• they/them or anything else idc

I'm not a real robot, but I have a real face!

25, bi, genderless.



It's you. You're the storytelling engine. Dwarf fortress is just a videogame. If you only go by what the game gives you it'll be pretty dry, raw, chaotic and senseless.

Whenever I need to appoint a surgeon but I don't have any dwarves with relevant skills I look for a fish dissector first, despite those things having no mechanical relation. Several friends have told me they do the same or similar with butchers and animal dissectors and whatnot. I think it's an inherently funny and interesting concept for such dwarves to be appointed as surgeons because their jobs are the best suited to the task out of all available dwarves, but the game itself treats it almost the same as if they were farmers or miners or bards.

I think a lot of games that actually end up as storytelling engines are pretty light on story. Rimworld set out to be a storytelling engine, but in my opinion most the space in dwarf fortress where the player gets to be creative is crowded out in rimworld where the game tries to do a lot of it for them. Dwarf fortress provides a fantastic backdrop for you to build off of, but rimworld focuses much less on history and the wider world environment and more on actual procedural story events, and suffers for it.


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