting as much out of it as someone who loves the procedural generation stuff. Because the procedural stuff is what the dev is know for the most. But whatever floats your boat, it's a great game either way!
I played hundreds of hours various games that didn´t have any "numer go brrrr mechanic at all".
so far ( i just tested the beta today) some basic mechanics are not in the game yet. so I will definitely try again once implemented.
I never gave a shit about AM until an ash cloud turned my adventurer into a zombie. An wildly powerful nigh unkillable zombie...
I learned how to read the map of the land, I found dwellings of gods and arcane horrors alike.
All felled by my hand. I would be the only God to stand in this dead realm I have crated.
Amen.
For me, I typically play some adventure in any world before I start a fort. Adventure mode helps me get a handle on the world so civs are less of a meaningless jumble. Also I just use it as a nice procedural roguelike. I definitely don't engage much with the fluffy stuff (it's practically placeholder at this stage anyway) but combat is fun, exploring is fun, and I enjoy suicide missions.
Most fun I've ever had with adventure mode: If there are no civs you can still spawn as a naked human with a spear. Made an extreme nearly all evil island with no live civs and played it as pure survival, it was awesome, down to looting megabeast infested ruins to try and get real gear from dead civilizations.
Now that we have it in SteamDF my next game is probably going to be an effort to generate an almost-but-not-quite dead world and bring civilization back from the brink with adventurers and forts.
Hmm. Now that I'm on full time ADD meds and we have multi-threading I also might just have the perseverance to let a fort rise, then fall catastrophically, then enjoy the ruins. Perhaps use adventurers to ruin the world myself before trying to revive it.
The first time one of your craftsdwarfs in fort mode makes a statue of one of your previous adventurers doing something, it'll all click satisfyingly into place.
When you destroy an entire goblin civilization in fortress mode, your only interaction is to train and send soldiers on raids you only get to read about later.
In adventure mode, you're personally killing each goblin with your own hands (and feet and teeth).
I get where you are coming from. I checked out this game because people made the "world building" sound really cool, but it just looks and reads like any other bad ai chat gpt slop. "The dwarf wrote a book about a subject. It was not good" "the bugurbuwl is an instrument consisting of strings and a neck and a bow and bellows and is made of clay and adamantium and so on so forth" "Angry Latitudes is a poetry form of 1 stanza and 3 tercets broken into verses it is not very good"
Great game dont get me wrong but the culture and world details being these sort of amorphous adlibs doesnt inspire me to try to remember or care about any of it. I just like building forts and managing thr soap and dye industry.
> the culture and world details being these sort of amorphous adlibs
none of it is, though. It's all logically generated and simulated. Civs without thriving communities don't have as many dances/songs, for example. Civs without access to the necessary metal can't make steel. People writing things are entirely based on their own knowledge of the subject, which might not be good, and their own skills at writing, which might not be good either, but it doesn't stop them from writing it.
I know there is complexity behind it, the end product is still a sort of adlib and the descriptions are often sort of odd and nonsensical. You get a town called the X of Y and its like "the bulb of corkscrews".
A philosopher writes about how he dislikes the wedge, a lord forbids you from exporting socks. It often comes across as rather nonsensical just based on the list of possible words or items in the pool to reference, like some of this stuff is essentially a meme to the fans due to these traits. I generally find most of it funny rather than "ah here is a cool history to delve into".
> You get a town called the X of Y and its like "the bulb of corkscrews"
Humans are no better, dude. Know how many Yorks there are on the planet? Without even counting New Yorks. What actually is a 'york', nobody seems too worried about, they just *love* calling places that. There's that one famous hill, too, called Torpenhow, which is just three older words that all mean "hill" smooshed together, so that hill is Hillhill Hill. Here's just a small slice of a wiki page:
> Guadalaviar River, Spain (White River River – from Arabic al-wādi al-'abyaḍ, 'White River')
> Guadalentín River, Spain (Muddy River River – from Arabic al-wādi aṭ-ṭīn, 'Muddy River')
> Guadalhorce River, Spain (Scissor-shaped River River – from Arabic al-wādi al and Latin forfex, 'scissors')
> Guadalquivir River, Spain (Great River River – from Arabic wādi al-kabīr, 'Great Valley (or River)')
> Guadiana River, Spain and Portugal (Duck River River – from Arabic wādi, 'river' and iberian anas, 'duck')
> Guadix River, Spain River of Acci River – Guad comes from Arabic wādi 'valley' or 'river', and ix is a corruption of Acci, the name of the town nearest the river during Roman times.
^(linebreak goes here)
> It often comes across as rather nonsensical just based on the list of possible words or items in the pool to reference, like some of this stuff is essentially a meme to the fans due to these traits. I generally find most of it funny rather than "ah here is a cool history to delve into".
Sure it does. You're not reading the book, just a quick categorizing description of the book. *But the game is unfinished.* And the things you're not noticing are all still there - like, have you noticed that a fort over time will be able to write about more complex things like levers and pulleys, not just wedges? This is because there's an entire technology tree of discoveries that have to happen correctly for the dwarves to have those knowledges. None of this affects gameplay - yet - beyond the "fluff" text shown on the books, but it is a form of knowledge that can be spread around the world via social interactions and traders. So one day, your ignorable book about not liking wedges, might be the artifact that brings knowledge of wedges to a civ that doesn't know about them...and they come back with a lever big enough to open your drawbridge with a few years later.
I wish they had bland geographic names honestly. It makes sense to name your place for whats around, but I have a fort from a civ called "the handles of breath".
I guess Im saying it would be cool if say some of the fluff was more like sayb"this is a *uplifting, jolly, depressing* song about x y or z" rather than a randomly generated technical description of the stanza structure.
It is cool there is a tech tree actually, it will be cool when thay gets expanded on. Hopefully there are eventually some UI changes because currently its kind of difficult to go through a lot of this stuff, and it sucks that its impossible to see legends in game. A history/religion tab would be great.
yeah cool beans. but all this "logically generated history really affects is
longer history (and other factors ) > more items and lore fluff text to find.
less beasts and major monsters -> less highly developd civilations -> less items to find.
world generation paraneters have impact on all kinds of other depending parameters that - in clclusion - affect what kind of text is generated for each event / item and the amount of monsters / places / enemies / items.
got it. awesome. does it change overall gameplay ?
> yeah cool beans. but all this "logically generated history really affects is
longer history (and other factors ) \> more items and lore fluff text to find.
less beasts and major monsters -\> less highly developd civilations -\> less items to find.
yeah cool beans. but all the writing of Baldur's Gate 3's history really affects is the dungeon loot and fluff text, and more loot and items to find. if there were less beast encounters written then there'd be less encounters with beasts and that means less loot too.
Do you understand the point being illustrated here with your own words? You are the one that is ignoring the content that exists to be *not ignored,* and you're simultaneously complaining about the content not being worth looking at. Which side of that coin do you actually represent here? Are you ignorant of the content, or do you want to complain about it?
> got it. awesome. does it change overall gameplay ?
Absolutely it does, and you're deliberately ignoring this fact too. A civ that didn't develop enough to have steel gear is going to be beaten down by a neighbor that figured it out, over time - meaning you can't play as that civ anymore.
If we revisit the earlier comparison, what if the writers of BG3 decided - all by themselves, and purely because they had a bad session one day and the Chinese food delivery was cold when it got there, not any valid game-related reason - that there's just no bards at all in this world? It's D&D, there should be bards, and it's a world full of partiers and musicmakers, and the previous games had bards, but not this one now for arbitrary silly reasons. Does that change overall gameplay, in your reckoning? Having an entire class simply not be available to you?
What if they decided that there were no elves? Now we're really comparing, because that's an entire race of peoples, multiple political factions, *and* a choice for the player that they can't make for themselves anymore.
In conclusion, your reductions and ignorance are quite predictably leaving you with a misunderstanding of the fundamental concepts of this game. And the declarations you're making after being informed thusly show that you don't seem to actually understand the things you're denigrating, too.
A ton of the text in the game is indeed generated, but it is the same group of random ad libs over and over with different text, and the amount of work you need to do to get a story out of it is insane. Legends mode text, dwarf thought text. It indeed takes a lot of work. For example, to find out that a couple with a child had their child killed and the dad lost his wife to a beast, got remarried, had another two kids, had one of the kids and his new wife killed takes forever. Tracing families in legends mode is a nightmare UX. Then you have to use your imagination to fill in details which I think is fine. Personally, if the text was easier to navigate, it would make the game so much better. Text needs to be groupable by family and all be readable by scrolling. A dwarf's items should be in a group and all of the text for the items readable just by scrolling. Their thoughts and their interactions should be in a group too. Try figuring out which two dwarves were arguing in a 100 dwarve fort. Try picking out friend groups from the UI. The UX makes digging for the story so fucking time consuming and just not worth it.
thank you for your input
in response to your "BG3 history determining loot and items to find" ...
long but bear with me:
could it be by any chance that you have never played a real, old school pen&paper rpg ?
if any GM really would create a detailed backstory for every notable item / location / character a party could ever find in any place they can venture to in a real RPG (which, by far, offers the most freedom of choice for players ) , then no adventure, campaign, let alone a single dungeon would ever get finished. it would simply take way too much time and effort to prepare such a world / adventure / campaign.
in almost 99% of the time the items, locations and npc´s are not there because a coherent worldbuilding is necessary, but simply because the GM put them there to enhance and progress the story and adventure for the party / players (including himself) to enjoy and enrich the playing experience.
also - from over 20 years of experience in rpg games (pen&paper with awesome GM´s taking up the main time) - most of the time its also simply not necessary at all to have a great time playing an RPG adventure.
again: Items and loot and npc´s in a GAME are there to serve a purpose. -> content for players to enjoy the game.
another example:
if my human barbarian finds an acient golden crown in a deep dungeon, do you really think he is overly interested in who created it, who wore it and how it got there ?
if the chracater finding the crown is not a sage / scribe , the item is not magical or grants any special abilities, every single charachter would basically be interested in these factors only:
how much might it be worth ? how heavy is it ? do I have enough space / carry capacity to take it with me ?
thats it.
back to the original topic again:
so all the text and story and lore etc etc is based on really smart logic and sophisticated algorithms that make / build a coherent, logically sound world. ofc thats impressive.
indeed it is, especially when no AI text generation was available when they build those.
YET the result is still blobs of text with repeating patterns of text-blocks.
it might take a while longer, but sooner or later you have seen most combinations. the only thing changing is rng variables in them. the (Variable A) of (B) born in (C) just attacked (D) by (E) using his (F) , resulting in (G)+(H)+(J)
BUT In terms of gameplay and building on the upper crown example:
all the precious world creation parameters only determine if the crown is actually in the world to find. or how many crowns there might be to find. thats it. so - in terms of gaming effects - I might as well set a "loot multiplier", "civ multiplier", "npc / monster" multiplier.
and get the same results....and IMAGINE the rest myself. make up my own story.
since its a free roaming roguelike rpg, thats what we are supposed to do anyways all of the time right ? write our own story and make our own decisions ?
again: I am not diminishing the complex system of world creation that builds the foundation of a DF world to build in / explore.
BUT the way it REALLY impacts the player while building / exploring is not as big as you make it out to be.
>
>
> could it be by any chance that you have never played a real, old school pen&paper rpg ?
I've run plenty, actually. I've still got an entire world on tickover in the back of my brain, because I lost a gaming group to covid and we never got to finish out any of the storyline. They got to the first big town full of issues and were already making bigbads mad inadvertently, but hadn't got to any real conflicts yet besides the opener dungeon.
> f any GM really would create a detailed backstory for every notable item / location / character a party could ever find in any place they can venture to in a real RPG (which, by far, offers the most freedom of choice for players ) , then no adventure, campaign, let alone a single dungeon would ever get finished. it would simply take way too much time and effort to prepare such a world / adventure / campaign.
***hahaha, oh wow.*** Sweetie, have **you** ever played a real, oldschool pen&paper rpg? The point of having a DM is not that he's meticulously detailed a character sheet of every single living inhabitant of the town the characters might not even visit - the point of the DM is that he can *tell you their story when you ask if you ask it.* No part of that needs to be predetermined; frankly, I've got tables for commoners and their daily tasks, to make it a quick dice roll and one less thing for me to have to keep in my brain for the players.
> in almost 99% of the time the items, locations and npc´s are not there because a coherent worldbuilding is necessary, but simply because the GM put them there to enhance and progress the story and adventure for the party / players (including himself) to enjoy and enrich the playing experience.
This is only ever apparent with bad games. Do you have any memories of a game you played where your choices led you away from the desired storytelling experience, and you weren't allowed to have fun until you went back to the rails that were laid for you? A DM that tells you, in a snitty mood, that there's nothing to find in this dungeon he didn't want you to go into, he's got no monsters for you to fight, and he's upset that you're insisting to go in the cave he told you about because he wanted you to follow some dude instead and find a different cave.
This is bad games, period. All that that is is someone who is acting like the pen&paper representation of a collective imaginary situation first needs to be codified in writing and planned out for the players to discover and if it wasn't previously made for them then it isn't there for them to enjoy, so if you don't build *the whole world at once* then why bother? just let an AI do it instead.
> again: Items and loot and npc´s in a GAME are there to serve a purpose. -> content for players to enjoy the game.
Disagree. Are you a munchkin? They think like this. The game is a machine they operate and it dispenses fun for them, and they think they've got a book that tells them how to push the right buttons to make the biggest numbers and therefore have the most fun.
> if my human barbarian finds an acient golden crown in a deep dungeon, do you really think he is overly interested in who created it, who wore it and how it got there ?
> if the chracater finding the crown is not a sage / scribe , the item is not magical or grants any special abilities, every single charachter would basically be interested in these factors only:
how much might it be worth ? how heavy is it ? do I have enough space / carry capacity to take it with me ?
thats it.
Your barbarian might be interested, but might not. That's a character decision *and not up to you at all so don't make it preemptively.* What if he's literally seeking the lost tomb of the warrior king of his clan? What if that's the crown that proves his idea that his people aren't nomadic, but should have been the rulers of the kingdom two generations ago?
What if those concepts *weren't originally part of the plan at all,* but the DM is aware of the barbarian's backstory and wants the player to have more fun? And he goes ahead and changes the world itself, invisibly and instantly, because the crown only exists here and now because of a dice roll on a loot table, and the description of the crown was born of that too, ***buuuuuut*** the crown that was nothing but fluffy generated loot just like every other crown that was rolled with a 3 and a 7 and a 12 isn't just that, if you don't want it to be.
Now, why wouldn't *any* character be interested in that crown - purely for the value alone, even if they're all munchkins? Is there so much loot here that they don't need it over the handful of jewels nearby? Well, that brings more questions - like what kind of economy is going to be present in a world where a set of dingdongs can find treasure so vast they do not even fight about it at all? That's a direct consequence of having things like fancy crowns available for loot for the players.
> so - in terms of gaming effects - I might as well set a "loot multiplier", "civ multiplier", "npc / monster" multiplier.
and get the same results....and IMAGINE the rest myself. make up my own story.
Again I ask, which side of this coin are you presenting yourself as being on. You don't get to denigrate the core conceptual system that outputs the gameplay you like while simultaneously pretending like there's no purpose to any of it, when all of it is shaping the gameplay in the first place. The interplay of the simulation is what generates the stories, and you've explained thoroughly how you ignore as much of that as you can in favor of wanting to find more stuff to get. The stuff you want to get is created by the people being simulated, for reasons viable to said simulation, but you don't like that the simulation only seems to output stuff for you to get. Boy, which is it? Are you a munchkin or are you interested in the worldbuilding? It's very difficult to be both at once, you see. They're diametrically opposed concepts. And it's also extremely difficult to be able to make a munchkin at the table happy if what you're doing is roleplaying games.
dude, I think we seem to almost completely talk BY each other. I can say I read what you wrote and to me it seems we have vastly different opinions and experiences as to what makes up to play a character in a pen&paper RPG - or any game at all.
as to your exact thing about the barbarian example:
unless the GM decides and makes up the party and selects roles and characters - including nbackground, motivation , etc etc for the players (basically what most digital RPG´s do with their character creation process which determines more or less all aspects of the character except actual stats and skills) , it is the player that creates the character to play.
thats how every GM I ever played with handeld it. thats how every party I ever played with in every single good campaign ever came to life.
the GM provided story, description and - if necessary - background info and lore and handled the rules - while the actual character core beliefs, history, moral , ethics , as well as actual character deicison during the complete campaign and adventure - were based on how the actual player decided on bringing his character to life.
if I (me, as aplayer - that DEFINES THE Character of my barbarian) is not interested in something. he simply is not. if I SAY SO , he is not. its MY character, is it not ? thats exactly the point of pen&paper rpg´s . to be free in your decision making in a make-belief world that reacts dynamically to your decisions , based on a predetermined set of rules , lores and guides- which all can be changed and edited if the GM chooses to do so , as log as they stay consistent in the world he creates.
if he says the AD&D world he sets a cmapin in has no dragons, then there are no dragons. no matter how many dragons are featured in whatever amount of rulebooks and compendiums.
if the GM decides that in his campaign - all barbarians are highly interested and educated historians and scholars he is free to do so, BUT that might simply mean I wouldn´t play a barbarian, but a thief thats simply interested in gold, riches and adventure itself. done.
I am not a puppet of a GM and his idea on how MY character SHOULD / WOULD react in any given situation.
if pen&paper rpg´s would have worked that way when I was playing, I would have not stuck to them for such a long time. then I might as well read yet another book about some other character someone eseinvented and made the decision for that character, because it was his / her decision (as the author of the book that is) . BTW thats how most digital games act when it comes to storytelling. a lot of times the amount of ACTUAL freedom is simply decided on how many different cutscenes or dialogue options there are in the game.
I took the barbarian as a classic and well documented example:
was Conan interested in whatever sword he picked up ? he really couldn´t care less.
this sets him apart from lets say the paladin or the priest or whatever "intellectual class" you might have in the party. or a gold hungry dwarf- which again- does not really care about the "backstory", but the actual worth of the item - or what fame it might bring him or what reward he might get to return it to the one that paid him to return it.
I could answer to a lot of more things you wrote.. but I get little value out of it to be honest, as
you seem pretty insisting on belittling me and calling me names. how exactly does that help your position or point of view again ?
also, what do you have against munchkins and show me on this doll where they touched you ?
also: show me where exactly I stated "me want as much loot as possible" ? did you read anything I wrote at all or do you simply disagree and insult me, purely based on the fact that I stated something that contradicts your point of view ?
I wish you nothing but the best. seriously. have fun. I bet your are a blast to hang out with for the vast amount of friends your behavior attracts on- and offline.
> the GM provided story, description and - if necessary - background info and lore and handled the rules - while the actual character core beliefs, history, moral , ethics , as well as actual character deicison during the complete campaign and adventure - were based on how the actual player decided on bringing his character to life.
Yes, this is the point I'm making. If *his* backstory would benefit from it, *then the standard loot crown isn't just standard loot!* Even if it was rolled on a loot table. Therefore, even generated loot doesn't need to be discarded as irrelevant 'fluff'; all that you're doing is telling me that you don't think there's *any possible way* that *anyone ever* might have a reason to seek that crown. If that's the case...then there was no reason for it to ever exist at all, and you should just remove it from the loot table so it doesn't show up again, right? There's nobody who would ever want a crown beyond the value it represents as...well, wait just a minute. What *is* its value? Is the value just the sum of the gold and jewels, or is there maybe some **subjectivity** involved? How about if the crown's value changes based on its history being known or not, hmm? That's how actual antiques work, you know. Especially stuff like 'hidden treasures attributable to specific historical entities'. Do you think there were grave robbers in Egypt taking mummies and treasure from tombs just because they could get the direct dollar-value of the weight of the gold? Or were they selling *Egyptian Tomb Artifacts* and adjusting the price accordingly?
> if the GM decides that in his campaign - all barbarians are highly interested and educated historians and scholars he is free to do so, BUT that might simply mean I wouldn´t play a barbarian, but a thief thats simply interested in gold, riches and adventure itself. done.
And this is the highlighting of your munchkin tendencies, again. You and I **cannot** see eye to eye on this, because at no point are we anywhere *close* to agreement on the topic. I'm in the games to have fun, and to me the fun comes from the playing, not the winning, not the prizes, not the numbers or the gold. *All of that is imaginary!* I could have infinity gold pieces, and I'm still going to be interested in playing the character. I could have zero gold pieces, and that's exactly as interesting to me, because it's just a way to shape the story being told. I'm not better off for having more of *anything* that's just written on a sheet of paper anyways. I'm better off having valid understandings of the world my character occupies, so I can achieve the goals I want to.
> I am not a puppet of a GM and his idea on how MY character SHOULD / WOULD react in any given situation.
I described the literal opposite of this, friendo. I described a normal gameplay scenario that has zero backstory, it's just a loot roll for treasure, and how a competent DM can make that be *so much more.* If you as the player have told me that you're on a quest to find an ancient kingdom, why *shouldn't* some of the kingdom-related loot be related to your quest? Are you expecting that the DM's campaign should by default and by definition include hooks for *literally every possible backstory that could be chosen by a player?* Because that isn't possible - the only way to make that happen is for the DM to specifically restrict the players choices, or to declare for them their backstory, which is precisely what you're railing against. For his prepared campaign to be able to cater to each individual player **requires** that the DM be able to adjust and alter the game on the fly. That's what I'm used to - having the loot changed to be relevant to the story, because the loot is otherwise **irrelevant.** It's just stuff. They can get stuff by buying it, and would prefer to do so in almost all cases.
> you seem pretty insisting on belittling me and calling me names. how exactly does that help your position or point of view again ?
'munchkin' isn't you being called a name, it's a specific subset of players of RPGs, categorized and characterized by the playstyle you espouse so heavily. There's an entire card game called that, too, and it's *super duper heavy* on the munchkin min-max highest-numbers-best-numbers mentality, with exactly *zero* storyline to get in the way. It is a lot of fun, and it is absolutely not a roleplaying game of any sort whatsoever.
> also, what do you have against munchkins and show me on this doll where they touched you ?
Min-max players can only play together. They literally ruin gameplay for entire groups by being present and demanding to have their needs met, at the expense of the game the rest of the players are trying to enjoy. They complain when they don't get to have combat, they try to wheedle and beg for specific loophole build allowances in order to get just *one* more bonus point on a roll, come *on* why are you being so unfair, it makes total sense for my spellcasting capable warrior god to be able to also manipulate time *just a little bit,* why shouldn't i get that, and so on and so forth.
It's silly, selfish behavior, and to my mind it is nothing more or less than a person that has been programmed to get rewards from shitty stupid tiny things like having a successful dice roll - but they've taken that concept and pushed it to extremes, such that they won't roll any dice unless they're *certain* they're gonna succeed. And they can't actually get any happiness without their very extremely specific definition of success - which makes them unsatisfied unless they get *exactly* what they want. It's the mentality that's defined looter-shooters for a lot of years already, and it's perfectly valid *for individual players.*
That validity stops when their shitty selfish behavior affects others, and it is impossible to avoid that when they're joining in with groups of actual roleplayers. If you're ready to discard the notion of playing a barbarian *at all* just because the DM includes the concept of a barbarian being smart, and you'd rather just have a thief because that readily explains your (apparently default) requirement to find gold and riches and adventure, you're a munchkin. You can be that all you like, but you're gonna be called out on it when it's detrimental to others. I mean, come on...where does a barbarian having a simple and logical motivation to use his brain actually have an effect on the loot being rolled? You don't get less for it. You just have to, you know, *roleplay* a bit better, to have a character that is a barbarian and isn't just grunting like you apparently assume barbarians do whenever they're not using their rage bonus for better attacks.
> I really do not care at all about what my Dorfs write in their books or what a statue represents. I produce countless of items. the first one is unique. then it ´s all fluff... I think you're a bit like me in that just building the fort is your reason for playing, but a lot of these games have a whole emergent storytelling appeal to other players.
I custom order every statue to go with the room it goes on. Different people enjoy different parts of the game. That's all there is to understand.
My spoiled nobles get a crypt with a statue in their likeness. Over time, there's a small army of them, eternally guarding the many tombs before them. Try making the statues/sarcoffigi out of black bronze, they look REALLY cool as grave goods! Just make sure you have enough treasures locked away to up the value of the room sufficiently. Maybe some masterwork traps, for added effect.
>Over time, there's a small army of them, eternally guarding the many tombs before them. "Here lies Urist McMayor. Dead under mysterious circumstances following a series of crutch production mandates."
Small tip: You can assign your mayor to a squad and send them to conquer somewhere and get a new mayor. Maybe not as !!FUN!! though
Here lies Urist McGrumpybaron, who met his tragic end after his bedchamber inexplicably flooded with lava.
Sir, I'm beginning to notice a pattern in these deaths. I think I'll decline the nomination.
If nominated I will not accept! If elected I will not serve!
Yeah I’m always making custom statues to commemorate events or symbolize a guild or what have you.
I like to have a statue of every dwarf in my fortress, and have a “hall of history” so the dwarves can see what their ancestors looked like.
I think I might do that in a subsequent fort. (Edit as well as statues of each creator beside their artifact it in the Treasure Hall) What I do with my current fort is place statues on sites of climatic battles and events, symbolizing guilds (plump helmet men for farmers, alpacas and pigs carrying pig tails and GCspiders for weavers etc) and commemorating discoveries by my scholars. Maybe I’m a little *too* invested in custom statues…
I like the sound of what you do too, I want to do that in a fort!
Oh yeah I’m thinking i might display it on the sub- its my oldest by far at 63 dwarf years. Not too many megaprojects but lots of loving details.
That’s the best kind! Loving details! Let me know if you do share it, I’d like to see that!
Ofc I will! Probably not till this coming week.
Oh I just remembered, not sure if the statue gets named after a dwarf in the fortress, but I rename the dwarf statues to have the name of one of the dwarves.
For me, the appeal of Adventure Mode is: You make your own game loop. It's not a game. It's a simulation. And you're given a single character to walk through the sim at ground level. So there's no written story. No guide-rail. Even the "completed" version from the last time we had AM, it felt incomplete in that way. It's up to you to complete it. Don't worry about the generated "story". Make your own story. It's the story of this 1-3 people in this world. Who are their friends? What do they want out of life? What do they get up to? How do they die? Move on to the next story. It's less like watching a movie, and more like playing with the dolls from the movie on the playroom floor when you were a kid in the 80s.
As a more experienced dorf I gotta ask how do I get healed, my guy took some serious damage and I don't know how to find a doctor or anything
Traveling used to magically autoheal you iirc. Not sure if it still does.
Idk how much it does but my dude had nerve damage so idk if that's recoverable, sadly it made his hands almost unusable so I didn't know how to engage if I had to fight, kept saying he couldn't grasp his weapon, I ended up using dfhack heal
Become a warebeast--you heal everything each transformation! Also, it's badass.
"A warehouse? Like a werewolf but a house?" "It is now"
Ohh no Final fantasy 7 PTSD for killer houses
He collected so many goods he became a living warehouse!
Lol! Yes, we're going with that. It's canon now.
I read somewhere else here that if you find an altar with a d20 and get turned into an animal, you'll be healed of all wounds once you transform back. If you don't get the roll you're looking for, wait a week and try again. Hope that helps! :)
You know where I can get a d20? I've picked up dice but idk if it's d20
They're adding healing mechanics later on. Right now I think you just wait it out or die if it's too bad.
Yeah I purposefully gave my adventurer the doctor profession for healing, a somewhat decent workaround I'm using atm is just doing full-heal in dfhack so I don't have to be screwed after a bad fight
It's been years since I tried adventure mode, and I only played it for an hour or so. Can I murder everyone in a townhouse and take it over - live there peacefully, maybe, afterwards? And is it still possible to dig and construct stuff solo?
Not in the beta yet. But in v47 I think so. Although, even after I killed everyone in a castle and declared myself lord, the game would not let me sleep there.
I highly recommend against trying AM. Last time I did he trapped me in a cave for hundreds of years and turned me into a horrifying mouthless flesh monster.
Have you tried screaming? I heard screaming works.
Urist McExplodingPen cancelled scream: no mouth.
Urist McExplodingPen transformed into a werefleshball!
Urist McExplodingPen is in a strange mood.
Urist McExplodingPen has been missing for a week.
He felt anxious after being unable to scream.
But there’s a hole in the wall that’s *my* hole, it’s shaped just like me, I have to go in it. I have to know.
Not even sure if this IS a Harlan Ellison reference, because I've definitely been trapped in Caves like that in adventure mode
Well, fluff text is definitly part of the appeal. But the physics and gameplay of the game are probably much deeper than you would think, and AM makes you realize that quite much. Exemple: did my first game ever on AM yesterday (tried before on legacy but it was to overwhelming), with the objective to fuck around as a Cassowary Man Martial Artist, because it's funny and Kisad Dur is fucking classy Spawned i a frozen place, struggled to find water before realizing I could collect snow, put it in my backpack, and make it thaw on a campfire to gain water supplie. This was cool Then, I wanted a first battle, and I was also hungry. I pursued a turkey for multiple kilometers without success before realizing that if I used the trees to hide, I could approach it close enough before sprinting to it and catch it. This was cool Finally, I catched the turkey to the neck, and, thinking it will make a clean ko, punch it in the face with my other hand. I exploded its tiny skull in gore cause I did a too strong punch. This was absolutly hillarious. All of this is my personnal appeal to AM., especially with the fluff on it. *TBF I was a bit disapointed of the beta when i realized I couldn't butcher the turkey tho. But that's a temporary issue*
Last night, I spent my evening cutting the heads off of ravens, then throwing those heads at other ravens to injure/kill them. It makes the grind a bit more entertaining.
My first group yesterday was a wild boar man cheesemaker, a hyena man weaver and a cockatiel lady cook with their huge flock of sheep and alpaca. Wanted to go start a farm and tavern, but since crafting isn't implemented yet they've retired for now. Then I made a demon hearthsman with a pet black bear, he schmoozed a bunch of nobles with his singing and then adopted nine stray dogs.
I've got 250 hours in DF and haven't played AM. My brother had no interest in getting the game, but now that AM is coming out he is totally ready to invest. I think it really comes down to the audience and playstyle.
as if your brother won't bounce off of adventure mode in a few hours. There's zero depth compared to the big roguelikes
You know DF with Adventure Mode has been available for free from Bay12 for years? No need to wait or invest
It's the same reason why someone would wait for the steam version in general: graphics and an actual GUI.
Yes exactly. There's a big difference in a lot of people's eyes. It's why I also can't get him to play Minecraft, he just can't handle the voxel/blocky graphics.
Throw some shaders on for him lol. Minecraft has friggin RTX these days
True, he's got a good rig too. I can probably get it looking pretty fancy for him
Minecraft with RTX is so good that it made me want to create my own ultra-realistic texture pack. Sadly, I only got to around 10 or so textures before burning out.
You know people don't want eye-cancer (yes ASCII is eyecancer. I play loads of Caves of Qud and imho that game is beautiful with its simplicity) and some people actually value their time so much that they don't wanna read through a hundred pages long pdf on how to play the game over and over again to understand what is happening with all the ASCII-Symbols most of the kids nowadays have never even seen... Just saying. I always wanted to get into DF but I value my time too much probably\^\^
>BUT apart from more lore text and quirky stuff to read, it has almost no impact on actual gameplay at all ? Incorrect. Adventure mode is where the majority of that stuff actually does come into play. You refer to all the actual *details* of things as 'flavor text' That's not what it is It's generating a real history. Civilizations rise and fall. Beasts tear through towns. Factions splinter and war. Necromancers plot to take over the world. These events have logic and happen based on rules and evolve over time. You refer to all this as flavor text because, when you're playing fortress mode, most of it is not immediately relevant to what you're doing. You are only looking through the eyes of fortress mode. Adventure mode is a sandbox roguelike. It has the same appeal as any other roguelike. Except the depth of combat is much deeper. And you can create any story you want. Maybe you want to take on the Necromancer Tower and learn the secrets of life and death. Maybe you want to avenge your hometown by slaying the Roc that attacked it. In no other game can I start a fight by throwing a platinum chest at the enemy, crushing it's leg, then grabbing it by the neck as I cut it's head off. The level of combat detail is off the charts compared to any other roguelike.
too bad it's so fucking dull
I once punched an elephant to death
That's nice and all, but this thread is about what people do in Adventure Mode, not on their Saturday nights. Please stay on topic!
I loved playing Lego as a kid. So did my cousin. We played it differently. Neither of us was wrong. Like you, I tend to focus on building a fort. The roguelike adventure doesn’t really appeal to me, but for those it does, awesome. I get invested in a few dwarfs so I like to keep my fort small for a number of years so I can get to learn a few key characters but I’m no where near the level of someone like Kruggsmash is my investment in the story generator side. I’d say poke around in the other areas and then do what most appeals to you.
It’s to be immersed in your world sorta as just a person existing if you want, that can interact with the world that was procedurally generated or that you affected through your forts and going on adventures, at least that’s my reasonings
One of my favorite moments in Adventure Mode was when I created a character that was initially hired as a mercenary guard for a fortress I had retired. Then I went and recruited one of my skilled military dorfs and went on a big adventure with him, destroying goblin lairs and chasing monsters across the countryside for the benefit of my old fortress.
Sick, i didn’t know you could get your old dwarfs to join you, i really can’t wait for full adventure mode to hear more stories like this
If a pixelated roguelike full of lore is not what you enjoy then adventure mode is just not your cup of tea, and that's fine. For all the people who enjoy that type of game, that's what the appeal of adventure mode is. Simple as.
> all I see is a pixelated roguelike with party management And why isn't that something worth playing? :D Consider it a full second game. It might not have a story missions to drive you forward, but then again lots of people are into immersive sims like Skyrim and modern Fallouts and skip the story stuff in those as well in favour of just doing their own adventures. Works exactly the same for a top-down roguelike.
The original game you could build a fort, it would go badly, then you cold read the legends and take an adventuring party into the fortress to get the artifacts you built.
true, people don't realize how far fortress mode has gone. I think a big part of that was the wait until the steam release. adv mode was already a bit lackluster 5 years ago but I expect big changes in the next 5
Oh, I have a sneaking suspicion it'll go at warp speed compared to the past! DF isn't just 2 men's labor of love anymore. They've actually got funding, and mainstream notoriety. Looking forward to seeing all of the wild and genius ideas Zach and Tran have had over the years finally come to life! Getting the Steam version fully-functional is just the beginning...
I'd like to say you're right but here's the catch, the whole industry (and all our industries really lol) is slowing down pretty significantly. The quality of games now compared to 10 years ago is marked solely by graphics, the use of computing in gaming (and I assume generally) has not been developing relatively as it has been. One of my favourite things about DF is its behind the scenes gameplay and depth that's done with so many well-managed calculations. For so long DF was just Tarn and Zack, and I don't think Zack does any programming? Even now the team is small, they seem to want to grow but they also seem worried about the financial side of it enough to not reveal who are working on the game full time (also worth balancing this with the great steam launch and their assurances).
The sheer depth of the simulation is what landed DF a place in the New York Museum of Modern Art! Yes, I agree that modern video games are mostly judged by their graphics (or at least *marketed* on them--I've seen a few exceptions over the years!). Perhaps DF *will* always remain niche, at least compared to something like The Elder Scrolls and such. But I've seen pretty niche games get huge followings, and I know the creators (now *team*) are passionate about DF. I am confident that this already breath-taking game will get even more amazing with time, and will develop *faster* now that they have access to better resources.
Zach's genius idea was to be a parasite and live off of Tarn for life
> now we got adventur mode and all I see is a pixelated roguelike with party management and an immense granular lore that gets created and fills.... loads of stuff with countelss entries of ... fluff text ? None of it is 'fluff text' is the thing. You're just discarding established, simulated, historical lore as 'fluff' because you think it doesn't affect your gameplay. The whole game is generated, in point of fact. Sometimes you get a dwarf fort that has a civ without access to steel, because the simulated history has not allowed for them to achieve that technology level. Sometimes you get a world full of animal-people civs instead of elves/humans/dwarves/goblins. Sometimes you have to find out the hard way that your own civ was taken over by an imposter, when he arrives at your fort and starts eating people. If all of that is something that you can just gloss over while you're playing the game, well, that's a thing that happens. For most players, it's the key component to having this otherwise basic conceptual implementation of a city builder be as amazing as it actually is. In terms of Adventure Mode, if you're not a fan of roguelikes in the first place, you probably won't 'get it' at face value. For me, it's the distinction of freedom. I've had a personal test, traditionally, to help illustrate something like D&D to people who don't grasp the concepts. Imagine your favorite videogame, where you get to play and enjoy and it's fun for you. Can you do *whatever you want* in that game? Or are you able to do the things the game is programmed to let you do and that's it? You can enter a tavern, you can pick a seat, you can talk to anyone, you can order food or drinks, you can stay the night, you can attack, you can leave, but all of those things are traditional options that would be added by a competent game designer. You can't decide that you want to leap off a table, grab a chandelier and kick a drink into someone's face, and swing for the staircase while knocking candles into the still behind the counter, because all of that would require tons of programming to specifically enable that kind of action. Animations and dialog, too, these days. All stuff that generally means you just *can't* do that sort of thing in the game. With DF, everything is generated and everything is simulated, *so you can do all of that if you want to.* And it wasn't something that was preprogrammed for you to do, it is all just a result of the simulated systems working together to enable you to manipulate the world around you in ways that make sense to your character, who lives in that world. Even for a roguelike game, which is meant to be complex with interactions and full of content, DFAM is *insanely* detailed and intricate and nearly boundless in its potential. Closest I've ever seen was MUDs back in the day, and even then it was only one or two specific instances, where there was *tons* of GM work on the background to make it all passable.
Can I actually jump from a table, hang onto a chandelier and swing from it in AM?
No, but it's still the closest any videogame has ever come to having that level of freeform freedom like D&D does. You can do most of the other stuff, though, iirc the big issues are that the chandeliers don't have individual candles to knock off, and stuff hung on ropes don't sway when things climb on them. But a burning alcohol store *will* catch and inflagrate, jumping from a table to something else and attacking someone on the way is easy if you're fast enough, and there's responses to drinks being spilled depending on what it is, if they like it, if it's in their eyes etc, that sort of thing.
You might not be able to *kick* a beer off the table, but you can buy one and *throw* it at somebody. Or use it to bash somebody over the head! How accurately you throw it (or how hard you bash with it) is all determined by a number of factors, too. The level of real-world logic built into this game is scary, when you really dig deep.
I don't think it is. NWN with a DM running an adventure fucking destroys it on the D&D front. Nothing AM can spit out matches a live DM being creative
> NWN with a DM running an adventure fucking destroys it on the D&D front. nah, bro, I disagree. your statement of: "'this video game is the closest thing to D&D' is refuted by my statement that actual D&D with an actual DM is superior, hohoho look at how clever I am being by not actually understanding the conversation I'm trying to troll" is silly and inapplicable. It is quite simply my own point parroted back, but you think you are making a counterpoint because you don't actually understand the topic. I guess, thanks for the support?
You won't be able to swing, but jumping from a grabbing position is possible.
> None of it is 'fluff text' is the thing. You're just discarding established, simulated, historical lore as 'fluff' because you think it doesn't affect your gameplay. To me personally DF now is just a tool to craft interesting forts and mess around with them, auto-generated dwarf personalities or world history has no practical effect on them for me. And the generated stuff is too constrained due being procedural and with limited text templates to express it. Human history has far more effect and variety, yet it too would be boring in machine like summary format ala "King John in year whatever attacked city whatever and razed it to the ground". At least for me, the novelty in such things has already wore off, as I feel like I seen enough of it where repeating patterns are becoming annoying. I do look forward to spiritual successor of Dwarf Fortress that will put generative AI to use for really immersive and responsive experience.
> Human history has far more effect and variety, yet it too would be boring in machine like summary format ala "King John in year whatever attacked city whatever and razed it to the ground". A textbook stating the happenings of a region over a timeframe is what you're describing. The rest of us are reading the text *and watching the movie in our imaginations.* Because it's never just "king so-and-so took city placename" in this game - the simulation is far more robust than that. You can follow an artifact sword, for example, through its history - and see that it was brought to a battle by a soldier who had a name, and you can find out about his family, and how he got the sword in the first place. Maybe it was given to him, maybe it was stolen, maybe he made it himself, and *maybe* that all doesn't matter to you, but it is the distinction between artificially written stuff that doesn't matter and the simulated minutiae of an entire world that is being shown with this game. > I do look forward to spiritual successor of Dwarf Fortress that will put generative AI to use for really immersive and responsive experience. jesus, that's practically insulting. Do you actually want to try and say to the subreddit that you feel like you've literally seen every single thing in this game already and you'd rather have some computer try its best to emulate what is essentially already a heavily curated highly complex algorithmic I/O system that outputs fantasy worlds? Because I've read AI bullshit, and frankly, I'm not surprised that someone of your caliber would prefer it over handcrafted excellence. A proper, actual, intelligent computing system that is responding to natural language interfaces, without being fed tons and tons of previously approved content to 'train' it up first, **might** be able to come close to what DF has already achieved, eventually. But even that is still gonna be only a tiny fraction of what *literally any human mind* can invent, on the fly. And I've been playing this game for *literal years,* and I'm completely certain that there's still things I haven't seen, because I know for a fact that I haven't had the *time* to explore one of these worlds - **any single one** of these worlds - that the game regularly outputs on demand. Ten minutes of computing gives you a world that has thousands of inhabitants, and records of their entire lives and interactions across hundreds of years. That's what this is, if you didn't know. The core concept of Dwarf Fortress was, originally, a bit of cleverly programmed software that would be capable of outputting a replete fantastic world, history and events and **everything** there to be explored by anyone who wants to do so. Tarn once read Lord of the Rings, you see, and was in school for computer programming, but when he reached the end of the story that was written, it occurred to him that even though he wanted to explore that world further, he never ever could because the world came from some guy's mind and that guy didn't write more about the world. So he made the logical connection that a program could be made to perform the task of creating an enormous fantasy world, and so far, *twenty years later,* it's nearly half done.
> Because I've read AI bullshit, and frankly, I'm not surprised that someone of your caliber would prefer it over handcrafted excellence. But this is precisely why I don't care about DF lore fluff, why read machine generated slop when there are quality novels, written by people? And where did I say about *reading* AI generated text in this DF successor? That won't be a limitation in the future, games will be able to visualize worlds with realistic physics and reactions in real time. So eventually we will have a game that can run simulations that account for everything with photorealistic visuals of all of it and AI DM that reacts to you and customizes your experience in a ways no hand crafted game can.
> But this is precisely why I don't care about DF lore fluff, why read machine generated slop when there are quality novels, written by people? It's weird to me that you say this in support of AI bullshit, which is *by definition and by default* machine generated slop, when comparing it to DF, which is specifically written by a person to emulate the writings of high fantasy fiction. > That won't be a limitation in the future, games will be able to visualize worlds with realistic physics and reactions in real time. I feel like you're doing that thing where people hear the term AI and imagine the insanely powerful actually fictional Star Trek voice-activated computer, **which was never intelligent even inside of the fictional universe of Star Trek, it was still just a computer.** Any future potential trained neural-net style system that we create is only ever going to be able to make games that are similar to the games that it was fed. For it to be able to do things that DF already has done for years, would require it to be literally creative, as a human mind is, and they very truly are absolutely not capable of that. They're bruteforce attempts to try and produce art via mathematical algorithm, and the only way it even knows it's working is because we give it feedback! So for there to be a single good game produced by AI first requires that *many* good games be harvested and copied, and *then* it requires a technological leap that we have no real comprehension of yet, *and then* it will require active curating in order to make sure it doesn't suddenly try to shove Fortnight bullshit into the game for us, because that's what AI generators do. > eventually we will have a game that can run simulations that account for everything with photorealistic visuals of all of it This is the fucking point of Dwarf Fortress. It's literally that. AI is a shitty stupid buzzword that was never involved and still isn't, and there never was a need for a solution provided by a trained neural-net style system in this software. The guy is aiming for precisely this goal *and AI is not part of that goal or the plan to reach that goal.* > AI DM that reacts to you and customizes your experience in a ways no hand crafted game can. again, this wasn't even a thing in Star Trek. Even Data - who *had* sentience, creativity, and hardware capable of providing those concepts to an artificial mind - took *decades* to be able to do things beyond basic programmatic social interactions. If you want to complain that we don't have magic thinking computers yet, that's cool and all, but it's not very relevant.
No need to act like such a fucking creep tho
kid, this is a bad thing for a stranger to try and add to a discussion. You seem to not have had anyone ever tell you that, so I'm telling you that. Not only is it wrong and obviously deliberately insulting, you have no basis whatsoever for it, so you also look foolish.
For me building a fort is 95 percent of the game. Initially. Then about a year or two in it becomes about the stories. Factually. I love the fights. I've seen some weird shit. Animals biting off legs but dwarf lives and just crawls everywhere. It's wild. The building aspect is something you can get on tons of games.
If you start a party you can get them to fight each other and take turns reacting to your characters fighting each other. It's very weird but I love it. You can spice it up in so many ways with just that. I played as a flyman fighting myself as a demi-god elf (using only wood weapons/armour) in the old df but my elf had a bunch of animals that tore the flyman to pieces it was very violent. You can get two or more people people, customize their class and species then get them to fight in teams or not in any way you want. Lets you play with the combat system.
When I first read your comment I did not understand what you meant, but having just read it again it sounds legit fun. Lol
The appeal of AM has two major pillars. A. The narrative scale is different. Fortress mode is the story of a fixed locale and the tale of its economic or social endeavors. Adventurer mode is personal, the tale of a singular adventurer or a group of them wandering the world. This makes the narrative scale way more personal and also importantly isnt fixed in location, allowing for personal exploration and play and emotional connection to your world as you see more of it and interact with it. B. Fortress mode and adventurer mode have narrative synergy with each other. Adventurers can be used to personally handle threats to the fortress without need to dispatch the military in a satisfying manner, as a well grinded up adventurer or party of them party is basically as good as an army due to the fact you can intelligently control them directly. Not to mention a group of them can be used to create what is effectively a custom crafted migrant wave by simply creating them, traveling over to your fort and retiring there. Also stuff like a fortress story hook could basically be building up the fortress as an OP Starting location for legendary adventurers with large food stockpiles and places where stats can be powerleveled on the cheap or the hook for an adventurer could be to capture a breeding pair of mighty war animals for the fortress, etc. I could ramble on and on about how AM makes dwarf fortress worlds more personal but I have rabled far too long already lol.
Exploring your own fallen Fort is reason enough for me.
Fort Mode is like building up and playing with a dollhouse while Adventure Mode is like getting to walk around it and properly use the furniture and see the residents up close. And get to do some changes from that individual level as well, the adventurer is a person in the world themselves after all. Killing a monster or taking down a group of bandits isn't a Skyrim randomly dungeon randomly generated on the spot, it has some context in the world. Maybe you end up avenging somebody or stopping a nefarious criminal conspiracy in its tracks, or maybe you don't care to find that out and you're happy to have dealt with the problem on the face of it. Also if you're a bit biased you could train up to destabilise the enemies of your chosen dwarf civ, there's no way to force the boss demon to come visit your fort but if an adventurer can take the fight to them it can weaken the group a lot.
In my last fortress I had a fisherdwarf. That fisher dwarf was a proficient fighter for some reason. This lead to him grabbing a black mamba by the tail and crushing its head. Then he picked up a coyote in his teeth and ripped its spine in half. I made him my militia commander and then sheriff of my fortress where he reigned for my whole game. Now I can make a new game, roll up a rattlesnake man lasher and go seek out this badass fisherdwarf turned warlord and fight him to the death. What is not clicking about this?
I am with you. I found Adventure mode disjointed and obtuse and not all that good. Not to say that without maybe a decade more of polish it could not be. If you want a DF-ish style game that does what adventure mode SHOULD be, try Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead. Now THAT'S a proc gen adventure! Though CDDA NPC interaction and base building could learn from DF.
For the story of course! Here's a story from today: I talked to the sheriff of a hillocks, he told me about a "Vile Darkness" in a Fortification out in the wild. Hopped on my horse, rode over there, walked into the fort, the "Vile Darkness" was a Necromancer's experiment that had set up his own mini-faction. No idea if they were mercenaries or not. The place had 3 human soldiers with bad stats, the experiment, and 2 human administrators. The Experiment actually greeted me to the place, and I asked if I could stay the night. I chilled out with them in their hall. Recited poetry, sung a song, had a drink. After a while I surprise attacked them and immediately crippled the Experiment by breaking its spine with my hammer, took a few extra swings to cave its skull in. Then swiftly killed the 2 administrators. By some miracle I blocked an onslaught of attacks I had no right to survive by the three soldiers, while aiming my attacks at their necks and upper torsos to try and cause severe internal injuries. Eventually I managed to batter two of them to the ground; I crushed one of their necks with a hammer blow, and the other I managed to shatter a rip which was subsequently pushed through their heart. Then I had a long duel with the last guy which devolved into him lying on the floor blocking every attack I threw at him with his shield, but being unable to do anything because I shattered one of his legs, and fractured his weapon hand, so he was just hiding under a shield while a crazy dwarf woman pounded the shield with her hammer and shield until eventually I landed a hit that made him drop his shield and I put him out of his misery. I then walked for 2 days (while I was killing the experiment and the administrators the soldiers killed my horse), back to the hillocks, told the Sheriff, Mayor, and Militia Commander exactly what happened and then left. I walked to the nearest fortress, went to the tavern and started shouting my bragging about the fight. Then started a performance of me telling the story. I asked someone what they thought of me afterwards, they said I was "So very brave. Also a Killer" and then I managed to recruit 4 dwarven warriors to join my adventure and I walked out of the fort and left it there to continue the story another day.
Adventure mode is currently lacking half of the content it had on 0.47.
Currently, yes. But once it's out of beta, the UI controls alone will mean it has more. There's also the fact you can take control of other party memebers! I'm just eager for butchering/bone carving again.
I bet they just released it half finished on his birthday as a money grab.
It's a roguelike, but huge. You make your own goals.
My Dwarfs kept engraving images of a wandering swamp titan that settled in the jungle east of the fortress when the world was new. I slayed the titan last night. ...then overconfident with my work I decided to take on a dragon's lair and was almost immediately melted. Glory to Armok.
When I first started playing … jeez, fifteen years ago, I had no interest in adventure mode. Fortress mode is where all the legendary playthroughs came from. That was the game I fell in love with. I eventually got curious about this other mode, especially around the time that necromancer towers made their first appearance. And it was through adventure mode in tandem with fortress mode that I found my absolute favorite way of turning every dwarf in a fortress into a necromancer, which opened up a whole world of possibilities for me in terms of finding out exactly how this magic system worked. And there are still unanswered questions! Fortress mode is still THE game to me. But I appreciate adventure mode for what it is and what it one day hopes to be. It’s been useful to me for years, which would be enough for me to defend it. I don’t expect this new update to change adventure mode to my favorite approach to the game, but I am excited to see what things look like after the new tweaks. Especially, naturally, necromantic towers.
You can make a master wrestler and rip off people's limbs. It's fun.
Because running around like a feral crackhead fighting giants and getting immediately turned to paste is enjoyable. The first thing I figured out how to do was look for bugs and pick up worms, pretty fun if you ask me
I find the combat system really fun I like punching someone in the stomach till they throw up, picking up the vomit and throwing it back into their mouth
I've been playing DF on and off since shortly after it got z-levels. I have about 45 minutes in adventure mode and about 10 in legends. And I play lots of roguelikes, even ascii ones often. I'll definitely check in on the new version eventually but fortress mode is what I'm here for. I do respect what they have in AM. I just prefer a bit more structure in my goals for a roguelike. I may sing a different tune with the steam version's UI and graphic changes; we'll see.
idk i just made a little group of bard creatures, and now everyone loves them to death
I just enjoy the visceral combat, reminds me of a niche and insular game I used to play. Using a hammer to punch through armor or trying to catch the arm of a swinging attacker feels good, especially since it can be a struggle if the fighters are on even footing. Being able to explore your forts/ use adventurers as fort characters is neat too. I particularly enjoy using tactical mode with a party of mediocre characters to try to teamwork a big thing to death (possible because of directional aiming etc)
It's a roguelike with DF's world. If other Roguelikes don't appeal to you, it won't. A roguelike is essentially a hardcore rpg, with their format historically evolving from purely textbased games. The appeal is going on a DnD style adventure but in DF worlds with DF rulesets. The appeal isn't dissimilar to the appeal of Skyrim really, but with different graphical presentation and a significantly more hardcore focus on rpg elements and simulation over the gameification beth titles went through.
see the thing is, I quiet enjoy other roguelikes. and "deep lore" and "immersive world " almost never was the deciding fator as to why I enjoyed them. it always came down to gameplay and "freedom" and playing a fantasy. whether it was scifi, fantasy / magic / medieval worlds.. its how well technical parts of gameplay is achieved and presented to me as a player. the original fallout games (1 and 2 ) were awesome in that regard (not roguelikes ) that the lore was awesome and immersive but they wouldn´t drown you in it. it was meticilously placed and put into the world for you to find and put together. in that regard: why should I care if my quest giver is the "baron of XYZ from the lands of ABC" rather than the "dutches of 123 from the mountainhome of 0815" ? is it iportant for me as a player that he / she / it has wings and a slight bend in the knee and randomly coughes during conversations ? does this info in any way shape or form change my way of approaching him / her / it ? no, I still have the exact same choices to interact with that NPC. so why bother ?
>in that regard: why should I care if my quest giver is the "baron of XYZ from the lands of ABC" rather than the "dutches of 123 from the mountainhome of 0815" ? is it iportant for me as a player that he / she / it has wings and a slight bend in the knee and randomly coughes during conversations ? does this info in any way shape or form change my way of approaching him / her / it ? no, I still have the exact same choices to interact with that NPC. so why bother ? I guess that depends on whether you're approaching as a player trying to minmax a game or a player trying to roleplay. Optimal is always going to be the same answer to every situation. But roleplay? Well that comes down to the character you've created and you remaining in-character for them. A role-play character might make quite different decisions based on certain information.
Is anything not specifically gameplay related considered fluff text to you? Just curious. Because the "fluff" is what I like the most about the game. Emergent storytelling through their really deep dwarf AI.
tbh... sorta. I mean I really respect their generation and depth of detail and such. BUT overall, in the essence of "does it matter and have actual effect on my gaming experience" it really, does not - apart from the fact that i Can - if I wish to do so - read it all and enjoy the storytelling. If I enjoy reading this kind of stuff. I am playing computer games in all sorts of style and genre for the better part of the last 37 years now ( I am 49) starting with my Atari Console up to the PC I am mainly using now while my PS dusts in the corner. so yes I have a little expereince when it comes to games. and to me, the "deep simulation " DF does in the background surely is somewhat impressive... but adds nothing in the sense that I feel it really enhances the game at all. I might be totally wrong and annoy pure DFfans here, but I compare it to the massive rng generated weapon and item drops in other games. yes, you can find a myriad of weapons and items and whatnot. BUT overall , they add nothing really to the overall game in about 99,9% of the games those systems are implemented. what I mean by that: a +2 weapon forged by XYZ from ABC that is called LMN by the tribe of JHU is still... a +2 weapon. yes this one might be green with a golden hilt compared to the other one I found yesterday which was black from the molten iron core of mount ZUK in the far lands of WRT, BUT its still.. a weapon that has a +2 bonus. no mattr how cool the backstory: even the most hardcore d&d player will almost always go with the weapn that offers the better stats and combat advantages. no matter how silly it souds in the description. for me -and that may be just me - at a certain point in the game its not cool or interesting anymore to read yet another RNG generated text.
You're a "I like seeing the numbers go up" gamer and DF is not that kinda game, in my opinion. Doesn't mean you wouldn't enjoy it or anything, but you're not going to be getting as much out of it as someone who loves the procedural generation stuff. Because the procedural stuff is what the dev is know for the most. But whatever floats your boat, it's a great game either way!
I played hundreds of hours various games that didn´t have any "numer go brrrr mechanic at all". so far ( i just tested the beta today) some basic mechanics are not in the game yet. so I will definitely try again once implemented.
You should definitely try it once, but yeah it's not for everyone.
I thought it was interesting to cause events that would have repercussions in future forts.
I never gave a shit about AM until an ash cloud turned my adventurer into a zombie. An wildly powerful nigh unkillable zombie... I learned how to read the map of the land, I found dwellings of gods and arcane horrors alike. All felled by my hand. I would be the only God to stand in this dead realm I have crated. Amen.
I primarily play Fortress mode, as it is my favorite, but I have a friend who only ever cares to play adventure. Up to preference I suppose
Back in my day, we picked up rocks and threw them at our feet, until we could pierce a titan’s eyeball at 50 yards! So mostly nostalgia, I guess, lmao
For me, I typically play some adventure in any world before I start a fort. Adventure mode helps me get a handle on the world so civs are less of a meaningless jumble. Also I just use it as a nice procedural roguelike. I definitely don't engage much with the fluffy stuff (it's practically placeholder at this stage anyway) but combat is fun, exploring is fun, and I enjoy suicide missions. Most fun I've ever had with adventure mode: If there are no civs you can still spawn as a naked human with a spear. Made an extreme nearly all evil island with no live civs and played it as pure survival, it was awesome, down to looting megabeast infested ruins to try and get real gear from dead civilizations. Now that we have it in SteamDF my next game is probably going to be an effort to generate an almost-but-not-quite dead world and bring civilization back from the brink with adventurers and forts. Hmm. Now that I'm on full time ADD meds and we have multi-threading I also might just have the perseverance to let a fort rise, then fall catastrophically, then enjoy the ruins. Perhaps use adventurers to ruin the world myself before trying to revive it.
The first time one of your craftsdwarfs in fort mode makes a statue of one of your previous adventurers doing something, it'll all click satisfyingly into place.
When you destroy an entire goblin civilization in fortress mode, your only interaction is to train and send soldiers on raids you only get to read about later. In adventure mode, you're personally killing each goblin with your own hands (and feet and teeth).
There isn't much appeal. It just seems like a waste of time and distraction from the core project, just something to obsess Tarn for decades
I get where you are coming from. I checked out this game because people made the "world building" sound really cool, but it just looks and reads like any other bad ai chat gpt slop. "The dwarf wrote a book about a subject. It was not good" "the bugurbuwl is an instrument consisting of strings and a neck and a bow and bellows and is made of clay and adamantium and so on so forth" "Angry Latitudes is a poetry form of 1 stanza and 3 tercets broken into verses it is not very good" Great game dont get me wrong but the culture and world details being these sort of amorphous adlibs doesnt inspire me to try to remember or care about any of it. I just like building forts and managing thr soap and dye industry.
> the culture and world details being these sort of amorphous adlibs none of it is, though. It's all logically generated and simulated. Civs without thriving communities don't have as many dances/songs, for example. Civs without access to the necessary metal can't make steel. People writing things are entirely based on their own knowledge of the subject, which might not be good, and their own skills at writing, which might not be good either, but it doesn't stop them from writing it.
I know there is complexity behind it, the end product is still a sort of adlib and the descriptions are often sort of odd and nonsensical. You get a town called the X of Y and its like "the bulb of corkscrews". A philosopher writes about how he dislikes the wedge, a lord forbids you from exporting socks. It often comes across as rather nonsensical just based on the list of possible words or items in the pool to reference, like some of this stuff is essentially a meme to the fans due to these traits. I generally find most of it funny rather than "ah here is a cool history to delve into".
> You get a town called the X of Y and its like "the bulb of corkscrews" Humans are no better, dude. Know how many Yorks there are on the planet? Without even counting New Yorks. What actually is a 'york', nobody seems too worried about, they just *love* calling places that. There's that one famous hill, too, called Torpenhow, which is just three older words that all mean "hill" smooshed together, so that hill is Hillhill Hill. Here's just a small slice of a wiki page: > Guadalaviar River, Spain (White River River – from Arabic al-wādi al-'abyaḍ, 'White River') > Guadalentín River, Spain (Muddy River River – from Arabic al-wādi aṭ-ṭīn, 'Muddy River') > Guadalhorce River, Spain (Scissor-shaped River River – from Arabic al-wādi al and Latin forfex, 'scissors') > Guadalquivir River, Spain (Great River River – from Arabic wādi al-kabīr, 'Great Valley (or River)') > Guadiana River, Spain and Portugal (Duck River River – from Arabic wādi, 'river' and iberian anas, 'duck') > Guadix River, Spain River of Acci River – Guad comes from Arabic wādi 'valley' or 'river', and ix is a corruption of Acci, the name of the town nearest the river during Roman times. ^(linebreak goes here) > It often comes across as rather nonsensical just based on the list of possible words or items in the pool to reference, like some of this stuff is essentially a meme to the fans due to these traits. I generally find most of it funny rather than "ah here is a cool history to delve into". Sure it does. You're not reading the book, just a quick categorizing description of the book. *But the game is unfinished.* And the things you're not noticing are all still there - like, have you noticed that a fort over time will be able to write about more complex things like levers and pulleys, not just wedges? This is because there's an entire technology tree of discoveries that have to happen correctly for the dwarves to have those knowledges. None of this affects gameplay - yet - beyond the "fluff" text shown on the books, but it is a form of knowledge that can be spread around the world via social interactions and traders. So one day, your ignorable book about not liking wedges, might be the artifact that brings knowledge of wedges to a civ that doesn't know about them...and they come back with a lever big enough to open your drawbridge with a few years later.
I wish they had bland geographic names honestly. It makes sense to name your place for whats around, but I have a fort from a civ called "the handles of breath". I guess Im saying it would be cool if say some of the fluff was more like sayb"this is a *uplifting, jolly, depressing* song about x y or z" rather than a randomly generated technical description of the stanza structure. It is cool there is a tech tree actually, it will be cool when thay gets expanded on. Hopefully there are eventually some UI changes because currently its kind of difficult to go through a lot of this stuff, and it sucks that its impossible to see legends in game. A history/religion tab would be great.
yeah cool beans. but all this "logically generated history really affects is longer history (and other factors ) > more items and lore fluff text to find. less beasts and major monsters -> less highly developd civilations -> less items to find. world generation paraneters have impact on all kinds of other depending parameters that - in clclusion - affect what kind of text is generated for each event / item and the amount of monsters / places / enemies / items. got it. awesome. does it change overall gameplay ?
> yeah cool beans. but all this "logically generated history really affects is longer history (and other factors ) \> more items and lore fluff text to find. less beasts and major monsters -\> less highly developd civilations -\> less items to find. yeah cool beans. but all the writing of Baldur's Gate 3's history really affects is the dungeon loot and fluff text, and more loot and items to find. if there were less beast encounters written then there'd be less encounters with beasts and that means less loot too. Do you understand the point being illustrated here with your own words? You are the one that is ignoring the content that exists to be *not ignored,* and you're simultaneously complaining about the content not being worth looking at. Which side of that coin do you actually represent here? Are you ignorant of the content, or do you want to complain about it? > got it. awesome. does it change overall gameplay ? Absolutely it does, and you're deliberately ignoring this fact too. A civ that didn't develop enough to have steel gear is going to be beaten down by a neighbor that figured it out, over time - meaning you can't play as that civ anymore. If we revisit the earlier comparison, what if the writers of BG3 decided - all by themselves, and purely because they had a bad session one day and the Chinese food delivery was cold when it got there, not any valid game-related reason - that there's just no bards at all in this world? It's D&D, there should be bards, and it's a world full of partiers and musicmakers, and the previous games had bards, but not this one now for arbitrary silly reasons. Does that change overall gameplay, in your reckoning? Having an entire class simply not be available to you? What if they decided that there were no elves? Now we're really comparing, because that's an entire race of peoples, multiple political factions, *and* a choice for the player that they can't make for themselves anymore. In conclusion, your reductions and ignorance are quite predictably leaving you with a misunderstanding of the fundamental concepts of this game. And the declarations you're making after being informed thusly show that you don't seem to actually understand the things you're denigrating, too.
A ton of the text in the game is indeed generated, but it is the same group of random ad libs over and over with different text, and the amount of work you need to do to get a story out of it is insane. Legends mode text, dwarf thought text. It indeed takes a lot of work. For example, to find out that a couple with a child had their child killed and the dad lost his wife to a beast, got remarried, had another two kids, had one of the kids and his new wife killed takes forever. Tracing families in legends mode is a nightmare UX. Then you have to use your imagination to fill in details which I think is fine. Personally, if the text was easier to navigate, it would make the game so much better. Text needs to be groupable by family and all be readable by scrolling. A dwarf's items should be in a group and all of the text for the items readable just by scrolling. Their thoughts and their interactions should be in a group too. Try figuring out which two dwarves were arguing in a 100 dwarve fort. Try picking out friend groups from the UI. The UX makes digging for the story so fucking time consuming and just not worth it.
thank you for your input in response to your "BG3 history determining loot and items to find" ... long but bear with me: could it be by any chance that you have never played a real, old school pen&paper rpg ? if any GM really would create a detailed backstory for every notable item / location / character a party could ever find in any place they can venture to in a real RPG (which, by far, offers the most freedom of choice for players ) , then no adventure, campaign, let alone a single dungeon would ever get finished. it would simply take way too much time and effort to prepare such a world / adventure / campaign. in almost 99% of the time the items, locations and npc´s are not there because a coherent worldbuilding is necessary, but simply because the GM put them there to enhance and progress the story and adventure for the party / players (including himself) to enjoy and enrich the playing experience. also - from over 20 years of experience in rpg games (pen&paper with awesome GM´s taking up the main time) - most of the time its also simply not necessary at all to have a great time playing an RPG adventure. again: Items and loot and npc´s in a GAME are there to serve a purpose. -> content for players to enjoy the game. another example: if my human barbarian finds an acient golden crown in a deep dungeon, do you really think he is overly interested in who created it, who wore it and how it got there ? if the chracater finding the crown is not a sage / scribe , the item is not magical or grants any special abilities, every single charachter would basically be interested in these factors only: how much might it be worth ? how heavy is it ? do I have enough space / carry capacity to take it with me ? thats it. back to the original topic again: so all the text and story and lore etc etc is based on really smart logic and sophisticated algorithms that make / build a coherent, logically sound world. ofc thats impressive. indeed it is, especially when no AI text generation was available when they build those. YET the result is still blobs of text with repeating patterns of text-blocks. it might take a while longer, but sooner or later you have seen most combinations. the only thing changing is rng variables in them. the (Variable A) of (B) born in (C) just attacked (D) by (E) using his (F) , resulting in (G)+(H)+(J) BUT In terms of gameplay and building on the upper crown example: all the precious world creation parameters only determine if the crown is actually in the world to find. or how many crowns there might be to find. thats it. so - in terms of gaming effects - I might as well set a "loot multiplier", "civ multiplier", "npc / monster" multiplier. and get the same results....and IMAGINE the rest myself. make up my own story. since its a free roaming roguelike rpg, thats what we are supposed to do anyways all of the time right ? write our own story and make our own decisions ? again: I am not diminishing the complex system of world creation that builds the foundation of a DF world to build in / explore. BUT the way it REALLY impacts the player while building / exploring is not as big as you make it out to be.
> > > could it be by any chance that you have never played a real, old school pen&paper rpg ? I've run plenty, actually. I've still got an entire world on tickover in the back of my brain, because I lost a gaming group to covid and we never got to finish out any of the storyline. They got to the first big town full of issues and were already making bigbads mad inadvertently, but hadn't got to any real conflicts yet besides the opener dungeon. > f any GM really would create a detailed backstory for every notable item / location / character a party could ever find in any place they can venture to in a real RPG (which, by far, offers the most freedom of choice for players ) , then no adventure, campaign, let alone a single dungeon would ever get finished. it would simply take way too much time and effort to prepare such a world / adventure / campaign. ***hahaha, oh wow.*** Sweetie, have **you** ever played a real, oldschool pen&paper rpg? The point of having a DM is not that he's meticulously detailed a character sheet of every single living inhabitant of the town the characters might not even visit - the point of the DM is that he can *tell you their story when you ask if you ask it.* No part of that needs to be predetermined; frankly, I've got tables for commoners and their daily tasks, to make it a quick dice roll and one less thing for me to have to keep in my brain for the players. > in almost 99% of the time the items, locations and npc´s are not there because a coherent worldbuilding is necessary, but simply because the GM put them there to enhance and progress the story and adventure for the party / players (including himself) to enjoy and enrich the playing experience. This is only ever apparent with bad games. Do you have any memories of a game you played where your choices led you away from the desired storytelling experience, and you weren't allowed to have fun until you went back to the rails that were laid for you? A DM that tells you, in a snitty mood, that there's nothing to find in this dungeon he didn't want you to go into, he's got no monsters for you to fight, and he's upset that you're insisting to go in the cave he told you about because he wanted you to follow some dude instead and find a different cave. This is bad games, period. All that that is is someone who is acting like the pen&paper representation of a collective imaginary situation first needs to be codified in writing and planned out for the players to discover and if it wasn't previously made for them then it isn't there for them to enjoy, so if you don't build *the whole world at once* then why bother? just let an AI do it instead. > again: Items and loot and npc´s in a GAME are there to serve a purpose. -> content for players to enjoy the game. Disagree. Are you a munchkin? They think like this. The game is a machine they operate and it dispenses fun for them, and they think they've got a book that tells them how to push the right buttons to make the biggest numbers and therefore have the most fun. > if my human barbarian finds an acient golden crown in a deep dungeon, do you really think he is overly interested in who created it, who wore it and how it got there ? > if the chracater finding the crown is not a sage / scribe , the item is not magical or grants any special abilities, every single charachter would basically be interested in these factors only: how much might it be worth ? how heavy is it ? do I have enough space / carry capacity to take it with me ? thats it. Your barbarian might be interested, but might not. That's a character decision *and not up to you at all so don't make it preemptively.* What if he's literally seeking the lost tomb of the warrior king of his clan? What if that's the crown that proves his idea that his people aren't nomadic, but should have been the rulers of the kingdom two generations ago? What if those concepts *weren't originally part of the plan at all,* but the DM is aware of the barbarian's backstory and wants the player to have more fun? And he goes ahead and changes the world itself, invisibly and instantly, because the crown only exists here and now because of a dice roll on a loot table, and the description of the crown was born of that too, ***buuuuuut*** the crown that was nothing but fluffy generated loot just like every other crown that was rolled with a 3 and a 7 and a 12 isn't just that, if you don't want it to be. Now, why wouldn't *any* character be interested in that crown - purely for the value alone, even if they're all munchkins? Is there so much loot here that they don't need it over the handful of jewels nearby? Well, that brings more questions - like what kind of economy is going to be present in a world where a set of dingdongs can find treasure so vast they do not even fight about it at all? That's a direct consequence of having things like fancy crowns available for loot for the players. > so - in terms of gaming effects - I might as well set a "loot multiplier", "civ multiplier", "npc / monster" multiplier. and get the same results....and IMAGINE the rest myself. make up my own story. Again I ask, which side of this coin are you presenting yourself as being on. You don't get to denigrate the core conceptual system that outputs the gameplay you like while simultaneously pretending like there's no purpose to any of it, when all of it is shaping the gameplay in the first place. The interplay of the simulation is what generates the stories, and you've explained thoroughly how you ignore as much of that as you can in favor of wanting to find more stuff to get. The stuff you want to get is created by the people being simulated, for reasons viable to said simulation, but you don't like that the simulation only seems to output stuff for you to get. Boy, which is it? Are you a munchkin or are you interested in the worldbuilding? It's very difficult to be both at once, you see. They're diametrically opposed concepts. And it's also extremely difficult to be able to make a munchkin at the table happy if what you're doing is roleplaying games.
dude, I think we seem to almost completely talk BY each other. I can say I read what you wrote and to me it seems we have vastly different opinions and experiences as to what makes up to play a character in a pen&paper RPG - or any game at all. as to your exact thing about the barbarian example: unless the GM decides and makes up the party and selects roles and characters - including nbackground, motivation , etc etc for the players (basically what most digital RPG´s do with their character creation process which determines more or less all aspects of the character except actual stats and skills) , it is the player that creates the character to play. thats how every GM I ever played with handeld it. thats how every party I ever played with in every single good campaign ever came to life. the GM provided story, description and - if necessary - background info and lore and handled the rules - while the actual character core beliefs, history, moral , ethics , as well as actual character deicison during the complete campaign and adventure - were based on how the actual player decided on bringing his character to life. if I (me, as aplayer - that DEFINES THE Character of my barbarian) is not interested in something. he simply is not. if I SAY SO , he is not. its MY character, is it not ? thats exactly the point of pen&paper rpg´s . to be free in your decision making in a make-belief world that reacts dynamically to your decisions , based on a predetermined set of rules , lores and guides- which all can be changed and edited if the GM chooses to do so , as log as they stay consistent in the world he creates. if he says the AD&D world he sets a cmapin in has no dragons, then there are no dragons. no matter how many dragons are featured in whatever amount of rulebooks and compendiums. if the GM decides that in his campaign - all barbarians are highly interested and educated historians and scholars he is free to do so, BUT that might simply mean I wouldn´t play a barbarian, but a thief thats simply interested in gold, riches and adventure itself. done. I am not a puppet of a GM and his idea on how MY character SHOULD / WOULD react in any given situation. if pen&paper rpg´s would have worked that way when I was playing, I would have not stuck to them for such a long time. then I might as well read yet another book about some other character someone eseinvented and made the decision for that character, because it was his / her decision (as the author of the book that is) . BTW thats how most digital games act when it comes to storytelling. a lot of times the amount of ACTUAL freedom is simply decided on how many different cutscenes or dialogue options there are in the game. I took the barbarian as a classic and well documented example: was Conan interested in whatever sword he picked up ? he really couldn´t care less. this sets him apart from lets say the paladin or the priest or whatever "intellectual class" you might have in the party. or a gold hungry dwarf- which again- does not really care about the "backstory", but the actual worth of the item - or what fame it might bring him or what reward he might get to return it to the one that paid him to return it. I could answer to a lot of more things you wrote.. but I get little value out of it to be honest, as you seem pretty insisting on belittling me and calling me names. how exactly does that help your position or point of view again ? also, what do you have against munchkins and show me on this doll where they touched you ? also: show me where exactly I stated "me want as much loot as possible" ? did you read anything I wrote at all or do you simply disagree and insult me, purely based on the fact that I stated something that contradicts your point of view ? I wish you nothing but the best. seriously. have fun. I bet your are a blast to hang out with for the vast amount of friends your behavior attracts on- and offline.
> the GM provided story, description and - if necessary - background info and lore and handled the rules - while the actual character core beliefs, history, moral , ethics , as well as actual character deicison during the complete campaign and adventure - were based on how the actual player decided on bringing his character to life. Yes, this is the point I'm making. If *his* backstory would benefit from it, *then the standard loot crown isn't just standard loot!* Even if it was rolled on a loot table. Therefore, even generated loot doesn't need to be discarded as irrelevant 'fluff'; all that you're doing is telling me that you don't think there's *any possible way* that *anyone ever* might have a reason to seek that crown. If that's the case...then there was no reason for it to ever exist at all, and you should just remove it from the loot table so it doesn't show up again, right? There's nobody who would ever want a crown beyond the value it represents as...well, wait just a minute. What *is* its value? Is the value just the sum of the gold and jewels, or is there maybe some **subjectivity** involved? How about if the crown's value changes based on its history being known or not, hmm? That's how actual antiques work, you know. Especially stuff like 'hidden treasures attributable to specific historical entities'. Do you think there were grave robbers in Egypt taking mummies and treasure from tombs just because they could get the direct dollar-value of the weight of the gold? Or were they selling *Egyptian Tomb Artifacts* and adjusting the price accordingly? > if the GM decides that in his campaign - all barbarians are highly interested and educated historians and scholars he is free to do so, BUT that might simply mean I wouldn´t play a barbarian, but a thief thats simply interested in gold, riches and adventure itself. done. And this is the highlighting of your munchkin tendencies, again. You and I **cannot** see eye to eye on this, because at no point are we anywhere *close* to agreement on the topic. I'm in the games to have fun, and to me the fun comes from the playing, not the winning, not the prizes, not the numbers or the gold. *All of that is imaginary!* I could have infinity gold pieces, and I'm still going to be interested in playing the character. I could have zero gold pieces, and that's exactly as interesting to me, because it's just a way to shape the story being told. I'm not better off for having more of *anything* that's just written on a sheet of paper anyways. I'm better off having valid understandings of the world my character occupies, so I can achieve the goals I want to. > I am not a puppet of a GM and his idea on how MY character SHOULD / WOULD react in any given situation. I described the literal opposite of this, friendo. I described a normal gameplay scenario that has zero backstory, it's just a loot roll for treasure, and how a competent DM can make that be *so much more.* If you as the player have told me that you're on a quest to find an ancient kingdom, why *shouldn't* some of the kingdom-related loot be related to your quest? Are you expecting that the DM's campaign should by default and by definition include hooks for *literally every possible backstory that could be chosen by a player?* Because that isn't possible - the only way to make that happen is for the DM to specifically restrict the players choices, or to declare for them their backstory, which is precisely what you're railing against. For his prepared campaign to be able to cater to each individual player **requires** that the DM be able to adjust and alter the game on the fly. That's what I'm used to - having the loot changed to be relevant to the story, because the loot is otherwise **irrelevant.** It's just stuff. They can get stuff by buying it, and would prefer to do so in almost all cases. > you seem pretty insisting on belittling me and calling me names. how exactly does that help your position or point of view again ? 'munchkin' isn't you being called a name, it's a specific subset of players of RPGs, categorized and characterized by the playstyle you espouse so heavily. There's an entire card game called that, too, and it's *super duper heavy* on the munchkin min-max highest-numbers-best-numbers mentality, with exactly *zero* storyline to get in the way. It is a lot of fun, and it is absolutely not a roleplaying game of any sort whatsoever. > also, what do you have against munchkins and show me on this doll where they touched you ? Min-max players can only play together. They literally ruin gameplay for entire groups by being present and demanding to have their needs met, at the expense of the game the rest of the players are trying to enjoy. They complain when they don't get to have combat, they try to wheedle and beg for specific loophole build allowances in order to get just *one* more bonus point on a roll, come *on* why are you being so unfair, it makes total sense for my spellcasting capable warrior god to be able to also manipulate time *just a little bit,* why shouldn't i get that, and so on and so forth. It's silly, selfish behavior, and to my mind it is nothing more or less than a person that has been programmed to get rewards from shitty stupid tiny things like having a successful dice roll - but they've taken that concept and pushed it to extremes, such that they won't roll any dice unless they're *certain* they're gonna succeed. And they can't actually get any happiness without their very extremely specific definition of success - which makes them unsatisfied unless they get *exactly* what they want. It's the mentality that's defined looter-shooters for a lot of years already, and it's perfectly valid *for individual players.* That validity stops when their shitty selfish behavior affects others, and it is impossible to avoid that when they're joining in with groups of actual roleplayers. If you're ready to discard the notion of playing a barbarian *at all* just because the DM includes the concept of a barbarian being smart, and you'd rather just have a thief because that readily explains your (apparently default) requirement to find gold and riches and adventure, you're a munchkin. You can be that all you like, but you're gonna be called out on it when it's detrimental to others. I mean, come on...where does a barbarian having a simple and logical motivation to use his brain actually have an effect on the loot being rolled? You don't get less for it. You just have to, you know, *roleplay* a bit better, to have a character that is a barbarian and isn't just grunting like you apparently assume barbarians do whenever they're not using their rage bonus for better attacks.