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[Uristsonsonson]

Watching the new Hobbit movie yesterday made me realize that DF dwarves still lack one of the most essential aspects of dorfitude: the institution of the clan. Sure, they can have families they barely care about, but will that ever be expanded? I'd love to see factional infighting and jealousy over the throne leading a minor traitor house to secretly conspire with the goblins right under my nose.

[smjjames]

That's planned, but it's still a long ways off.

[Footkerchief]

That's planned, but it's still a long ways off.

Not terribly informative without quotes:

Rainseeker:   Are families going to be more complicated? Like family relationships?
Toady:   I think just as a starting point they should be respected at all. A dwarf ... they might recognise a few things about their brother, like vaguely speaking, but they really don't in general have a handle on their parents or their brother. With their spouse they know that they're sleeping in the same room and they can shoot spores at each other, but it's one of those things, maybe even part of the sociology discussion. I don't know if ... like they say 'the building block of society is the nuclear family' ... we haven't really decided what the building block of dwarven society, but the family should certainly be part of that. If you're starting to add things like a mason's guild and a cult based around the god of minerals then having the family of a dwarf be one of those units that determines what a dwarf thinks about is really important because they'd be then weighing decisions; like 'how does this decision jibe with my religion, how does it affect my relationship with the mason's guild?' but also 'how does it affect my family?' would be a huge factor I'd think, at least in a dwarven society; I'm not sure the goblins would give a crap about it, maybe some of them would. It's one of those things that's completely underutilised. Of course families are really common; every dwarf has a family and there's a lot of different families, so tracking it as an entity in and of itself might be a bad idea. Having a larger clan or something, if it's a really large group of people then it makes more sense but having ten thousand different entities, one for each family, would start to stretch what's reasonable, especially because there'd be room set aside for things like 'what is the uniform of your family?'; it's not necessary information ... 'what kind of trade goods does your family have access to, what territory do they own on the map?' It starts to get silly if you really give them full blown entity status, but at the same time they're important enough that they should get an equal role in decision making. But it's one of those things that's also easier to let slide ... I'm not really sure when we'd start thinking about that stuff, maybe we'd start thinking about it when we're doing these guild and religion overhauls, just at least leave a spot open at the table for it, not code myself out of it. It's certainly something that I have to keep in mind. Huge amounts of legends are family based, like people rescuing their children, or rescuing their significant others, or having the three heirs to a kingdom fighting over it; a lot coming back to family stuff there, and right now that's completely unrecognised ... fortunately it's recognised in world generation to the point that they don't sleep with their siblings to have more kids but that's really just a very specific case that's handled in a very specific way instead of something that's tangible by itself.

[...]

Threetoe:   Will we see more dynastic or clannish behaviour, or will the dwarves remain more individualistically oriented? Can an usurper count on the support of his brethren even if his claim is weak to other people? How will vampires and bandit gangs be factored in?
Toady:   So this is one of the things that when we started these position claims, and we started talking about factions and so on, and we talked about having reputations with families and so on, this is one of the things we were thinking about. And one of the actual main things we were thinking about because families are one of the only things in the game right now that are links between people that could determine their behaviour. There's not a whole lot for them to work with right now other than what town they live, what civilization from, and then who their family is.

I wouldn't expect too much with this next release because there's just no mechanisms through which they can act on sort of realizing their ambitions right now. So we're kind of pre-army arc and just trying to get the ball rolling on some really basic mechanics but it's definitely the intention to have the families matter a lot more. When you bring up things like bandit gangs, right now the bandit gangs exist in a vacuum but they are generally led by historical figures that have family ties nearby in the communities that they're harassing and so on. And that should have a huge impact. Whether or not it's to create conflict within the family, or to have their family aiding them in their activities and so. Of course vampires can get all strange with that kind of thing.

So it's definitely the exact sort of thing we wanna milk to get great sort of emergent stories. It's one of the main elements we wanna use. At the same time, we have done nothing. *laughs* Aside from the few things in fortress mode that can happen. So yeah, but it's definitely something we're always look at and always kind of...Delaying the realization of, but it's always there. And hopefully we'll get to that.

It's also not necessarily that far off, since some family-related stuff is already on the dev page:

Adventurer Role: Hero
    Reputation
        Reputation with entity populations, site governments, families and individuals
            Increases with heroic acts but can rise out of stranger status just by going to markets etc.