Is it just because DF was developed on the fringe that it gets away with having infants and children that people use atom smashers on and have core game mechanics where monsters come snatch them?
Or is it something about the implementation that makes it drama-less to everyone?
As far as I'm aware anything that can happen to a Dwarf can happen to an infant or child.
The dilapitated chaos of the simulation makes it work on looney tunes logic.
I remember I had a hunter shoot a deer, which began vomiting. The hunter shot repeatedly again but never hit — the deer continuted to vomit. Dozens of combat report pages of
the deer vomits. A mountainside covered in deer vomit. The suspension on your disbelief can't endure it.In a simulation where, by a miracle dice roll, a baby can punch the head off an iron colossus, it's not a normal baby. The baby is Bugs Bunny.
That's an interesting point. Effectively what you're saying is that as long as the simulation is completely and totally insane and unpredictable that the horrible things that occur within it lose their morbidity and get replaced with complete and total fascination with what this insane machine that continually produce unpredictable results might produce next. You are completely distracted.
If I recall correctly children are insanely strong because some calculation or something uses body size to strength in calculating power. The children all have basic strength levels so they can do things like carrying rocks and materials as chores without being slowed down. This however combines with their tiny size to produce absurd power in combat.
This conversation is kinda proving your point because that whole paragraph I just wrote is insane and we're totally distracted from the topic of children fighting monsters already because of the absurdity.
Regarding the emergent nature of the chaos, I had a sworddwarf in my militia give birth mid-combat (it's not really clear when they're pregnant) and drop her shield to pick up the baby and continue fighting, the baby did manage to survive being used as a shield.
BJORN IN BATTLE!
Yup. You nailed it. It's all so weird and silly you can't take it seriously. Plus, the world is so chaotically hyperlethal - You might be mining for bauxite or whatever and the mineshaft collapses in to an underground cavern and then the next fifteen hours of gameplay are "The First Spider War: Dark years of horror and privation before things got really bad". And all you were trying to do with that game was make a screw-pump that moved beer between two levels of your fortress, but now your engineers are trying to divert the lava pipe in to spider hell before all your dorfs succumb to cave spider venom.
I haven't played in years, but from what I remember over the course of a few games, with things going horribly wrong in FUN ways, I stopped feeling like i'd failed when bad things happened to my dorfs and it was just like "Okay, the elephant thing was pretty fucked up, but the fortress survived and if we can just hold the zombies at bay until spring we'll get more colonists and then the elves will bring wood and..." and I just started rolling with it, trying to hold things together, reveling in my dorf's victories and building them very fancy tombs when they were torn apart by macaques or something. Actually, come to think of it, being able to bury the little weirdos probably did help. Like there was some closure or something idk.
The construction of fancy tombs is the essence of df. The game isn't fun if you're not taking frequent horrible losses.
At one point with enough throwing skill you could decapitate a dragon with a thrown sock.