Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
That -

That has really deep implications, actually. Like, way the fuck deeper than yours and WHF's depiction of them would ordinarily permit. Were the Dawi not an engineered species, I'd call bullshit on them bearing even a slight psychological or physiological resemblance to humans, and just the idea of it sets my imagination flying.

So, okay.

Repeated stimulus gets tuned out. This is something that happens at every single level of your body, from physical nerve cells be they touch, hearing, sight related, etc - to pathways, to the neurons that receive those signals, to the brain talking to and making sense of itself. Monotonous repetition is something that gets muted, this is why fading of emotional memory is even a thing - eventually, the same internal reaction to the same memory will just get... tuned down. That's just how nerve cells and neurons work.

They kind of have to, because all stimulus and activation is relative. If you couldn't de-prioritize a response to stimulus, you almost wouldn't be able to learn or sense things at all.

That Dawi don't have fading emotional memory hints at something way, way more fundamental about how their... well, everything works, just calling it their brains is underselling it.

But as a small example... in humans, our ability to tell the difference between two stimulus is more or less percentage/ratio based - our increments of perception are not absolute, the brighter a light, the greater a difference in lumens is required for a change in it to be perceptible. The heavier a weight, the more ounces or pounds have to change for us to tell the difference between it and another weight. This is a consequence of the same underlying mechanism of sensory deadening as everything else I've talked about.

So if that just doesn't apply to emotional memory for Dawi, can they tell the difference in stimulus in absolute rather than relative terms, too? Certainly seems like it could be a major benefit for precision work, I'll say that much...

It would also seem to imply that they have no reason to value novelty for its own sake, and that repeating a task they find engaging over and over while regularly realizing slight improvements would be the height of satisfaction to them, instead of something that they'd grow bored of. So they would likely default to somewhere between caution and suspicion towards new things. They wouldn't have the hedonic treadmill at work in their brains, so they'd tend to be rather spartan out of practicality, because they'd only need a certain amount of comforts and pleasures to be happy and wouldn't grow to see them as a new baseline requiring them to seek new heights to get the same sense of enjoyment. It would mean they'd value well-insulated, carefully-controlled environments to live in, and would highly value depressants to dull external stimulus, possibly outright relying on them.

All of which sounds rather familiar...
 
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Are we talking about Ghal Maraz 1.0 or 2.0 here because I believe there is a big difference or should be?
Ghal-Maraz's tabletop stats are the same as a Runefang (no armor saves, no roll to wound) plus it does D3 Wounds instead of just 1.

To my knowledge there has never been any implication on tabletop that Ghal-Maraz is not the same one Sigmar wielded.
 
It would also seem to imply that they have no reason to value novelty for its own sake, and that repeating a task they find engaging over and over while regularly realizing slight improvements would be the height of satisfaction to them, instead of something that they'd grow bored of. They wouldn't value novelty for its own sake, and would likely default to somewhere between caution and suspicion towards it. They wouldn't have the hedonic treadmill at work in their brains, so they'd tend to be rather spartan out of practicality, because they'd only need a certain amount of comforts and pleasures to be happy and wouldn't grow to see them as a new baseline requiring them to seek new heights to get the same sense of enjoyment. It would mean they'd value well-insulated, carefully-controlled environments to live in, and would highly value depressants to dull external stimulus, possibly outright relying on them.

All of which sounds rather familiar...
This has interesting implications for the idea of neurodivergent dwarfs, who lean towards a more human-like disposition on certain things. Dwarves who grow to view an increase in wealth and status as the new normal, thus seek more, and more, and more...

"His love of gold had grown too fierce; a sickness had begun to grow within him. It was a sickness of the mind."


Honestly, this chain of conversation has given me an even deeper respect for Tolkien. He explicitly depicted the dwarves as being the result of a different Creator and it was a plot point that they effectively ran on different O.S compared to most races of Middlearth, but I suspect that he put even more effort into the traditional dwarvish characterization that's propagated through fantasy settings than I thought he did.
 
and would highly value depressants to dull external stimulus, possibly outright relying on them.
This has interesting implications for the idea of neurodivergent dwarfs, who lean towards a more human-like disposition on certain things.
We know a group of neurodivergent dwarfs. Pulled them out of the warp. They lost their taste for alcohol. Which says all sort of interesting things about their differences.
They wouldn't have the hedonic treadmill at work in their brains, so they'd tend to be rather spartan out of practicality, because they'd only need a certain amount of comforts and pleasures to be happy and wouldn't grow to see them as a new baseline requiring them to seek new heights to get the same sense of enjoyment

Of course that also applies the other way. If a dwarf finds their living or working conditions unsatisfactory they will never get used to them. No wonder Kagg is so Grimm.
 
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Voting closed, writing has begun, but will probably stop and start a lot as I try to wrestle back into usability the personal wiki I thought I'd saved but had actually exported into a form that can't be reimported.

Results:
[*] Revise

[*] Eike
[*] Karak Vlag
[*] Magister Tochter Grunfeld
[*] Kasmir
[*] Karaz-a-Karak

Adhoc vote count started by Boney on Sep 2, 2022 at 12:11 AM, finished with 1211 posts and 169 votes.
 
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Most prominently unfading emotional memory, leading to the cultural institutions of Grudges to deal with unredressable grief and Slayers for unredressable shame.
So if that just doesn't apply to emotional memory for Dawi, can they tell the difference in stimulus in absolute rather than relative terms, too? Certainly seems like it could be a major benefit for precision work, I'll say that much...
It would mean they'd value well-insulated, carefully-controlled environments to live in, and would highly value depressants to dull external stimulus, possibly outright relying on them.
And if their memories of these precise, absolute responses to stimuli similarly don't fade with time, then all those Longbeards grumbling that this cask of Goatkicker Ale isn't as good as the Goatkicker of their youth, or how standards of craftdwarfship fit and finish have slipped... are being literal.

Further reminding them of the decline of the Karaz Ankor.

This has interesting implications for the idea of neurodivergent dwarfs, who lean towards a more human-like disposition on certain things.
We know a group of neurodivergent dwarfs.
Rangers. Who seek to live outdoors, on the surface, away from the carefully-controlled environments. Dealing with unpredictable non-dwarves. Distilling their spirits up a mountain in the wild, very deliberately in a non-carefully-controlled manner. Every batch- or interaction, or campsite- a novel experience, of varying stimulus.
 
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Ghal Maraz where I think they should stick to the basic weapon-effects.
Just to add to the overall discussion, Ghal Maraz was also apparently blessed by Ulric when Sigmar went through his Flame.

As a side note, that made me think about relations between Cults of Sigmar and Ulric and the respective Gods. I strongly suspect the latter would be quite amicable.
 
I thought I'd saved my Zim wiki for DL just before my old computer let all the magic smoke out, but I'd actually exported it in HTML form. All the data is still there, it just needs to be manually copied back over to restore the structure that made it easily parsable.
HTML is (mostly) XML. Some xslt magic might do the trick. What format do you need it to be in?
 
HTML is (mostly) XML. Some xslt magic might do the trick. What format do you need it to be in?

Zim save things in individual .txt files for each page in nested folders, with metadata in three lines at the top of each. I thought about figuring out a way to automate it, but that has 'three hours of programming to automate one hour of doing it manually' written all over it.
 
I thought I'd saved my Zim wiki for DL just before my old computer let all the magic smoke out, but I'd actually exported it in HTML form. All the data is still there, it just needs to be manually copied back over to restore the structure that made it easily parsable.

IDK if this will do what you want it to do, but it is an attempt to make zim files out of HTML.
(not written by me, just something I found on a short googlesearch)
 
Voting closed, writing has begun, but will probably stop and start a lot as I try to wrestle back into usability the personal wiki I thought I'd saved but had actually exported into a form that can't be reimported.
I've taken a break from WHF, but if you ever need to bring back something you lost, I'm more than willing to dive back to help you do so. I'm always up for an adventure if it means being helpful to you.
 
We know a group of neurodivergent dwarfs. Pulled them out of the warp. They lost their taste for alcohol. Which says all sort of interesting things about their differences.
Well, we don't necessarily know if that'll stick.

None of the younger generations have tasted alcohol, but that's because it would have been impossible, they needed that food to survive.

It might be that they'll come to enjoy it now that they're out.
 
Well, we don't necessarily know if that'll stick.

None of the younger generations have tasted alcohol, but that's because it would have been impossible, they needed that food to survive.

It might be that they'll come to enjoy it now that they're out.
Those who have gone through the Warp while being hounded by Slaanesh would likely be the type of people who would despise being in less control of their own actions. Almost all of them are incredibly paranoid about attempts to fool their perception, and I'd imagine they wouldn't like the feeling of being drunk.

The kids of the future might have different feelings on that, but they'd still be raised in a different culture than general Dwarf society. Their values and cultural mores are probably going to be somewhat different.
 
Those who have gone through the Warp while being hounded by Slaanesh would likely be the type of people who would despise being in less control of their own actions. Almost all of them are incredibly paranoid about attempts to fool their perception, and I'd imagine they wouldn't like the feeling of being drunk.

The kids of the future might have different feelings on that, but they'd still be raised in a different culture than general Dwarf society. Their values and cultural mores are probably going to be somewhat different.
I am kinda curious if alcohol actually makes dwarfs "drunk." I could totally see their bodies handling alcohol different then humans
 
Those who have gone through the Warp while being hounded by Slaanesh would likely be the type of people who would despise being in less control of their own actions. Almost all of them are incredibly paranoid about attempts to fool their perception, and I'd imagine they wouldn't like the feeling of being drunk.

The kids of the future might have different feelings on that, but they'd still be raised in a different culture than general Dwarf society. Their values and cultural mores are probably going to be somewhat different.
I'm not sure. Loremaster Ivaldisson considered their enjoyment of sex a rebuke of Slaanesh:
But in living we have rebuked Her thrice - once for escaping Her claws, once for taking pleasure in each others' arms without being ruled by it
I do think the Dawi of Karak Vlag would see that drinking is something that can lead to Excess, but at least some of them would see this as a challenge and would make a point of drinking responsibly to spite the Tempter.
 
I'm not sure. Loremaster Ivaldisson considered their enjoyment of sex a rebuke of Slaanesh:

I do think the Dawi of Karak Vlag would see that drinking is something that can lead to Excess, but at least some of them would see this as a challenge and would make a point of drinking responsibly to spite the Tempter.
Yeah, but you don't lose control of yourself when having sex (well, unless you're into it). I'm not talking about excess, I'm talking about the loss of cognitive control from being drunk. That's different.

They are explicitly in control when they spite Slaanesh by having sex, kinky or not, while not losing control of themselves. If you drink alcohol you're probably doing it to get drunk. The state of being drunk is a refutation of the idea of having control.
 
True, but there are stages between "not a drop" and "drunk". So, if you enjoy alcohol, you could get just to one of those and stop there.
Depends. I despise the idea of being even slightly out of control. I want to have complete and total control over me, my thoughts, and what I say. I think being under the trauma of Karak Vlag would make that pretty common.

I've never tried alcohol, but most people I know who drink it say that you don't do it for the taste.
 
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