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Role Playing Public Radio: This is Ross Payton for RPPR, and here with me is Tarn Adams the developer and programmer for Dwarf Fortress the Indie cult hit computer game.

0:00:12 RPPR: So Tarn, why don't we start off with your elevator pitch of Dwarf Fortress, introduce it to those who aren't familiar with it.

0:00:21 Tarn Adams: Ideally I'd like to say Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy world simulator, you know, kind of along the lines of other sim games you might be familiar with. But right now it's more of a Dwarf Fortress simulator, which is why it's got that native.

So basically you start a colony of dwarves, you start out with just seven of them, and you dig out a fortress in the ground, and I mean you kind of place workshops and so on. You might be reminded of a real time strategy game. But it's a bit different from that, they have jobs and overcome various standard fantasy adversity situations, and you're always destined to lose the game.

But the thing about this that makes is nice is that the whole entire world is saved. I mean I do have my eyes on this being a larger project with the entire world always being active. So your fortress will be saved in the world wherever you chose to place it. And you can come back with more dwarves later to try and revitalize it, or bring it back from nothing. Or you can come in with a more standard kind of RPG adventure, and see what's going on there, read old engravings that your dwarves made a hundred years ago, see if the Dragon is still living there, that kind of thing.

And I'm just focusing now on the actual world generation 'cus right when you start the game you go through this sort of world generation process where it starts from scratch, places some landscapes, and continents and so on and the seeds of a few civilizations here and there and some large standard fantasy monsters and so on and lets them do their thing for a thousand or so years. Then your involvement in the game begins with either your dwarf fortresses or your adventurers and we'd like to get you involved with more and more things as it goes, but as it stands the dwarf fortress component is the main part of the game.

0:03:01 RPPR: Right and even with just that component it's developed quite a following. I don't think I've seen any game with such a following over people who aren't even necessarily playing it but following other people playing it. For example the Saga of the fortress Boatmurdered which has become sort of a cult hit in of itself on the Internet. I've read people describing that they don't want to play the game so much as to run it and have them tell stories.

And yet at the same time you've also been very critical of narratives in video games today. What is the role of narrative in Dwarf Fortress and what's your critique of video game narratives?

0:03:53 TA: I'm certainly approaching it a little different than you'd often see in fantasy. To start with video games in general I haven't played a lot of games recently but, narrative wasn't sort of a fixed was always a down side mainly because your sort of investing your time the narrative is never quite like reading a book because you have to do parts over and over again, go back to old save points, see the same thing happen 20 times, and maybe not even have the ability to skip seeing it nineteen of those times, and it was just sort of a frustrating thing. But the main thing for us was we always wanted to write, and when I say we (I'll do that a lot) my brother's the other person working on this project. And when we started writing games, our main thing was just to write games we could play and if you're doing a game with a fixed plot it's just not that interesting to play as the designer because you know everything that's going to happen. You can't really surprise yourself that way. So we always kind of moved away from those things, but then again you've got things like strategy games out there and so on that don't really have necessarily any plot at all aside from maybe this is taking place in North Africa in World War 2 or something, and you have the entire narrative surrounding that to the extent that you know the history of the situation. But the types of stories that arise out of that would be these alternative history situations, who won this fight, what happened, what went wrong, that kind of thing.

Dwarf Fortress sort of thrives partially on the same thing, except you don't have the same kind of background. But, the idea was to kind of create that background randomly so that it's not something that would be easy to get burned out on at least when the project gets far enough along and right now we've just got this Human Dwarf Goblin Elf Kobold type thing that's been done a million times. But the fact that the back story is different every time, and with the next release there's going to be a lot of additions to that, to the history of the world, because I'm putting the world generation wars in. It gives you an interesting starting point and the main thing though now that doesn't matter so much right now the main thing is just that there's lots of little moving parts and one of the difference between computer games and other types of games is that you can track an awful lot of stuff and provided you don't have a lot of bugs it's all going to be internally consistent so you don't have to worry about forgetting something or having to cover for yourself later on when you're telling the story because it will just keep track of it for you.

So when you've got all of these things going on, when you're a player playing the game, you kind of focus on the things that you're interested, and there's an awful lot to do. You can see one of the favorite little dwarves that you've been working with, something will go terribly wrong, his cat will die or something, and he'll start going crazy and pick someone to beat up and that guy will go nuts and go pull a level or something he probably shouldn't have pulled, and bathe the entire lower level of the fortress and flood it from something you have for your sewer system or something like that. And those kind of things assuming that you're really invested in that then you'd have a story to tell and the things that you'd be watching about it are the things that you're interested in. As long as there's enough floating around for you to look at then it's a different kind of way of getting a narrative out of the game and then when you start again, assuming you aren't jaded on the whole process, then you can do it again, share what happens with your friends and so on, where as the whole thing of having a plot or a track that you need to walk down or a whole branching path that you need to explore that's really common in computer games, doesn't really come up. I mean there are a lot of people that like that kind of thing.

0:08:20 RPPR: Right, the sort of choose your own adventure method.

0:08:24 TA: Yeah, yeah, I mean it will have more/less branches and people will try and say it has more branches than it actually does sometimes. In the end, as the designer/developer here, it's really hard to write that sort of game then stick with it for a while. I mean you can kind of become invested in your world or whatever; a lot of people sort of like to build up a fixed world and add all kinds of interesting details. But, like I said we kind of wanted to play the game too. And so, I mean do get to mess around with that a little bit when I change the properties of the stock creatures that come with the game. You can modify anything almost, as to do with the creatures anyway. But I still have to ship some out, when I say ship I mean include in the little zip file that you can download from the website. But the Dwarves are a certain way, and Elves are a certain way, and Goblins are a certain way. And although the reasons that I make them different is not so much to liven up the universe as it is to introduce new mechanics to fiddle with, that can be used by other people, mixed and matched, that sort of thing. It's still fun to work with that; I've got my Goblins right now, for example, sort of have this Labyrinth the movie type of pathology, where they kidnap babies from other races then raise them. And it's led now in the world generation to some very strange scenarios where a Goblin would kidnap an Elf and then raise the Elf. But then the Elf would decide to become a Kidnapper themselves and kidnap another Elf or kidnap some Dwarves and then that Dwarf would lead an army and so on for the Goblins and all that kind of thing. And all that just came up; I didn't have to do anything once I got them doing the kidnapping everything else just happened automatically.

0:10:30 RPPR: Is that something you anticipated?

0:10:33 TA: Yeah, that was the reason I did it, I want some cool stuff to happen! No no, I don't anticipate everything certainly. But you can kind of tell what's going to happen, right? I mean the second you put in Goblins are going to kidnap and raise these babies, you know what's going to happen, you can tell they're going to be leading armies and being kidnappers and so on, but it's so funny to see it. And it's not something where I feel like you know, well I'm heading, when I fire up the game myself and look at the world generation, I don't feel like I'm heading to the kingdom of Agrotha for the thirty-seventh time to rescue the kidnapped prince or whatever I mean I'm seeing something interesting each time that's different. And the way that the pieces fit together you really start to kind of lose track and it gets really interesting to look at the files. It records almost everything that happens, certainly anything important, but even things like someone moving to a different house or something. So you can pick a character when you're looking at the legends and look at all the things that happened in their life, and go look at another one and kind of build up this narrative yourself. It's difficult as a computer game project to get the narrative produced by the game so you can just read it like a book. We're hoping to do more and more with that but it is a difficult process to have it pick out what's important and to focus on those characters and so on. And string on all the events together and then do all that in standard English without being repetitive.

It's a very difficult project but even having the players just able to see the information and reconstruct the narrative themselves it's sort of a tool for them to tell those stories. And everything you do in the game, at least our goal is, it does this to a good extent now but we'd like to do more so, get the events while you play recorded right along with the histories. That's already happening in a sort of half assed way right now. Then you can kind of weave your fortress, look at the history back before you were allowed to start playing, and just see this picture come into being.

0:13:05 RPPR: You mentioned several times that you developed this game to make it so you could play it yourself, and you mentioned you know make sure the character; as long as the player isn't jaded with it, as long as their still involved with the characters. What do you do in Dwarf Fortress to try and keep players interested in the game or involved with it? Are there any techniques or anything that you use to keep them involved with the game or the narrative?

0:13:34 TA: Well, so a new player coming in, if they download Dwarf Fortress for the first time, they've got a lot to look at. Now if they don't like the interface, 'cause right now, I mean, we should say pretty early off this is essentially a text game. I mean if you've played a Rogue Like game, it's like that. It's got these ASCII text based graphics and although it's got some support for 2D tiles and so on. But it's not like it's going to get an overhaul and change into 3D or anything like that. So that's what you've got and that cuts off a lot of players there. And also the fact that it's documented poorly and the interface is still a very slow work in progress, because I'm still working on the game itself it's hard to focus on everything.

Once a player gets through all that, then they've got a lot to look at and I'm not really worried about them burning out on it, at least no more than on any other game. I mean when I was younger, playing a lot of games, I'd burn out on them, I never lasted more than a few days on any game. You know, you just get tired of them. But, what I'm doing for people playing the game now is I'm just putting out new versions all the time. Uhm, not ALL the time, I mean it's been a couple, two or three, months since I've put one out because I'm working on a pretty large project right now. But in general, I'll always be putting out these new versions and that gives people more things to play with, even in their existing fortresses, I've been pretty good about save game compatibility.

And you just need to put in more stuff, more stuff, more stuff and that's more elements for people to see in their stories. And it's all really generic, so I none of the worlds that it randomly generates are going to be a masterpiece of fantasy, with all this really subtle symbolisms and stuff going on they're always going to be kind of this cheap Beastmaster kind of knock off Tolkien crap, right? But it's fine, because if you're into that kind of thing, you're not going to get jaded on the game for that reason, right? It's not like “Oh I'm just sick and tired of dwarves” or whatever. It's not something that happens very often. I mean people do get tired of that crap, but they'll come back or they'll go on and find something else to do.

In general you just need to put in a lot of effort in putting in details into the game and so on. And people get tired of games, I'm surprised some people have been with the game since I've put it out on August 8th, and they're still there, August 8th 2006, and they're still there. I've never stuck with a game like that, so I'm not the first person you'd want to ask about how to stop people from getting jaded or whatever, because it's certainly beyond me to stay interested in anything that long. So it's cool for those people in that kind of limited group that can actually get into the game, something's going right. So I'll just keep doing things the way I'm doing it I guess.

0:16:47 RPPR: Well again if you look at Boatmurdered you can see how each player decided to take on their own projects, and they sort of interpreted like, I mean you call it a very generic sort of reporting of events in the game, but people interpreted them to turn this Saga of these sociopathic Dwarves setting the countryside on fire with lava channels and things like that. And I think there's a lot of interest in, you know, reinterpreting the works for your own amusement. But, one thing that always struck me that was real interesting was the emotional state of each character.

How do you model the dwarves? Did you just sort of make a sort of basic algorithm or A.I. for it? Or did you look at specific psychological personality profiling or anything like that?

0:17:28 TA: More, and more. As it started it was just really basic. You've got a Dwarf and you can set their jobs, what they do, and they'll go off and try and do those things. That's the very beginning before I released it, and I'm like “OK, I'm happy if they're actually working and not walking around in circles or jumping off cliffs or anything” right? So, if you want to create a character you don't just want them to be another unit in a war game or whatever you want to give them some more information. And so we gave them names, and it recorded their thoughts. Now the thoughts are when they see things they like, so we needed to give them likes and dislikes, have relationships with other characters and so on. It records all these things, their pets, and the types of animals they would keep as a pet, or at least the one they like the most. And, once you've got all that information, whether or not the dwarf is happy or sad, or that kind of thing, we don't really have a lot of emotional states right now, just sort of a linear spectrum from 0 to a very high number if they're really ecstatic. We'd like to do more with that basically because you have them in their thoughts they can see another dwarf with more stuff than they have and they can become jealous especially if that dwarf is in a sort of lower social station, meaning that the players kind of allowed them to have more things or given them a bigger room when the other dwarf things they shouldn't have it or so on. And you could say you're modeling jealousy at that point, but it's kind of weak, I mean it's certainly more than you see in a lot of other places, but it's still if that just makes their happiness number go down by 20 or something and they start pitching a fit or whatever. It's not a specific fit though, they aren't going after that particular dwarf and doing spiteful things to them or something, which is where we'd like to start pointing that stuff to get the specific emotions and having short term and long term relationships with people, emotional state that can flare up but still be different in the long term. There's lots of things that could be done, but it's a start. It's like every other system in the game you kind of work on it in stages and add things to it. But recently I've started looking at more things for instance for their personalities. Before a Dwarf meets other dwarves or things happen, now they've got a personality which is one of these partially implemented things I went with a, I don't remember the names of these things really well because I just find them on Wikipedia then look up supporting articles basically. So I think it's the Neo Pi-R. It's a 30 facet personality model, they're grouped into five, five.. I guess the Big Five or something, things your sort of neurotic traits, like how paranoid you are or how angry you get or how much you can't control yourself, that kind of thing. And how open you are to new experiences, and how empathetic you are. And there's five categories there and each one has say six, I don't remember the exact set up, I know there are thirty total. But six different little traits like how cheerful you are or how artistic, that kind of thing. And those are the ones I'm using for now. There's some weaknesses, you kind of run into the weaknesses of the system pretty quickly when you already have the world in place. Certain things, certain facets don't exist that you'd like to have and so on. But I've got those and I've just been going back through the game and making dwarves start to change their decisions based on their personalities, so now they won't throw tantrums so much if they're supposed to be a calm Dwarf they'll handle the situation; they'll be able to more grief in their life anyway. But if they're really susceptible to it then they can become depressed, rather than throwing tantrums, and eventually just stop or whatever and jump into a chasm or something. Or, if they're really unable to control their anger then as their happiness goes down they'll start wrecking buildings and starting fist fights and throwing items and so on. And a dwarf that doesn't like to keep their situation organized wont clean up their room as often and so on. There's just little things put in like that. And as long as you don't start trying to hammer things into, you know like making all the dwarves suddenly, I don't know what a good example is. I mean something totally extreme would be like getting rid of pregnancy in female dwarves or something and have them jump out of the rock walls or something. I mean people would be unhappy with that. And if you made all the dwarves devoutly religious, and you had to build alters, or something; The dwarves have beliefs now, I recently added, but they're not strident about them, they don't do anything with them. If it were only the more feverishly devout dwarves doing those kind of things, so then that's good, but just having alters for everybody would be kind of bad. As long as you keep kind of everything open, and just add more details, but not sort of pigeon hole the experience for anybody, then people can continue building their stories. Continue to imagine the mechanics that don't exist, while making use of the mechanics that do exist. This is sort of how things like Boatmurdered and so on work, I mean a lot of the things that were described in that story Boatmurdered were game mechanics and did do exactly what they say. But there are other things in the story where they kind of ... about Boatmurdered was that the story, I mean there were a lot of things that came from the game itself, a lot of the mechanics and so on. But then there a lot of things where they embellished themselves, right? If they get into a dwarf's head and start doing dialog and all that kind of stuff they were doing, that's all made up, right? But as long as it isn't at odds with what I've set up for them then I think it works out better. But if I made all of the dwarves a certain way, or did something like that to them where they wouldn't have that freedom of narrative. And I mean it's already true to some extent, right? Because the dwarves all live in mountains, if they want to write a story that isn't about that, then they'd have to have their dwarves live outside, which kind of changes the game a little bit. But you just kind of go with people, so I don't anticipate ever hamstringing anyone like that. But it's just something to be careful of. Because sometimes when you get into your sort of stock universe ideas, you're set properties of the creatures and so on. Like I've been doing a bit, for instance with the goblins when I was talking about that kidnapping thing, they've always been doing that, but now it's really a more ingrained part of world generation. If that wasn't someones notion of a goblin, thats going to affect their ability not just to get into the game but to tell stories, and so on. And fortunately they can just go in and mod that out, there's just a thing in the goblin definition that says they do that kind of stuff and you can delete that line. But you don't want to force people to mod the game to get into it or whatever. In the end I'd like to move away from the stock universes more and have randomly generated creatures and more randomly generated items and situations and so on. You can go so far with that before it starts to look like gray goop or whatever, but I'd like to start moving in that direction, it's something I've always been saying. But anyway I'm rambling at this point so.

0:25:33 RPPR: That's fine, you're bringing up these randomly generated creatures in games. You've said recently that the people making Spore, the video game, have been playing Dwarf Fortress. and it's sort of an interesting thing.

0:25:45 TA: Who said that? That was Sims 3, those guys are playing it.

0:25:50 RPPR: Yeah, okay it was the Sims 3. But still it wouldn't surprise me if the Spore people were not at least aware of Dwarf Fortress. Certainly these game designers are keeping up with your game, it seems like. So what do you think the future of narrative or the future of storytelling in games is going to be like? Is it going to be more... Do you think it's leaning towards this direction of randomly or procedurally generated worlds or storytelling, like the Sims, like your game, and Spore?

0:26:38 TA: Theres always going to be a place for these RPGs, right? A big place for them, any kind of role playing game with a story, you know Bioshock, that kind of thing. People play those games and I think random content, because.. I mean theres a lot of reasons why this sort of procedurally generated stuff is springing up, a lot of them are just financial. And if in Spore you can get people to pay to create your content for you, I mean I guess that's not a bad situation right? (Laughing) I can't say I'm totally for that but if people want to pay to do it thats cool. And it's not like I'm not benefiting myself from moders and so on so it's the same kind of thing I guess.

But theres just more room for it, I guess, is the thing, and if people who were getting kind of jaded, like myself I don't play games anymore really I mean theres just not a lot that I like, if theres more of a place for that kind of thing, rather theres more of an opportunity for that kind of thing just be processors have gotten better and so on. And people who need their graphics fix at the same time can still get procedurally generated content now, at least thats what we're going to see with Spore I imagine. It's not so much I think that fixed plot narratives and so on are dying in games or something like that, that's just not the case. But theres going to be more and more interesting things coming out, I think. And I'm just glad to be a small part of that.

0:28:12 RPPR: Any predictions of particular types of procedurally generated content that, we haven't seen yet, that you think is going to happen in the next few years.

0:28:24 TA: A few years, maybe not, it seems like it's going to be dry. It's been dry, this year. Short term you always get into that thing where we're going to be having flying cars in five years, or whatever it is, 's silly. In the future it seems there's a lot of people working on procedurally generated storylines and characters, because it would be nice, right? Because it does increase the replay value and it decreases your need to hire certain, you know, (chuckling) writers and so on, I guess. Although they'd still have a lot of work just to get those characters to say things reasonably, and so on. But people have been working on that, there are a lot of projects that I've heard about that are making quite a bit of progress with creating actors, characters, non-player characters, in the world. Giving them their motivations and their personalities, and so on. Setting the stage for them, but then the story after that kind of writes itself.

0:29:20 RPPR: Sounds like a table top RPG, almost.

0:29:25 TA: Yeah, it's like that. A lot of people don't get into table top RPGs or can't play them anymore, and so on. There are ways to handle that, or whatever, and one of them is just (chuckle) to remove the other humans from the equation, and try to turn them into little computer people, that's more or less how I operate. I'm making a single player game, but there are a lot of multiplayer aspects to how people play Dwarf Fortress, such as continuing each others fortresses, and so on.

But in the end it's a single player game, and so you're confronted then, when you're writing a single player game, with making a character that you'd like it to be something that can kind of live on it's own, if you don't want to go have a fixed narrative. But even with something like an MMO or something, one of those Massive Multiplayer Online games, if the Non-Player Characters there could react a little bit better, and some times you need them if you don't have a high enough player population for example, right? Then having those characters react to whats going on around them, rather than following a script, you know, would be beneficial. And it's also one those things that's just fun to work on as a project, trying to overcome those kinds of obstacles and I know theres quite a few people working on that sort of thing.

And seeing something, I don't know, like The Sims, or something, getting merged with a Fantasy universe, or a Sci-Fi universe, or something, with more of a directed plot, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Having the kind of autonomous characters thrust into a situation where theres sort of more than a peaceful town going on around them, I mean, you can expect to see that right? (chuckling) Well you're going to see it with the stuff that I'm doing. But I expect that other places as well.

0:30:00 - 1:00:00

0:31:50 RPPR: Right, is this something in the future for Dwarf Fortress? Do you think that you're, at some point in the future, going to add this sort of 'randomly generated narratives' or quests or something like that?

0:32:00 TA: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean if you have a really low bar, that you could trip over, you know, hurt your ankle, I'm there already. (laugh) But, uh, if you want to do things that are more interesting, I'm heading there, it's just going to take a while. For instance, you have right now the randomly placed human towns everywhere, and if you're an adventurer and you go there, they'll ask you to deal with local situations. And these are all... local situations, things that they're threatened by, local minotaur, or something, is causing trouble. They're not actually causing trouble now, they're just there. But you know, you've got to expect that kind of penchant to kill monsters that haven't done anything, to you at all, from a human, right? But that sort of thing can be expanded upon. Now with the historical stuff that I've got, they can look back; do they have any history with these things? Are they currently fighting a group next to them? They might ask you to go raid an nearby town, that's coming up in the release after this one. And as they develop more of this personal history, and so on, they'll have more interesting things for you to do.

At some point you now are at “Now is this the same as 'which-way' games, where they've got four different ways to go, and you're just kind of throwing a little bit of randomness into the mix, which kind of decreases the value, in a sense, because you're doing the same things but it's not with a character that's been built over time, that you're interested in.” It's kind of how it feels now, but it's getting better. And at some point what I'm hoping for is that slowly one by one, Dwarf Fortress is able to subsume the worst plots you've seen in the Fantasy games. There's just a horrible “go kill the big monster” quest, or “go fetch this item” and stuff. That kind of stuff just, without a lot of backstory. Those things are already being gobbled up. And then, as you have more and more backstory we'll be able to match that as well. And hopefully for the people that play the game, it's hard to go back sometimes to the really horrible stuff. Same kind of thing happened with the combat system. It's hard for some people to go back to hit points now, because we've done away with that entirely. Added all kinds of stuff with wounds, and paralysis, and vomiting, all that kind of thing. Being stunned, crawling on ground, getting your finger chopped off, and all that stuff. And it's going to be the same thing with the plots, I mean I'm just going to keep snatching low hanging fruit until the game can generate something like a cheap fantasy game.

So there's always going to be a place for fixed RPGs, because people can be very creative. They can come up with something that's very immersive, although most of the time I'd just rather read a book. Because I don't have to play the same thing like seven times. So there's going to be a thing, where people will kinda, to make a fixed RPG I think, this all sort of vague, but. To make a fixed plot RPG people are just going to have to work harder. And they already do, you don't see a lot of things with really simple simple simple simple simple quests anymore. And stuff like that, you see quite a bit, but not so much. And people will just have to write at a higher standard and make games at a higher standard, not just because they're competing with a similar product. But because the procedural stuff is starting to match them. And I predict that's going to happen. It already is to some extent.

0:35:54 RPPR: Interesting. Of course then again, you can see popular games like Grand Theft Auto 4, which has had a record number of sales, I think like 500 million in its first week [liar! >.>]. With this sort of beginning, it has it's own randomly generated content where you're walking along this street and you don't know what sort of cars or people are going to be by. But it's mostly sort of a fixed narrative where you have limited choices you know, do you save this guy or do you kill him. And then later on, if you saved him, he can help you out himself. And things like that, but that's sort of an older style of game design philosophy, where it's sort of branching choices but they all converge at the same point, because obviously they can't procedurally generate cutscenes or dialog.

0:37:00 TA: Well I think they could if they tried.

0:37:05 RPPR Well, you can only have the voice actors say so much. But in Dwarf Fortress it's obvious that one of the things about it is its complexity. And not just the dwarves themselves, but you know, smelting ore to get metals and things like that. So what is your philosophy of game design in Dwarf Fortress, in terms of (one of the things I've wondered about is) at what point do you say “Okay this is too much, this is too complex. Let's cut it back. Lets simplify it.”?

0:37:37 TA: Well, yeah, so fortunately we don't run into that too much. Yeah, so there are certain thing; a lot of it is knowing ahead of time what's too much to bite off. Time travel for example, let's look at time travel. That's really hard, I mean there's the “I've got ten thousand people walking around, or whatever, they're not doing much right now. But certainly going back in time, I mean it's the thing that makes a lot of time travel theories sound silly, it's like everyone thinks there's a hard disk where every state of the universe has been saved, and you can just kind of go back. and just because you have memories, or something, you think every state of the universe has been saved and there is no reason to think that. And that's the kind of thing that'd be very difficult to do Time Travel in Dwarf Fortress because you'd have to rewind everything and go back to something, and it'd take hundreds and hundreds of gigs (gigabytes) to save that kind of information. I mean you could get away with little things, and try and kind of randomly set some stuff up but, it'd be a difficult project. That's the kind of thing we don't even think about, that's not going to happen.

But looking at geology or something, that's a part of the game the game that's obviously a bit overdone compared to some other parts of the game. At least at some level you've got the right type of stone, occurring in the right type of layer, or someone could have metamorphic rock or sedimentary rock and it'll have the right kinds of stuff in it. And there's a hundred something types of stone in the game, and so it's kinda crazy. I just kind of get in these moods, right? I'm like, okay let's work on geology, and so I work on it, I kind of set a vague time limit for myself, get as much done as I can and then move on to something else. And, at this point, sometimes I do go a little too far in one direction or another, like you can dye clothing right now specific colors, and so on. But you can't do some very basic stuff like send out a patrol to to look at, or assault a nearby town or something. Which, in the fantasy setting, is a much more basic activity than dying your clothes, or tanning a hide or something. So theres the focuses where I get kind of myopic and focus in on something for a while. But all in all, the basic idea would be to pick something that hasn't received a lot of attention, work on it for a while, and kind of bring the whole level of the game up and try and be comprehensive about it. You're never going to run into a real problem with sort of outdoing, you know, a modern computer, whatever, unless you just do a bad job with your optimizations, and so on. And you know, of course, I have some problems in that regard, when the game gets slow, and so on. That I'm going to work at, at some point. But, there's far more that you can add to a game like this, before you have to start worrying about, you know, bumping up into any walls, so it's more about rather than hitting some kind of technical restriction, it's more about trying to be comprehensive about it. And you know, sort of devote your attention to areas in equal measure. All though I've hardly could be said to have done that.

0:41:09 RPPR: People's computers being overwhelmed by Dwarf Fortress because of cats.

0:41:13 TA: You've heard of what?

0:41:15 RPPR: People's computers being overwhelmed in Dwarf Fortress because of the overpopulations, especially cats and other pets. The catsplosions, things like that.

0:41:25 TA: heh heh heh heh heh.

0:41:26 RPPR: Yeah, of course that's sort of an unintentional side effect of pets not needing to eat. And so they just keep breeding and breeding and breeding, till they're out of control.

0:41:36 TA: So as far as cats go... so yeah there's defiantly problems with optimization. Especially when you get up around 100 dwarves or something, and then you've got 50-60 cats going around, and all sorts of different pets, and so on. There are a number of problems there. Now when you say “an unintentional side effect of cats not eating”, the pets actually used to eat. And there were problems there too, because they'd eat you out of your fortresses. And so having them eat too much is a problem. So I took it out for the time being. And so you know you're going to get this overpopulation problem, but it's just a matter of balancing things out. Having the herbivores just be able to graze on grass for instance, they can't do that now. That would help a bit, although, of course, if they have a lot of grass, then it's not really going to help the population problem. But then if you could feed your cats, they could eat vermin although they'd run out after a time, because they'd eat out most of the vermin on the map. Dogs are another example, if wanted to feed them meat, or something; if you just had to feed them less, or something like that. I mean there are lots of ways to handle this. There's been a bit of discussion about this on the forums on my website (http://www.bay12games.com/) and uh, you know like anything it's just an ongoing issue.

0:43:00 RPPR: Yeah, heh heh, uhm. Of course the obvious solution would be to add a Spay or Neuter option to the butcher shops, or to the kennels I guess.

0:43:10 TA: Yeah, that came up as well. I think the consensus was that spaying was too advanced a technology, actually going in and doing some kind of operation like that. but just doing the castration would be fair game and castration is probably going into the game. Castration of your livestock and so on. Being able to do that. Uhm, I mean, it's something that you.. (nervous chuckle) I mean I guess it makes some people feel uncomfortable if you've got an animal being dragged off to the butcher shop to be denadded (what the hell?!), or whatever. But the uh, the worst part will be the bugs, where it messes up an item ID and then a Dwarf drags off another Dwarf, or something. but we'll weather that, we'll weather the storm there, eventually with better livestock management. :

0:44:33 RPPR: Alright, but what else did you, uh.. You know you mentioned earlier the wounds, the hit locations and things like that, which you've said you took from the Cyberpunk table top game. What else did you carry over from tabletop RPGs?

0:44:52 TA: So the idea here, the cyberpunk was largely inspirational for the wounds system. We've kind of had, we were playing D&D before we were playing cyberpunk, so with D&D and I think a lot of people experienced this at least, I don't know what the latest editions do, but I know we were up to, we started on first then went to second, I don't know the exact numbers or whatever. But theres these hit points, right? So you get frustrated, right? You're fighting these things, and hacking the crap out of them, you're kind of relying on your DM to say someones arm got chopped off. But you can't really chop his arm off unless he's dead, or something, because there weren't really a lot of rules in place, unless you make them yourself. And so cyberpunk was pretty refreshing we kind of wanted these things; we'd written a few little tiny little baby BASIC games, because we've been programming forever. And these really baby kind of games where someones arm would get blown off or something. But cyberpunk kind of had it; it was in line with how we were thinking, definitely reinforced a lot of that. Because it was easy to roll up a character really fast, and they could get killed in one hit all the time, there was none of this “hit points get higher and higher” type of thing. and easy for them to get messed up, put in the hospital really fast, with no way to stop it. And then you can roll up another character. So this kind of meat grinder effect, that was also how we played a lot of our Roguelike games, these early sort of randomized text games. It's the same kind of thing where you'd run a character, they'd get wiped out, you get a scorelist. This is the kind of thing that came from our, sort of this synergy between these Roll Playing Games, and the Roguelike games we were playing, is this persistence of a record of what you've done, that you have in a roll playing game because you've still got your sheets, and you can talk about your characters and stuff. But with the computer games it's a little more difficult. So you have a record of what you've done, so it doesn't matter if you lose it. And this is kind of an important thing for us, why we have so many things that are records about the game that you're playing. Because in a fixed-plot game, for example, you just kind of race off and do this plot and it doesn't matter if it records if you won or not, you just watch the little ten-second video saying everything is cool or whatever. And that's fine, but if the game is more like a strategy game, or something, then you want to have something that says that you were there, or whatever. and that's kind of far afield from the original topic.

0:47:52 RPPR: Heh, no that's actually very interesting.

0:47:53 TA: (random babbling for 10 seconds)

0:48:02 TA: The wound system and the pacing that we got from that, because it's kind of funny, when we were playing D&D, we basically approached it like a computer game. I mean I'm not sure where this fits in the theory of roll playing game, because it wasn't about a competition or anything like that. But we played it sort of like these early SSI games, or something, you'd go into a room and kill some monsters, sort of a dungeon crawl or whatever. And move on and eventually finish the plot or whatever. So it all kind of flows together. but the ... uh... (random babbling) Well I guess the train of thought was derailed a bit there. I'm kind of losing my track now.

0:48:40 RPPR: Right, that's sort of the old school of gaming is the “Kick the doors down, play it as a competition.” It's actually still very popular, the tactical challenge of conquering your foes and also recording your victories and defeats. The persistence, people telling stories of their [characters].

0:49:10 TA: Well just with the tactical thing, it's like, we didn't really care about “high tactics” or anything, or uh, it was almost like a grind. It's kind of funny, you know you get these things in front of you we didn't really think much about. But ah, either competing with each other, or really overcoming.. I mean it's almost meditative, how you kind of get through these things. This is the difference, for us, the way we played D&D and the way we played Cyberpunk. With D&D it was sort of this thing where, we didn't have a fixed DM, this is my brother and I and some random friends, depending on where we were living at the time. And we'd kind of just set up an adventure, I mean those things would mostly be for comedic effect or something, like where you ended up, or whatever. But mostly you're just sort of grinding against these monsters, and you knew you were always going to win. There were pretty much no characters die; we didn't kill peoples characters, it was just a pain in the ass to kill someones character. It's all your friends at the table, or whatever, and if someones gonna get knocked out, at the time we were young enough we didn't have a strategy for dealing with that. And when you get older you can deal with that in all kinds of ways. But, we played cyberpunk completely differently though, I guess it was because it was so much easier to roll up a character, it just took a few minutes to generate a character. And so we'd just ah.. peoples characters would just die at random. And they'd just kind of get a new one that would be weaved into the storyline. And so it was a different way of playing that didn't really relate to how we were playing; we played D&D more like we'd play a game other people wrote, and we played Cyberpunk more like a game that we wanted to write, and that we eventually took a stab at writing. But we essentially played D&D like the old role playing games, even the console role playing games, like dragon warrior or whatever it's called. Just kind of going through the motions, more or less. And yeah, it was pretty much always like that.

0:50:58 RPPR: All right, uhm heh heh. Are there any particular stories from your tabletop games that you still remember of “Oh my character killed a dragon this way” or any other anecdotes that you still remember?

0:51:17 TA: Well, heh heh heh, the only ones that stuck with me are the ones that were horrible, right? Because uh, I mean we didn't really.. heh.. we were young, right? We were young, and so we were entranced with the foul things that you could do. And bending the rules and so on. I mean we'd go through these fighting, and stuff like that, but it didn't really matter, we rarely finished a game of D&D. But there would things like I think my brother brought out this white dragon once that no one really had a chance of beating. It was just way better than us. And so he allowed us to use one of those stoneshaping spells to turn the ah mountain side a giant butt and then stone-to-flesh and it turned into giant fleshy butt, and then used fireball to light a fart at the dragon. That's the kind of level we were operating at as children, and that's something that I remember. Now there's plenty of other things, we're standard adventurers right? But those don't stick with you quite the same way, I don't know why.. but ah, that's one of my precious memories? I guess I just shared it with you. So ah yeah.. I mean the other stuff just amounts to getting shot in the head, and that's cyberpunk, you have memories of that. I had a character named shooter I remember, got shot in the head. And uh... Yeah. That's right, it's pretty high brow, you gotta watch out.

0:52:56 RPPR: Yeah there's ah, actually one role playing game I've played a lot called “Call of Cthulhu” which is a horror game. And characters, like in Cyberpunk, die very frequently. All though instead of being shot in their head, they're usually eaten by Cthulhu or some other Monster From Beyond Time and Space. So my fondest stories are of characters dying horrible deaths. So I that's sort of a tradition of gaming, the weird and memorable deaths and other exploits, rather than the victories. But since those early days of gaming, you're innocent days of first edition D&D, games have sort of advanced. This game design theory, like The Big Model [1] with gaming narrativists and simulationists [transcribers note: Where the hell did he pull those words from?]. And then of course, 4th edition D&D is launching in about a month with a very large online component, where people can play on a virtual tabletop. So what are you're impressions of these later developments in tabletop games? Especially when you compare them to video games.

0:53:58 TA: Yeah, so I've only become kind of familiarized with this stuff recently, because someone would mention Dwarf Fortress on a blog and the blog would also have a lot of stuff to say about tabletop gaming, and so on. And it seems there's really a awful lot going on, because when I was a kid you'd kind of know about D&D, and then you'd bump into whatever you kind of bump into at your local hobby shop. And I imagine it's a different game everywhere, for us it was cyberpunk. And you had the ones you're interested in. And I mean I guess people can probably find them easier now that theres an internet, and so on. Which we didn't really have a connection with, when we were growing up. But it just seems like there's a crazy amount different things going on. And as far as how it relates to video games, I'm not.. I mean, some of the things you mentioned about the theories, and so on, I mean I guess there's some applicability there, and now that you've got these online things... It doesn't relate to anything that I'm doing so particularly or just video games in general, because it seems like it's kind of a, I don't know, I wouldn't want to say it's something like Second Life or something, but just a place where people can get together and kind of have their avatars in the grid, and the monsters, and they can move the pieces around, and so on. I mean it all sounds very cool to me, especially because it gets people that are unable to play anymore, or you know, back playing with each other, and so on. But I mean it's kind of hard to draw a parallel, although I guess it could happen. I mean I never really got into Neverwinter Nights, I guess it had something like that, where it kind of drew the ah, you could have a DM or something like that and kind of play it kind of half-way between a regular D&D campaign and more of a traditional computer game. But uhm, yeah idon.. Idunno, huh?

0:55:58 RPPR: Heh heh, alright fair enough. Uhm.. I've also went on the SomethingAwful forums to ask, one of your larger fan bases, to see if they had any questions. They had a couple of questions about Dwarf Fortress. Uhm. Lets see here.

0:56:20 RPPR: Do you'll ever be able to finish the game? Or are you going to have a couple people help work out on the game?

0:56:26 TA: As far as finishing the game I've no idea, really, that that will really happen. But as far as getting to the version 1.0 or whatever, I've put up my goals for that. And I plan to do that all on my own. I mean I'm not going to involve other programmers, that kind of thing. I just feel the project will slip out of my grasp, if there were other people really involved with writing it. Then I wouldn't know what some of the code was somewhere. And so if someone dipped into the project and then dipped out, I'd just be left kinda more clueless with it. I mean I guess managing large teams is a kind of skill people develop and they're able to pay for that as well. But for me this is the way I do things, programming on my own, designing with my brother, taking input from people, and plugging along till I get to where I'm going. I imagine it'll be some years till the version 1 goals are complete, and if I'm still around, meaning people are still supporting what I'm doing through the donations, and so on, then I'll just continue and do the additional goals I had, and keep working my weekend games, and so on, eventually get some other games out. and everything is just going fine without actually involving other people in the technical stuff.

0:58:15 RPPR: All right, uhm, that was user Brannick [transcriber note: I apologize to the person who's name I just mangled] by the way. This next question is from crackbaby (heh heh): what are you doing to backup the source code? What if you lose all the source code in a crash? Distribute cool-aid to all the fans and yourself?

0:58:30 TA: Nah, see suicide is not the answer. But, I'd be distraught if I lost everything so I back it up. I don't have it online anywhere, I'm kind of paranoid about that whole thing having some kind of online send-your-source-code-off-to-somewhere repository sourceforgy type thing or whatever. For some reason, I don't know if it's just 'cus I'm an old fogy or something, but it just doesn't feel secure to me. So I burn CDs. I just burn CDs. I've got CDs scattered all over everywhere, not just in my apartment, but other places as well theres CDs.

And so if my apartment were burglarized and they stole the laptop I'd be a day back. If my apartment burned down I'd probably be three or four days back. And, you know, if we had some kind of North Korean situation where we lost the state of Washington, well that'd be the last of my worries I guess, where the source was. But, I think I'm all right.

I had a problem I think, before I released [Dwarf Fortress], maybe a year before I released it, where I got set two weeks back. That's when I tightened things up a little bit. I don't forget to back up now, I always back up and I always leave stuff off-site and so on. So I'm not that worried about it, I don't think I need to go do anything online or anything. And I don't know anything about RAID or Hard Drives and all that kind of stuff; I just burn CDs, I just burn lots of CDs. I mean theres all kinds of things. I think I've got an External Hard Drive sitting on the floor over here somebody gave me for Christmas or something, I haven't used that yet, I could probably use that too. But yeah, nothing fancy.

1:00:00 - 1:30:00

1:00:06 RPPR: All right. This is from Bootkerchif [transcriber note: I apologize profusely for the mangling] who wants to know how much ramen you eat.

1:00:15 TA: Well it's one of those things right? You have a certain amount of support, and it's okay, but it'd feel more okay if you didn't eat. Much. But I'm not on ramen, I eat rice, rice.. and I buy flour, and make bread. And uh, occasionally I'll splurge on some of my favorite little things or whatever. But mostly it's beans, canned beans. Can of tomatoes, flour, and I make pizza type stuff with that. Not with cheese but just with garlic and tomatoes and spices and stuff. And more rice, and uh water. It's pretty exciting, real exciting.

1:00:58 RPPR: Heh, uhm it's interesting, I've been reading the forums and a lot of the discussion is based on the fans worrying about you. Because “oh is he getting enough donations to get by?”, “Should we donate more?” and things like that, it's like you have a very concerned fanbase, about your well being, and I think that's sort of unique in the game design world.

1:01:27 TA: Yeah, I don't think I'm complaining too much, I guess, but I can understand why they worry about that. I mean, but all the months, I mean, ever since the z-coordinate release I've made enough money to support myself every month, so it's been pretty good. I still don't have health insurance, but a part of that is like I mean you have a good month, then you have a bad month, then you have a good month then you have a bad month, I mean you really want to drop a extra I don't know how many hundreds of dollars it would be every month on some kind of gamble with your own health, or whatever. I mean the only health crisis I've had so far I've been able to pay for out of my pocket with having the total cost be less than the cost of health insurance. But it's a fools game to keep playing it that way. But at the same time I don't feel like I can afford it. I don't know. But yeah, well I guess if I rant on like that they'll just be more concerned. But it's all right eveything's okay. They should still donate though, donations are cool.

1:02:42 RPPR: Right, heh of course. Uhm, Hamlin [transcribers note: Sorry if I screwed it up!] is asking what you thing of things like Regional Prospector [transcribers note: should link to the appropriate wiki pages.] , and Ricks Tools. And if those might be rolled into the game someday. I guess about Third-party mods and things like that. So.. uhm what are your thoughts on those tools.

1:02:59 TA: Yeaah... yeah, that one's like... It depends, it really really really depends, on the tool itself. There's kind of tools that are meant to replace the gross shortcomings of the interface, and those kinds of things , yeah over time I'll get to that. I mean I'm not going to roll in anyones code, or even look at them. I've never actually looked at one of these tools. But the kind of things that they want, and have asked for in the suggestions forum that people have made tools for, some of those things like setting their professions an easier way and so on. All of that stuff eventually will come in.

Then there's sort of the Debug type tools or cheating I guess you could call it, whatever that means, tools. Like Regional Prospector, for example, where people want to have more information than I would give them in the sort of stock setting situation. But I don't really mind them having it or whatever. Those kinds of things, as options, those kinds of things can creep in. But adding optional settings is kind of lower priority than stuff thats affects everybody. At the same time there are a few things like that, you know, you can really see the want. People want to have those and the fewer utilities there are, occasionally I'm not sure how many bug reports come out of people using a utility incorrectly, because I don't really know all of whats out there. But even if thats infrequent that's something that's kind of a small issue.

Then there are things like people making an entire, sort of, 3D visualizer overhead things, and that's when I start kind of feeling just leery about it. Just like “well can I lose control of my project this way” or something, because someones created a whole new interface for it and, you know, if it becomes popular an I going to become beholden to that person, even though it's my game. That kind of thing kind of worries the hell out of me sometimes. But uh, so far that hasn't been a problem. But when you have a game like where it's kind of, I've been working on it for a long time, it hasn't been released with a life substantially longer than a regular commercial game, because it's only been up for a year and something. But if it's still here after five years, that kind of thing will only tend to grow, and so sticking with the same project like that that's kind of a real risk to tying up your livelihood in one project, is that things like that will continue to happen. And it can only become more of an issue. But I'm not that worried about it, I go through fazes of worry on it, but right now everything's okay.

1:05:31 RPPR: Alright, that's good. Lastly theres a question from Brown Moses asking if you'd like to see player fortresses that can be left to run themselves while the player makes another fortress. And how that could be integrated into the game world.

1:05:47 TA: Yeah, yeah. Now if we're talking about just sort of the retirement of a fortress or the temporary retirement of a fortress while you go and do other things. That's come up quite a few times, and depending on how well you want to do it, it's anywhere from a sort of a trivial to an impossible problem. So I didn't want to just do it the trivial way where you like “Yes I abandoned the fortress and it just kind of sits there in a stasis” or whatever, with the people kind of, the Dwarves just kind of siting there and you can go visit them, even though that kind of IS what happens now because your Dwarves don't migrate after you abandoned, but actually leaving it as a settlement and your Dwarves just kind of sit there. I was kind of hoping to get through some of the Caravan arc [transcriber note: link to bay12games DF caravan stuff.] stuff where I'm going to start tracking resources throughout the world. And you know maybe a little bit more but really it's the Caravan arc's that's one of the main missing things. And then we can start thinking about that, I mean I'm certainly not against it because there's this kind of thing where there were originally the game was all about you know you play your game you just totally flame out lose, and then continue on but I mean I can see how that's not something people are always going to want to do. Especially if they've in a sense won, they're in their region, their local map, they've found everything that's there to find, they repel outside invasions without difficulty, and they're done. And they just want to keep that as some kind of giant dwarven capital and then start a new outpost. There's nothing wrong with that. The impetus to do that might decrease in the future now, after three or four releases on the army arc, because they'll be able to send out armies and affect the world. And when they get these large fortresses that's when they'll be in the best position to do that and so it'll increase the play value of a fortress like that. But still the same issue will be lurking there. And I'm for that, not for the issue lurking there but for allowing people to retire their fortresses. When it starts getting more tricky is when someone's like “Yeah I want to stop (sp?) this fortress for four game months while I'm working on this other project and then go back to the other fortress.” What should have happened to your fortress in between? You can sort of gloss over this by holding everyone in stasis, but that's the kind of thing I said I didn't want to do, I'd rather try and come up with a solution. It opens up a few tricky issues.

1:08:42 RPPR: So Tarn, what is next for Dwarf Fortress? What is coming soon and what are your upcoming plans for it? Is there anything you'd like to announce for Dwarf Fortress?

1:09:00 TA: Well right now we wanted to.. the main goal, which has actually been the main goal for more than a year is to get armies in the game, doing interesting things. Right now if you're running Dwarf Fortress you can be attacked by goblins or something. But with that whole world generation, placing goblin towers throughout the world, and human towns and elves have their places and Dwarves have their places, and so on. None of that really comes into play right now, in adventure mode you can visit those places but it's very static. So there are lots of ways to make a world come alive and become more dynamic, with places being removed and founded and so on. But a natural way to do that fits the genre is to have people killing each other, right? So I've been working on armies for a while, I've actually announced what I've been calling the army arc of development about what, January of last year? And I thought, “well okay I have to do the seamless maps and the z-axis stuff first” so I did all that and now I'm back to the army arc. And started ??? with world generation so that instead of just running forward a thousand years where nothing really happens they spread out, but they don't fight each other when they bump into each other, and nothing really happens when they bump into each other. Now though, it's really been cut lose, they'll fight with each other and abduct each other's children, steal each other's stuff to the extent that stuff is defined right now, it really isn't. Meaning there's no resources or trade or anything like that. But they'll raze each other's cities and build a Assyrian style corpse mounds and pillars, stretch their skin out over the walls and all that kind of stuff that you read when you're doing ancient history. And they'll enslave each other and the slaves will grow up in their new civilization and half to deal with that. It's all very sort of skeletal right now, there's not a lot. I'm fleshing it out, but just having that frame work in place is going to help a lot. And the stage after that we're going to make this stuff happen in the regular game so it'll take all that stuff that its been doing and allow it to continue on. Which is kind of the whole point so that you can interact with armies and if you get invaded in fortress mode you'll actually be invaded by an actual army which has something to do with the world rather than something that was generated for you. So that will cap in in three stages the first stage will just be getting that to happen at all, having the armies move around and having some interaction with the adventurer making adventure mode a bit more fun. Then I'll do the part where armies can actually attack you in Dwarf mode. And then finally, the thing that a lot of people have probably been looking forward to, is having you be able to send out armies from your fortress and cause trouble all over the world. At least as far as you can manage to stretch your tendrils. It's going to take a while, this first release is taking quite a bit longer than I thought. It's already been three or four months? I've gotten over most of the big hurdles now. But that's the direction things are going to go, just trying to make the world more dynamic through violence, and then it'll be more dynamic through trade and so on later. I mean I've got a caravan arc, diplomacy arc and so on, but this is kind of the natural one to start on.

1:12:33 RPPR: War comes first..

1:12:34 TA: That's right.

1:12:35 RPPR: Alright, very interesting, I look forward to seeing the sagas of armies marching on each other in the near future. Do you have a time frame on when the next release is going to be uploaded or released to the public?

1:12:54 TA: Yeah, I'm not sure. I've just gotten over the worst of it. I'd be hoping to get it out next month finally. But uh, every time I promise something it doesn't come true... You know? So I hope it comes out in June. You'd really expect that to happen.

1:13:11 RPPR: Cross your fingers.

1:13:13 TA: Yeah, 'cause this is not like the Z-Axis release took nine months to do. But that was a huge change. Adding a third coordinate to the game, and all kinds of other stuff that came under that release. And this one you're not really going to notice (HaaHAHHA) that much, I mean you'll have the world generation, but then when you start playing the actual game it'll be like “It's the same as usual..” 'cause those subsequent releases haven't happened yet where I actually make the stuff matter. So, uh.. I mean a lot of people, hopefully they're not getting too impatient with me but it has to go this way, because you have to set up the frame work first.

1:13:47 RPPR: Right, I've read a lot of your donation stories that are posted on the SA[something awful] forums. I really liked the Fish Dwarf saga today.

1:13:54 TA: Yeah, the guy.. yeah ...... We had this miscommunication were he, ah, 'cuz he sent two donations seven days apart. And so I was like “Okay I'll send you a cliffhanger and conclusion” right? And he's like “Well I don't really want the story to end but uh, okay.” And I was like “No I don't really want to end it, I just meant a cliffhanger and a conclusion to that part of the story.” and he's like “Well you know if you have to end the story, you have to end the story.” So now apparently I'm ending fish Dwarf. Ending fish Dwarf with a story that's going to be an epic conclusion to the fish Dwarf right now, he's entombed.

1:14:24 RPPR: Yeah in the underwater cavern.

1:14:26 TA: The underwater part, yeah yeah. I mean my brother writes most of those things. It's kind of unfortunate sometimes because uh, people post them on Something Awful and I will usually attribute either to my brother or myself but often times the attributions aren't included. I'm writing fish Dwarf and most of the other ones being posted were written by him, I think. I mean we have different writing styles, I tend to be a bit more dense and mess around with the words, and he has this sort of powerful more cinematic way of writing things. But yeah, I'm looking forward to finishing fish Dwarf, I have a bunch of other ones to continue first though. I tend to fall behind because I'm always doing the programming stuff I've got six or seven continuations to write, six or seven crayon art things to draw. My brothers' all caught up, he does the new ones, and they're all caught up. But I'm a month behind, I'm always a month behind, but uh 'cause everyone sent me money on my birthday.

1:15:33 RPPR: Nice that's a nice little gift.

1:15:34 TA: Yeah yeah, no it's a good birthday present. I got like three thousand dollars. I was like “Wooow..”

1:15:37 RPPR: Wow, yeah.

1:15:38 TA: Like holy sh*

1:15:40 RPPR: We've made like five bucks in google ads, so far.

1:15:46 TA: People have been telling me about google ads and stuff and I was like the rates don't seem that good unless you've got like some kind of site that's just meant to people in and give them career advices.

1:15:53 RPPR: It's all about the click-throughs, if you get a lot of click-throughs then you can actually get a pretty decent thing. But if you're not getting fifty thousand views a day or something, ten thousand views a day, it really it's not worth bothering with. I mean, on the other hand you can throw them up there it doesn't really cost you anything to put it up there so.

1:16:10 TA: Yeah, well I mean it does in a sense, if you've got this kind of image we do of this kind of “independant, commercial free environment” then I don't know, having the google ads there is kind of something I was trying to lean away from. But yeah, I don't care that much myself.

1:16:25 RPPR: It's going to be peanuts, I mean at best you'll just make some hosting fees back. So I don't know. How much bandwidth do you use a month?

1:16:34 TA: Yeah, it's what.. two hundred gigabytes, uhm. About? But the cap on my plan is five hundred.

1:16:42 RPPR: Who do you use?

1:16:43 TA: Unfortunatly I'm on Verio, they're one of the biggest ones. And it was a reasonable plan when I signed up in 2000. Heh heh heh. But now it's crap, I mean you see these plans all over the place that offer four times as much I've got at half the price. But moving is worse for me right now

1:17:00 RPPR: It is, it is a pain. I'm using Bluehost right now, I get for like $95 a year I get like six thousand gigs of transfer a month and six hundred gigs of storage. And so, I mean I maybe a hundred gigs a month but I'm moving MP3's so even a few hundred downloads of a file.

1:17:21 TA: Yeah but it's that kind of thing I see where people are just, it's basically the situation I was talking about, I've seen people getting about six thousand a month or whatever and I was like “Oh man, I could use six thousand a month.” So right now I'm mirroring my downloads, I don't know my download counts anymore because I've got three other people mirroring the downloads and I don't have stats on those. So I wouldn't have to if I had that, so I might move sometime, I could try. Because I'm probably moving forums soon, that was the main thing, 's 'cause I've got this creaky creaky ass old 2001 Ultimate Bulletin Board. And I need to move that, and I can't really move it it's kind of just stuck in the site. It's just this nasty old thing.

1:18:01 RPPR: Exporting all the users 's going to be a pain

1:18:03 TA: Yeah, just exporting everything. So I'm just going to start clean but maybe I should start clean somewhere else.

1:18:06 RPPR: I guess, do you go to any of the big cons of the year or anything like that?

1:18:09 TA: I never hear about them, people are like “Are you going to the...” there was some game dev one in San Fransisco or something, in February. And, is that GDC? I don't know what the hell they're called.

1:18:18 RPPR: Uh, Game Developers Conference, yeah.

1:18:21 TA: Yeah, and so they're like “Are yo ugoing to that in February?” and they wrote me that on like February 10th or something, I was like “Noo didn't even hear about it.” I mean I'm not sure what I think 'cuase it's a hassel for me to travel or whatever. And I'm not sure what the benefent is, getting together with a bunch of game developers.

1:18:40 RPPR: Get more donations!

1:18:42 TA: Yeah I guess, if you get actual people, I mean if it's like a game developer, if it's just developers, then it's like well.. You know, maybe that'd be cool, but I don't really like a lot of what they're doing so it's like I just go there and be like “ooh great...” I mean it's not their fault right? They've got all those corporate people above them who are essentially co-designers or whatever. S'like that guy you were talking to, I don't remember his name, the White Wolf guy who did the blood din pirates (???) was like where'd you get that name from and he's like “Well they gave us the name and we just had to work from there”

1:19:24 RPPR: Heh, I've done freelance game writing that's pretty much how it is. Like “We want something on Jack the Ripper” okay i'll write something on Jack the Ripper. Alright, you want twenty-five hundred words, I'll do twenty-five hundred words.

1:19:34 TA: Yeah, and then if you go too far afield it's like “No no, we just wanted it to be garden variety Jack the Ripper..”

1:19:40 RPPR: Yeah exactly.

1:19:41 TA: Yeah it sounded too bad with the crap he was doing with the underwater vampires and shit but they had some kind of eastern shit coming out or something.

1:19:47 RPPR: Oh yeah yeah yeah, that was vampires in Japan and Asia are more alien than the vampires that live underwater, haven't had human contact for thousands of years or whatever.

1:19:58 TA: Yeah, because they suck karma or something, it's like Karma Vampires. I like it when they cut loose though, because those are the books I like to go buy and then you just read them and let them stew. I think my favorite D&D book was, I don't know if it was 2nd Edition, Manual of the Planes was really interesting. Because they're just kind of, whatever came out of their mind, they're just like “and this plane is filled with Apes and giant bird like creatures” and stuff, and they're just going nuts. And then you read the Manual of the Planes for the later editions when they start getting all \Cutter and Burke\ [need proper names for authors] and Planescape on your ass and you're like it's not apes and birdlike creatures it's like (ancient English professor accent) “There will be 2d4 Yeti, and 1d2 rocks” I'm like whaat?

1:20:43 RPPR: Yeah, there have been two RPGs that I really want to get, one is called CthuluTech it's like Cthulu mythos all these Elder gods and alien horrors and giant robots. Fighting each other, and it looks really cool and I haven't been able to get it.

1:20:57 TA: So it's kind of like Rifts or something, where it's kind of stuck together. I've never actually played Rifts.

1:21:05 RPPR: Yeah rifts is kind of cludgy but it's fun especially if you're a teenager and you're like “Ooh robots and dragons and ninjas aah great. We're going to blow this shit up”

1:21:18 TA: Heh heh heh heh. Yeah I never played like that but my friend Alan (Alen?) from high school. They had this ritual, before I moved there he was with this group of roleplayers and they had this ritual where they would all roll up these 40th level characters or something, and they'd kill Odin. (laughing) it's like every week they'd kill Odin. It's like some kind of super power trip, I was like goddamn.

1:21:38 RPPR: Yeah I've been in games like that, that can be FUN you know? That whole “I've got three digit hitpoints,” “I've got four digit hitpoints,” you know, “I've got a strength of three digits,” something like that.

1:21:48 TA: Yeah where they start talking about 'Mega damage' and shit heh..

1:21:52 RPPR: Oh yeah, that is rediculous. There is one con I'm going to this year, and it's GenCon the big one in Indianapolis.

1:22:00 TA: Yeah I've heard of that.

1:22:01 RPPR: Yeah it's huge, there's like forty-fiftythousand people there. And that's where they announced D&D 4th Edition last year. And yeah, I'm going just to meet other broadcasters just hang out and have fun or whatever. That would be, I'm sure if you go there you would find quite a few Dwarf Fortress players there.

1:22:34 TA: you'd have to advertise somehow, probably just need to pay some kind of fee to set up a booth, or something.

1:22:47 RPPR: Well yeah, to set up in the convention. I mean you can just walk around.

1:22:51 TA: I could just wear a “I wrote Dwarf Fortress” T-shirt or something?

1:22:54 RPPR: That would pretty much get you a crowd, I'd bet. Because they also showcase video games there, so all the World of Warcraft and Age of Conan people will be like “Aahh, is that? Are you really the Dwarf Fortress guy? That's awesome!” Or you could just sell Boatmurdered T-shirts that would be a great merchandising opportunity get some artists to draw burning Dwarves running around and put a t-shirt on it.

1:23:20 TA: I could hire some circus performers and set them on fire.

1:23:23 RPPR: Yeah yeah, some midgets uhh...

1:23:27 TA: Yeah yeah, though you have to get a bearded.. Have you seen, I don't know if this is a PC question or not, but have you seen one of the little people but with a big ass beard. I haven't really seen that.

1:23:34 RPPR: I've never really seen a bearded one. Uhh, a bearded Dwarf, or midget.

1:23:38 TA: Yeah, I don't know.. do they shave? Or do people like willow (??) they just can't grow that shit.

1:23:43 RPPR: Uuuhm I think, genetically, some of them can't but like others probably could, they just don't. I think I've seen... like the Lollypop Guild, I think that was fake, but in the Wizard of Oz, they had beards. Right?

1:23:58 TA: Aaaaah man that's been a while. But it's possible. But I'm just afraid that if I go in and type “Bearded Little Person” into the google images, I mean I think I've got my porn filter on, I think i'll be okay, I think i'll survive. But ah. Yeah, no it's just yeah, I've no idea I really don't have the slightest idea. Nah, they've got little kids holding beards over their faces and stuff. But that Bearded Dragons, you know the lizard? They've got them stacked, they've got four stacked on top of each other. I don't know what that has to do with that but.

1:24:32 RPPR: I actually have a Bearded Dragon, weird that you mentioned it.

1:24:35 TA: Yeah I had an Iguana but you can't mess with the Iguana. It got six feet long and then you can't put it on the table anymore. It was bitter. It was bitter because we didn't know to feed it calcium the first three years so it got this really giant overbite and would bite people. It was not trained.

1:24:50 RPPR: Yeah Bearded Dragons are about as pacifist of a lizard as you can have, they just do not care.

1:25:00 TA: yeah there's nothing on google. Google's doing me wrong here, ah. I mean I'm not going to type bearded Dwarf because that's like a waste of time, I think I'll just get D&D stuff that way. But I tried bearded a bunch of other stuff and nothing! Nothing, I mean that's intriguing to me.

1:25:14 RPPR: Interesting, maybe wikipedia will say “Oh they can't grow beards,” or whatever so.

1:25:17 TA: Yeah, because it seems strange. I don't know the roots of the mythology and so on were but it probably doesn't come from that because those Dwarves have giant beards.

1:25:28 RPPR: I don't know it's like one of those things like now all Dwarves are supposed to have scottish accents.

1:25:33 TA: Yeah yeah, heavy drinking, scottish accents. Ah no no here we go, the Dwarf Don Sebastian de Mora by Velasquez in his portait now they got a serious guy, but he's got a big honking civil war looking beard.

1:25:56 RPPR: Like a ZZ Top type beard.

1:25:59 TA: Ah, well it's not quite like General Longstreet type of beard but it's got the curling mustache with a giant kind of gotee. And it goes way down, yeah so.. So maybe it's just out of style. Maybe it's more of a style thing these days

1:26:21 RPPR: Yeah, or it could be just practical issues, I mean you don't want it to get too big then you'd be tripping over it or something like that.

1:26:29 TA: Ahem, ah heh yeah. Uh, Jesus.. I hope none of this goes on the podcast now.

1:26:35 RPPR: Well I can edit that part out, yeah. There would just be this weird gap where “blah blah, oh what about Dwarves,” and then silence “And then we'll talk about something blah blah blah.”

1:26:48 TA: Yeah, I don't know why my mind is flowing that direction these days but yeah. Uh yeah, that was just an intriguing question to me. Uhm, but there you go, it's been answered at least, back in the good old days when they could have beards.

1:27:00 RPPR: One final question: What is your personal favorite game of all time? You know, you're on a desert island, got one game, could be a video game can be a tabletop game assuming it'll be you and your brother so you have someone to play with if it's multiplayer. What would be your one desert island game?

1:27:19 TA: Huuh, so it depends, is this a desert island game for posterities sake, or just something I'd kind of be a fiend on?

1:27:26 RPPR: Yeah, something you'd be a fiend on, something you would be able to play the longest, get the most play time out of.

1:27:32 TA: Ah, yeah, because I get bored with things pretty fast, I mean there are games like Starflight and stuff where it's one of my favorite games, but I can't really play it now. It was really an eye opener for me, very influential when I was a child. But now? Yeah I hardly play anything anymore, I'm off minesweeper I don't play that anymore. Transport Tycoon, I think Transport Tycoon has my largest record as far as just playing. My brother and I played that once for fourty-six hours straight switching off, we switched off when we had to go to classes because we were both in school at that time. But not anymore you kind of get burned out on stuff. Right now I'm totally burned out on everything so ah.. (laugh) It's a harder question to answer that way. Things like Chess and so on and Go I play those, but meh, especially with my brother I mean he's better at chess than I am and I'm better than Go than he is so we'd just be miserable hehe.

1:28:30 RPPR: Okay well what's the game that has your fondest memories?

1:28:33 TA: Ah yeah, there's lots of games like that like I said. Starflight, going exploring the little critters, going to the planets. A lot of people don't know there were randomly generated critters with pretty long paragraphs describing them. And we, my brother and I, would make these journal entries where we'd draw the picture and describe them and just do that for days and days and days and days. We have fond memories of Seven Cities of Gold, and arcade games we played a lot of like Gauntlet and so on. And some of those D&D things Cyberpunk things we talked about are way up there. A few Roguelike memories, mostly involving obscene names of characters that get immortalized on the score list. Like we were playing Ragnarok once and that was the first game, ah not the first game, maybe Hack was for us, but it was one of those ones where you can polymorph, right? And so we had a character, and we were just naming our characters, and you know you go through them one at a time over a few minutes so the names just start to degenerate and we eventually just got down to one where the name was just “Fucker” we had this guy named Fucker, right? Because you're just playing you know, play play play play play. And then he got transformed somehow into this thing, we don't know how to say it really, but it looked like Jackass, so we got immortalized on the high score list, it was our best game ever, and it was immortalized at the top. We didn't think about the name at all but we got stuck with “Fucker the Jackass” on the top of our high score list for a year or so. And theres all kinds of things, I mean, you can kind of go on forever. But nothing new really, but yeah just all this old foggie type stuff, thirty and up.

1:30:55 RPPR: Sometimes the old games are the best games.

1:30:58 TA: Well, yeah I like them.

1:31:00 RPPR: Alright well, thank you very much for joining us at Role Playing Public Radio and next, I'm sure within a couple months or a year when the army arc comes out we'll come back and talk to you again, and thanks a lot.

1:31:24 TA: Okay thanks.

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory