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> This is not a dig on guides, its instead an appreciation for what the game taught me - the idea that losing could be fun. I disagree. Losing a game because

> This is not a dig on guides, its instead an appreciation for what the game taught me - the idea that losing could be fun. I disagree. Losing a game because of undocumented behavior or bugs has never been fun for me. Sid Meier - "A game is a series of interesting choices."

TuringTest 5y ago
Different strokes for different folks. Though not every game benefits from having to discover its basic rules by trial and error, there is some appeal to it exploring the unknown when the game is designed around it. Scape rooms are a game genre, after all.
mnw21cam 5y ago
Typically in DF, you lose because of a hilarious sequence of events that overwhelms your fortress' capacity to cope, not through undocumented behaviour and bugs.
- Filligree 5y ago
  > Typically in DF, you lose because of a hilarious sequence of events that overwhelms your fortress' capacity to cope, not through undocumented behaviour and bugs. You also never really lose. It's always possible to reclaim an old fortress -- losing doesn't cause existence failure, it causes a nonfunctional fortress. If you abandon/retire instead of having everyone die, you may be able to find it in Adventure mode and meet some of your dwarves. Or you can kill the forgotten beast that destroyed it, then retire the adventurer and send in a reclamation party...
db48x 5y ago
That’s not what “losing is fun” really means. Winning and losing in Dwarf Fortress is not like most other games. In most games, having everyone in your fortress die would be a loss, it wouldn’t be much fun, and you would have to start the level over. In Dwarf Fortress, by contrast, this can be counted as a win as long as there was a good story to it, or if you learned something new about the game. I’ll give you an example of a fort that I lost. I had dug down into one of the cavern layers beneath the world and set up shop. I started walling off a good–sized area down there, making it safe from fliers and swimmers. I built walls across a lake that would keep them out but still let in fresh water, and hopefully cave fish. At the edge of the lake next to a courtyard surrounded by stalagmites I built a simple little well house to supply the fortress should the booze ever run out. Naturally, all this activity attracted attention, and forgotten beasts attacked the fort. I had a rag–tag militia with whatever weapons I happened to have on hand and some armor go out and attack the first one just outside the walls, not far from the well house. They fought hard, and managed to take down the beast with only a few casualties, who were soon carried back to the hospital. I then directed my butcher to carve up the carcass; this thing was huge and it would likely feed the entire fort for six months or more. He duly dragged the carcass past the well house, across the courtyard, into the stairwell, and up a few levels to the main body of the fortress. All was going well a few months later when I noticed the blood. There was blood in the hallways, and blood in the courtyard, and blood in the well house. There were dwarves running around cleaning the blood, but it never seemed to go away for long. You would expect there to be some blood after the fight, and there was. But even dragging the carcass of a huge forgotten beast wouldn’t leave a trail of blood down a hallway; in Dwarf Fortress a dead creature can no longer bleed. Even the meat you get from it doesn’t have blood in it any more. So where was it all coming from? I inspected some bloody areas, and found that it was dwarf blood. Indeed, Dwarf Fortress keeps track of this because the details matter; for every contaminant that comes from a creature it knows _which_ creature it came from. It wasn’t just dwarf blood, it was blood from specific dwarves! I started looking through my dwarves to find the ones that were bleeding. All of them had rotten feet. The skin, fat, and muscle layers of their feet were all rotting. Everywhere they walked they were leaving bloody footprints and smears of blood. They would go to the well house and try to clean themselves. They would try to clean the floors, and get it on themselves again, and on the clean floors. Any dwarf that got that blood on their skin was getting some kind of infection (or “syndrome” as the game calls them) that caused their flesh to rot. Animals and pets had gotten it too. Cats follow their dwarves around, so they were stepping in the same pools of blood and had rotten flesh on their paws. And that’s when I remembered, the description of the forgotten beast said that it had “poisoned blood”. Forgotten beasts are randomly generated. The game picks a body plan from all the creatures it knows about, randomly changes details such as material, size, and color, adds interesting features, and then sets them loose in the world to harass your fortresses. Poisoned blood is an especially interesting feature because the poison itself is randomized. The game generates a suite of randomized syndromes (on top of the non–randomized syndromes used by various venomous creatures, etc), then uses those syndromes in various nasty ways throughout the game. This syndrome apparently caused flesh to rot. When the forgotten beast bled from its wounds during the fight, it got on the ground and on the armor of the fighters. From there it spread, until it was everywhere. I might have forgotten that beast’s randomly–generated name, but I’ll never forget the story. Thus I won, even though the fortress was lost. In fact, the fun doesn’t necessarily stop when you lose a fortress, because you can always start another fortress in the same world. Since it’s the same world, it has the same threats. In particular, it has the same syndromes. There’s a good chance that any fortress in that world would see this kind of threat again, even if that one forgotten beast was dead. Hopefully I would have been able to deal with it better.
- ZetaZero 5y ago
  > I’ll give you an example of a fort that I lost.... Sure, this is a great example of "Losing is Fun". Here is my example. Note this is 10+ years ago, so some of the details are hazy, and this was my first or second fortress. I carve out an area for an underground farm, then designate the area for Farming. Something about "needing irrigated farmland" first, but the game doesn't tell me how I can issue an irrigation command. Apparently, after checking the Wiki, the dwarfs won't irrigate squares they stand in. I need to carve out a room above my farm, designate a pond, task dwarfs to fill the pond, then channel water down to my farm. By the time I figured all this out, my dwarfs all starved. Losing several times because I didn't read the wiki was not fun. I never got the chance to build a fort, where an "interesting story" had a chance to take place. To get to that point, I felt I would have to put some 30+ hours into the game just to learn the basic undocumented steps needed to build a functioning fort. There was too much "work" to get to the potential fun parts. The steep learning curve, the terribly inconsistent UI, and Toady's lack of desire to do anything to improve these issues, pushed me to spend my fun time elsewhere. I plan on looking at the Steam release to see if anything has changed.
  - db48x 5y ago
    True, though you might have tried putting a farm on dirt, like a normal person ;) My point is that this is not what people mean when they say that “losing is fun”. They mean that the traditional losing scenarios are not a loss in Dwarf Fortress. This doesn’t mean that the author has spent time smoothing out all of the interactions so that they are obvious or tutorialized the way a AAA game would be.
    - ZetaZero 5y ago
      > True, though you might have tried putting a farm on dirt, like a normal person ;) I was a dwarf, not a normal person ;>
      - db48x 5y ago
        Hah, ok. Fair enough. You were supposed to put your farm on _underground_ dirt, like a normal dwarf.
intended 5y ago
Well Sid Meier is right, and the term interesting is broader than just simply knowing the state of the board at all times. DF proved it for me. Essentially there’s a meta pattern in human behavior to avoid uncertainty. This robs you of the fun that can be had by embracing chance and risk. Plus the “bug” I encountered was spawning near a magma vent and a yellow “i” chucking a fire ball at my stockpile. If DF fulfills it’s goals, I doubt anyone can predict all the interactions.
munk-a 5y ago
I strongly agree with this - before I realized that plump helmets are an absolute necessity for an early fortress (you have a lot more freedom now - but for a while not immediately building a plump helmet farm would be a really bad decision) I really struggled to have fun - once you've got a general idea of which decisions aren't totally stupid then you reach the interesting choices. I think that with a proper tutorial there'd be a much more immediately interesting set of choices. I would say though that Civilization has always had obviously bad choices that aren't clear to new players - most games take this approach where the player is given a lot of obvious choices to feel good about rejecting. The difference is that in most games these choices are rather artificially created and clearly signaled because they're obviously wrong (Sorry - are you sure you wanted to create that Barbarian with 18 WIS and CHA and 3 STR and CON?) - in dwarf fortress it's harder to detect those terrible choices due to having pretty much every option open to you as soon as you start a new game (except a few gated features like Law and Nobility). That all said - maybe you could make a fortress work where you set up a pottery commune and don't actually set up any agriculture - just try and rely entirely on trade to feed your dwarves.

TuringTest 5y ago

Different strokes for different folks. Though not every game benefits from having to discover its basic rules by trial and error, there is some appeal to it exploring the unknown when the game is designed around it. Scape rooms are a game genre, after all.

mnw21cam 5y ago

Typically in DF, you lose because of a hilarious sequence of events that overwhelms your fortress' capacity to cope, not through undocumented behaviour and bugs.

Filligree 5y ago
> Typically in DF, you lose because of a hilarious sequence of events that overwhelms your fortress' capacity to cope, not through undocumented behaviour and bugs. You also never really lose. It's always possible to reclaim an old fortress -- losing doesn't cause existence failure, it causes a nonfunctional fortress. If you abandon/retire instead of having everyone die, you may be able to find it in Adventure mode and meet some of your dwarves. Or you can kill the forgotten beast that destroyed it, then retire the adventurer and send in a reclamation party...

db48x 5y ago

That’s not what “losing is fun” really means. Winning and losing in Dwarf Fortress is not like most other games. In most games, having everyone in your fortress die would be a loss, it wouldn’t be much fun, and you would have to start the level over. In Dwarf Fortress, by contrast, this can be counted as a win as long as there was a good story to it, or if you learned something new about the game. I’ll give you an example of a fort that I lost. I had dug down into one of the cavern layers beneath the world and set up shop. I started walling off a good–sized area down there, making it safe from fliers and swimmers. I built walls across a lake that would keep them out but still let in fresh water, and hopefully cave fish. At the edge of the lake next to a courtyard surrounded by stalagmites I built a simple little well house to supply the fortress should the booze ever run out. Naturally, all this activity attracted attention, and forgotten beasts attacked the fort. I had a rag–tag militia with whatever weapons I happened to have on hand and some armor go out and attack the first one just outside the walls, not far from the well house. They fought hard, and managed to take down the beast with only a few casualties, who were soon carried back to the hospital. I then directed my butcher to carve up the carcass; this thing was huge and it would likely feed the entire fort for six months or more. He duly dragged the carcass past the well house, across the courtyard, into the stairwell, and up a few levels to the main body of the fortress. All was going well a few months later when I noticed the blood. There was blood in the hallways, and blood in the courtyard, and blood in the well house. There were dwarves running around cleaning the blood, but it never seemed to go away for long. You would expect there to be some blood after the fight, and there was. But even dragging the carcass of a huge forgotten beast wouldn’t leave a trail of blood down a hallway; in Dwarf Fortress a dead creature can no longer bleed. Even the meat you get from it doesn’t have blood in it any more. So where was it all coming from? I inspected some bloody areas, and found that it was dwarf blood. Indeed, Dwarf Fortress keeps track of this because the details matter; for every contaminant that comes from a creature it knows _which_ creature it came from. It wasn’t just dwarf blood, it was blood from specific dwarves! I started looking through my dwarves to find the ones that were bleeding. All of them had rotten feet. The skin, fat, and muscle layers of their feet were all rotting. Everywhere they walked they were leaving bloody footprints and smears of blood. They would go to the well house and try to clean themselves. They would try to clean the floors, and get it on themselves again, and on the clean floors. Any dwarf that got that blood on their skin was getting some kind of infection (or “syndrome” as the game calls them) that caused their flesh to rot. Animals and pets had gotten it too. Cats follow their dwarves around, so they were stepping in the same pools of blood and had rotten flesh on their paws. And that’s when I remembered, the description of the forgotten beast said that it had “poisoned blood”. Forgotten beasts are randomly generated. The game picks a body plan from all the creatures it knows about, randomly changes details such as material, size, and color, adds interesting features, and then sets them loose in the world to harass your fortresses. Poisoned blood is an especially interesting feature because the poison itself is randomized. The game generates a suite of randomized syndromes (on top of the non–randomized syndromes used by various venomous creatures, etc), then uses those syndromes in various nasty ways throughout the game. This syndrome apparently caused flesh to rot. When the forgotten beast bled from its wounds during the fight, it got on the ground and on the armor of the fighters. From there it spread, until it was everywhere. I might have forgotten that beast’s randomly–generated name, but I’ll never forget the story. Thus I won, even though the fortress was lost. In fact, the fun doesn’t necessarily stop when you lose a fortress, because you can always start another fortress in the same world. Since it’s the same world, it has the same threats. In particular, it has the same syndromes. There’s a good chance that any fortress in that world would see this kind of threat again, even if that one forgotten beast was dead. Hopefully I would have been able to deal with it better.

ZetaZero 5y ago
> I’ll give you an example of a fort that I lost.... Sure, this is a great example of "Losing is Fun". Here is my example. Note this is 10+ years ago, so some of the details are hazy, and this was my first or second fortress. I carve out an area for an underground farm, then designate the area for Farming. Something about "needing irrigated farmland" first, but the game doesn't tell me how I can issue an irrigation command. Apparently, after checking the Wiki, the dwarfs won't irrigate squares they stand in. I need to carve out a room above my farm, designate a pond, task dwarfs to fill the pond, then channel water down to my farm. By the time I figured all this out, my dwarfs all starved. Losing several times because I didn't read the wiki was not fun. I never got the chance to build a fort, where an "interesting story" had a chance to take place. To get to that point, I felt I would have to put some 30+ hours into the game just to learn the basic undocumented steps needed to build a functioning fort. There was too much "work" to get to the potential fun parts. The steep learning curve, the terribly inconsistent UI, and Toady's lack of desire to do anything to improve these issues, pushed me to spend my fun time elsewhere. I plan on looking at the Steam release to see if anything has changed.
- db48x 5y ago
  True, though you might have tried putting a farm on dirt, like a normal person ;) My point is that this is not what people mean when they say that “losing is fun”. They mean that the traditional losing scenarios are not a loss in Dwarf Fortress. This doesn’t mean that the author has spent time smoothing out all of the interactions so that they are obvious or tutorialized the way a AAA game would be.
  - ZetaZero 5y ago
    > True, though you might have tried putting a farm on dirt, like a normal person ;) I was a dwarf, not a normal person ;>
    - db48x 5y ago
      Hah, ok. Fair enough. You were supposed to put your farm on _underground_ dirt, like a normal dwarf.

intended 5y ago

Well Sid Meier is right, and the term interesting is broader than just simply knowing the state of the board at all times. DF proved it for me. Essentially there’s a meta pattern in human behavior to avoid uncertainty. This robs you of the fun that can be had by embracing chance and risk. Plus the “bug” I encountered was spawning near a magma vent and a yellow “i” chucking a fire ball at my stockpile. If DF fulfills it’s goals, I doubt anyone can predict all the interactions.

munk-a 5y ago

I strongly agree with this - before I realized that plump helmets are an absolute necessity for an early fortress (you have a lot more freedom now - but for a while not immediately building a plump helmet farm would be a really bad decision) I really struggled to have fun - once you've got a general idea of which decisions aren't totally stupid then you reach the interesting choices. I think that with a proper tutorial there'd be a much more immediately interesting set of choices. I would say though that Civilization has always had obviously bad choices that aren't clear to new players - most games take this approach where the player is given a lot of obvious choices to feel good about rejecting. The difference is that in most games these choices are rather artificially created and clearly signaled because they're obviously wrong (Sorry - are you sure you wanted to create that Barbarian with 18 WIS and CHA and 3 STR and CON?) - in dwarf fortress it's harder to detect those terrible choices due to having pretty much every option open to you as soon as you start a new game (except a few gated features like Law and Nobility). That all said - maybe you could make a fortress work where you set up a pottery commune and don't actually set up any agriculture - just try and rely entirely on trade to feed your dwarves.