Every time I take some time for sleep, a new page shows up...
The inventor of the flute was Apollo. (gods bestowing technology should be a possibility)
Technically, you're getting the myth mixed up. Euterpe, the muse of joyful songs and lyric poetry, invented the flute. Apollo invented the lyre (a forerunner to the harp).
It was mentioned earlier in the thread that the game is already wed to the idea of heroes. From the perspective of creating interesting narratives it makes sense, and applies to inventors also, but does clash with the drive for realism. I'm not sure which is preferable or even if we need to have one or the other.
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I really like this and it could even act as the spawning ground for great individual inventors.
Keep in mind that the Ancient Greek Gods were liars, cheats, and thieves when they weren't rapists and murderers. The humans of myth routinely proved themselves better at the supposed specialties of the gods, more noble, more just (and when HUMANS are showing you up in the morality department...) and the Gods just buried this by murdering the humans and claiming themselves the best, and if you doubt them, ask the hideous mutated beast you turned the last person to prove something otherwise into. (The myth of Arachne, especially, stands out. It was claimed -by others, not her- that she was a better weaver than Athena, so when Athena came down to prove Arachne sucked, Arachne went and wove a tapestry that wasn't just far better than Athena's, but where it was a tapestry of all the crimes Athena and the other Gods had committed, and that all their "achievements" came about through cheating and stealing, and how they were routine rapists. Athena responded by turning Arachne into a spider, burning the tapestry, and declaring herself a winner and that the contest proved how wonderful and just she was, and that she'd murder anyone who mentioned the word "cheating" again.) The gods never invented anything, of course, they just got the credit.
Or, to use a more modern example, the steam engine was originally invented by a completely unknown boy. The original steam engine was derived as an improvement on the steam pump used for pumping water out of coal mines.
The boiler built up pressure, at which point, someone had to pull a lever to actually use that pressure to operate the pump, then pull the lever again to start building pressure back up. This was a stupid, simple job, so they just hired some children to do the job. Then, one of the boys hired to do this job figured out that you could just tie a string from the pressure gauge to the lever, and make the machine automatically pull the lever for you when the pressure was high enough.
As a reward, he was fired, since he had just created a labor-saving machine that eliminated his own position. The mine owner went on to become even more rich because of how much he was saving on labor costs.
Did I mention that the Luddites had a point? Labor-saving devices were often despised as job-killers. It's only in societies that have such an insatiable demand for products that you will still retain full employment, no matter how much you reduce required labor with labor-saving devices that you can have technological advancement.
People knew how to build a printing press for millennia before the actual printing press - the clay tablets of Mesopotamia could be rolled out by presses from as far back as the dawn of civilization. It's just that they needed to employ all the scribes.
EDIT: But back to the point I was trying to make with the earlier comments...
An "invention" that is actually created by unnamed lay-workers can just be claimed by the temple priests as the work of their god or divine inspiration (especially if one of their workers produced it), while a king or wealthy entrepreneur can just pull a Thomas Edison, and steal all Tesla's inventions and claim them as his own.
Good then Cacame is a red herring and can thusly be ignored as not having enough elven psychology to hold up. Since a Goblin, who is VASTLY different to a Dwarf, would act the same way. In fact the game barely takes biology into account and an intelligent gorilla would act the same as every other race.
So there... Cacame is completely irrelevant and unimportant even in context.
It is something that needs to improve and not something Cacame needs to pull the game down.
Talk about being a little too eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater...
The problems with the game currently are that, yes, the game can't tell the difference between any can-learn creature under your control.
Need I remind you, however, that this is the Suggestions Forum, and that the point is to talk about ways the game can be improved?
We don't have money in the fortresses right now, does this mean we can never again have an economy, even when it's clear that Toady wants it to be part of the game?
What those statements prove are less an intent by Toady or a proof of why we shouldn't talk about what multi-racial cities mean, and more about what
your opinions on the topic of multi-racial cultures are.
In fact, this clashes with what you're trying to say next:
It doesn't clash at all in my oppinion. As I said Dwarf fortress is a game that still has that mythology and epic storytelling but it handles it realistically.
So yes you do get a few grand heros but you also have traditional people.
You can have both without really hurting the game. Both the slow progressive technology with a few leaps... and the people who seem to be far ahead of their times. People who are destined for greatness and flawed people in important possitions because of undue perception of supperiority. You can have the near unstoppable demigod of a hero and you can have him being defeated by traditional army tactics.
Where the game often has flaws is when it forgets this balance. When its mythological aspects take over its realistic aspects and vise versa. Instead they should feel like two layers that are blended together and work with one another.
OK, if we're talking about this game as a creator of narratives, and we're talking about a Planet of the Hats mentality, where all the people of one race or culture all think EXACTLY alike, then there's one key thing you have to remember about
why those Planet of the Hats stories exist:
They exist to break down.
They exist to show the folly of those hats, and that sort of dogmatic behavior.
There isn't a single Planet of the Hats story that doesn't have either a My Species Doth Protest Too Much character rebelling from inside (Like 1984 or Brave New World's questioning alphas that are exiled) or else an outsider, a fish out of water that forces the people they come into contact with to question their dogma (Brave New World's Savage or Captain Kirk in
every one of the Planet of the Hats that named the trope).
That's not an accident: The only reason that a Planet of the Hats has any use in dramatic narrative is in testing how people react to it.
A Planet of the Hats inherently means that
everyone is the same. And that's completely anathema to character-driven storytelling, since any sort of character-driven narrative,
especially heroic narrative, has to involve distinct individuals who stand apart from their societies.
That's what Cacame was - a hero. It was a fan-created heroic myth, exactly of the mold that you're saying this game is supposed to produce, and you're rejecting him because of the exact thing that makes him heroic - being distinct and different from others of his kind.
The response to that shouldn't be, "This proves Cacame was irrelevant, now let's make sure he never happens again," it should be, "How can we make this happen more often, and how can we make the story more intricate, more complex, and more compelling a narrative."
Even in Threetoe's stories, the characters the narrative followed were the ones who went against their societies - the half-goblin, half-elf girl, and her goblin father who actually respected elven culture, and played by its rules. Nobody cares about the decadent elves in Root, it's only the "outlier" elf that still adheres to the traditions and the squirrel that was that elf's companion that were heroes.
We need to give the elves the mechanics by which they can rebel against their society, and rebel against the rebellion as they meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.
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Topic: Working through Medieval stasis (Read 32116 times)