Are all of these crazy stories genuine?

[Flickmann]

People say the main selling point of DF is the crazy, organic stories that the game generates. There are stories of dwarfs going crazy on murdering sprees, soldiers distinguishing themselves in battle and single-handedly taking down goblin hordes and of desperate dwarfs sacrificing themselves to save others from demonic monsters. Do all of these stories emerge organically from the gameplay or do they contain heavy embellishment from the imagination?

Boatmurdered and Hamlet of Tyranny for example - did all of this insane madness just happen for one reason or another?

[Kasa]

They get started kind of like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zmzg5b/i_present_you_unib_riftglaze_who_defended_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[Flickmann]

Man this thread descended into nerdrage fast. I think Rimworld is a decent colony management game but I was always puzzled at the "story generator" reputation it has. Most of the game consists of sitting around before the game randomly descends to send a savage in a loincloth to get eviscerated by your colonists, or turning a random squirrel rabid. Serious "lol so randumb xD" vibes. If DF is more of the same (but with less random dice rolling) maybe it's not for me, which is a shame.

[Ärlig, Häckriddare]

Messaggio originale di Flickmann:

Man this thread descended into nerdrage fast. I think Rimworld is a decent colony management game but I was always puzzled at the "story generator" reputation it has. Most of the game consists of sitting around before the game randomly descends to send a savage in a loincloth to get eviscerated by your colonists, or turning a random squirrel rabid. Serious "lol so randumb xD" vibes. If DF is more of the same (but with less random dice rolling) maybe it's not for me, which is a shame.

Well I’ve left I metric crap ton of examples, both in the micro and the macro, with little to no extrapolation on my brain’s part. If you like what you read, it’s probably not like Rimworld in this respect. (It’s not.) If not, it may not be what you’re looking for.

[Flickmann]

Appreciate it dude, I'll sift through and check out your posts.

[McFuzz]

Messaggio originale di Flickmann:

Appreciate it dude, I'll sift through and check out your posts.

Most posts asking if Dwarf Fortress is good, or genuine, are going to be divebombed by the Rimworld crowd who are furious the game even exists for whatever reason. Impossible to discern anything from either side once they show up.

[Ärlig, Häckriddare]

I can always scrounge up the links again when I get home, if necessary.

Edit: Still had one of them open on another tab.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/975370/discussions/0/3716063566027747367/

[Erei]

Yes, it's true. Obviously it's presented in a convenient way to read, while the game will only present you some guts, bloods and some raw combat log. But the story is true.
Whether it's a bug, a mistake, a RNG thing or a rather convoluted chain of events, lots of stuff happens in DF. You do have to make some effort to get invested, and some imagination to give flesh to what happened.

For example, recently I had a little kid I found fighting 3 ravens up a tree. I found her starving and thirsty, so I moved quickly and cut the tree. They brought her to the hospital. She was infected all over the place and eventually, died.
That was the event. As bland as can be. Some people will just see that and don't care. Many will wonder why she found herself up there to begin with (bug ?). But me, I was rooting for that little girl and hoping for her to recover. Lots of dwarves wandered in that hospital for no reasons (I think it's considered a meeting area and they come and go). So I thought "maybe everyone is rooting for her to ?".

See, little story there. Little drama in my little fort. You can take that event and keep it bland, or you can "play the game" and go alongside it.

[Mortis247]

Oh absolutely you'll get some great stories out the game;

I built a drop bridge over a drowning pit and dropped a Minotaur into it when it attacked my fortress, it survived the fall and i started dropping goblin invaders on it instead, ended up building a maze for it too

Got attacked by a cyclops and sent the only dwarf with (entirely mediocre) combat stats I had, expecting him to die gruesomely and start a new fort, he actually managed to kill it so he became the captain of the guard for life

Lost a fort to a siege because someone dropped a boulder on the door when they fled inside, had a squad of highly skilled axe dwarfs hold the tide at the doors until a squad of trolls and a goblin riding a giant cave crocodile finally broke them, watching the civilians getting hunted down in their home, immediately launched a new mostly military expedition to reclaim the fortress

Had something like 40 trained war hounds all stationed in the access tunnel detect a goblin, he had iron armour and they couldn't get through it, just pages and pages and pages of combat for the poor goblin getting slowly chewed to death

Watched a batman tribe take down a forgotten beast in the caverns, last man standing avenged his tribe

Captured a Roc and built a missile silo round it so i could unleash it during a siege, did so and watched aghast as it got absolutely butchered

Captured a cave dragon and managed to train it, training degraded to wild whilst it was in the middle of my dining room with predictable results

Had a doom spiral because a strange mood dwarf went berserk, killed a military dwarf, was executed, his wife went berserk and it ended with half the fort dead or berserk

Lost a fort I built by a river, didn't bother walling off the river side of the fort and it turns out undead invasions are a thing and they simply walked through the river

Theres the whole crime and espionage system that really lends itself to story telling i ended up with a couple of career criminals I had to keep an eye on

If you're not sure give the free version a go, you'll be pleasantly surprised

[Seabhac]

Why just this last game I racked up too many livestock in my pasture and it attracted a gang of named Giant Flies. Who then proceeded to carry off some unaware citizens who died slowly being eaten and with thoughts of their loved ones and the dining hall.

[Vivisectus]

My Major has a sock fetish. We must make socks regularly, and we are not allowed to get rid of old socks by selling them. My clothier got a mood, and created an artifact-level sock. It is it's own museum. A huge 50+ invasion force appeared, and demanded that we hand over the artifact sock. We refused, and fought the War of the Sock. We pulled our socks up and won. Now are are going to counter-raid the bastards and steal all their socks.

[Death Korps Commissar]

Messaggio originale di Flickmann:

People say the main selling point of DF is the crazy, organic stories that the game generates. There are stories of dwarfs going crazy on murdering sprees, soldiers distinguishing themselves in battle and single-handedly taking down goblin hordes and of desperate dwarfs sacrificing themselves to save others from demonic monsters. Do all of these stories emerge organically from the gameplay or do they contain heavy embellishment from the imagination?

Boatmurdered and Hamlet of Tyranny for example - did all of this insane madness just happen for one reason or another?

I'd say they are true for the most with some creative freedom taken in the writing.
in the classic version of the game years ago I had a real nice fortress going. Cant remember the details. Then, because of some miasma caused by a rotting corpse one of my axe dwarves went mad and starting making mince meat of his fellow dwarves. By the time the guard got to him he had turned a sizeable part of the population into bite sized pieces. This kicked off a cascade of effects with dwarves going mad because of grief and going berserk. there were survivors but pretty much the entire fortress was one big tomb at that point.

and dont even get me started on sinister and harder surroundings ...

[Cheesehead]

The idea where you are not allowed to create a story in your head about what transpired in the game is simply ridiculous. The game doesn't need to create a wall of text for you to read that perfectly states the events with the skill of Shakespeare to constitute a story. Nor does it need to create cutscenes for you.

The game police are not waiting outside your house waiting to arrest you for embellishing your experience. You do, however, have to contend with the internet lawyers.

Using your imagination is often better that a lot of the god awful "stories" that are in some games. There are tons of talentless hacks these days writing trash that they think you should enjoy. Just look at Hollywood and Netflix in "modern" times for examples.

People try to make this same argument in Rimworld, and say it's not a story generator, either. Sorry, but I have had the strangest and neatest things happen in that game as well. Just because it wasn't specifically scripted as a story is totally irrelevant. It was a memorable moment to me. If it's not good enough for some people, well, too bad.

When I used to play Dungeons and Dragons a lot, we never used a board or miniatures of any sort. We played totally in "theater of the mind". Some people like the complicated hex maps and grids, but we didn't. I'm not against miniatures, but really, you don't need them. Some players, particularly new ones, didn't bother coming up with a backstory for their characters. Eventually, by their own imaginations, their character eventually came to life.

In fact, in most games I play, I imagine my own things to enjoy the game a bit better. Maybe this is because I am old school, and I don't need a team of writers to tell me something. If you play Dwarf Fortress and can not come up with ideas to help explain an event on your own, you are just a stick in the mud, and probably sit in the corner at parties. Maybe you don't know what fun is. Maybe you just forbid yourself from having fun. I dunno. You are also not required to like the game or play it at all.

[Best Dressed Silhouette]

As others have pointed out, the level of embellishment depends on the storyteller, but in my experience, the stories are true and just waiting to be interpreted.

A good example would be one of my first fortresses years ago. I had an extremely lazy dwarf - Inod. He did not like to work at all and would always be found asleep in closets with a mug of recently drained of ale. Unfortunately, I couldn't do anything about it because he was the boytoy of the expedition leader, and I wanted to keep her happy. So he got to just laze about doing nothing and profiting off of the work of the other dwarves. He also didn't have great social so most of the other dwarves were annoyed by him.

The fort had a single drawbridge, that I would pull up whenever anyone attacked so that I could fire down with crossbows from the safety of the mountain. There were several guard dogs chained around the perimeter to alert me to invaders. Unfortunately, when I was removing ramps to limit access to the fort, I'd missed a small pass that could allow a large army to reach my courtyard undetected, and since I was unaware of its existence there was no guard dog.

Now Inod had been sent outside to haul some logs, and he decided that it was a good chance to get away from the fort and fall asleep with his waterskin of ale for a bit, and as luck would have it he fell asleep right in front of the hidden path. When the largest goblin army we'd yet seen showed up sneakily, he was woken up and ran screaming back to the fort - giving the rest of the dwarves time to pull the lever and seal in the city. Inod died of several spears being thrown through his back. The dwarves built a statue to honor him in the entrance hall and his name entered the legends of the fort.

Nothing in the above is 'projected' onto the story. Inod the dwarf really was extremely lazy. He really was the lover of the expedition leader and his death would deeply affected her. He really was found sleeping in closets all the time. He really did fall asleep outside and prevent a goblin force from storming my city through a previously unknown pass. Everything I just told you was true and the result of the emergent properties of a complex system - you just needed to know how to read the logs and pay attention to the fortress.

Crucially, if you hadn't been paying attention, this would have just been the story of one dead dwarf and another goblin invasion. Dwarf fortress demands your attention in a way other games don't.

And granted, there is a certain level of survivorship bias. That is true. I remember the interesting stories and don't really linger on the bad or goofy. But no other game I've found has offered that level of depth, even those with a similar proc-gen feel like rimworld or minecraft. It's not for everyone, but that's why I play DF.

[Vivisectus]

yahbut all that is just pixels jumping in circles.

I mean the guy wasn't wrong, on a superficial level. He was also very wrong, on all the other levels.

[Multihog]

Messaggio originale di Best Dressed Silhouette:

Everything I just told you was true and the result of the emergent properties of a complex system - you just needed to know how to read the logs and pay attention to the fortress.

A bit hard when the game currently has no logs.