Play safe. You can ignore everything that goes on outside if you go underground but don't breach the caverns. Have a walled off trading area you can let traders

Play safe. You can ignore everything that goes on outside if you go underground but don't breach the caverns. Have a walled off trading area you can let traders and migrants into without them coming all the way into your fort. Grow simple plants and cook / brew them. You'll end up with a ton of food and drink and the time and safety to experiment from. In DF random things will happen (sieges, monsters, etc) but they don't cheat to get to you, with one glaring exception. If you have a path from your stuff (people or objects) to an enemy the enemy immediately knows it, scouting out the most-hidden paths instantly. To be locked down you need to have a raised drawbridge that actually blocks access. Turn on seasonal saves and replay when you lose, until you think you've lost in a cool and epic enough way that you'd rather remember it that way than restoring. But play out the fails for a while - often it's easier to recover than you'd think.