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It makes me sad. So very very sad.

58 (49.6%)

I think it's great!

26 (22.2%)

I'm indifferent.

33 (28.2%)

Total Members Voted: 115

[Loud Whispers]

If this is a feature there better be a way to get Dwarves remarried, trying to build an eternal Fort around the pop cap that isn't reliant on migrants is hard enough without having to run purges

I don't get what you're arguing here - births are not affected by pop cap anyway, so "unreproductive" dwarfs don't limit population. And even if you're shooting for a high reproduction rate, having absolutely everybody coupled off won't really do that much: dwarfs reproduce at roughly one child per year per married couple, which means nine couples will already bump into the standard baby cap all the time if you don't increase the limit. Of course you can basically remove all limits, but not everybody enjoys having a fort with 220 dwarfs, 60 of them adults.

You've completely missed the point. Point is with a strict pop-cap you only have so many dwarves that are going to become parents. With this bug, the amount of said dwarves dwindles, therefore the time in which you'll get to a big enough dwarf number increases highly.

This to the point. For any Fortress where reliance on migrants is to be kept minimal (vampires, evil biomes and perpetual sieges come to mind) you have to rely on tens of couples to produce many offspring who in turn can produce their own. The longer the Fort goes on, the more marriages will take place. Given enough time you'd end up with a Fort that becomes sterile either through diverse lines stopping at a gay marriage or inbreeding. And god damn, I want my strongest workers and soldiers to carry on their strong genes to their children; when a baby is born with superdwarven toughness there is pride there!
Options, give me options. The state should be allowed to force Dwarves into unhappy marriages if the marriages are for the well being of the Fortress.

[Putnam]

1. This game doesn't support lysenkoism
2. A small subset of the population not breeding is really no different from how it was before

[BenLubar]

If the interspecies or same-sex couples give birth, this is a bug. Otherwise, it's a feature.

I've noticed a lot of goblins in the worldgen dwarf fortresses, so there might be something strange going on.

[Azrayel]

Given how hard and slow breeding dwarves is already, it's hardly 'happy'
 On worlds with no surviving dwarf civilisations, so no migrants, but lots of lovely reclaimable fortresses, it'd pretty much mean no game if you dwarfs didn't couple up in breeding pairs. You need alot of luck to get couples as it is without adding in the chance they'd couple the wrong way.

It also doesn't make a vast amount of sense for dwarf culture - which so far has been established as fairly conservative.

Conservative to what?

Greece and Rome were pretty conservative in terms of military matters and politics, but guy-on-guy was very normative--as was, unfortunately, guy-on-young-boy.

Particularly cultures which prized masculinity and strength saw homosexuality as the most erotic, because women were weak and inferior and fit for babymaking but not pleasurable like another man is.  Dwarves, a stocky and strong race, are equally set up to be homocentric as heterocentric.  It comes down to random chance more than anything, and "conservative" and "liberal" don't really apply.

As someone pointed out, breeding in DF is simply "is there a male on the map?  Is there a female on the map?  Out of cages?  BOOM" and then there's babies.  So all your dwarves could be gay and equally "productive."

Quoted person already acknowledged conservative isn't really a valid distinction here, never mind.

[Putnam]

As someone pointed out, breeding in DF is simply "is there a male on the map?  Is there a female on the map?  Out of cages?  BOOM" and then there's babies.  So all your dwarves could be gay and equally "productive."

This isn't true either, though; dwarves and other sentients have to be married first.

[Azrayel]

-snip-

Right, I agree about the duty and community, but the point of marriage is an insular unit--in the communist utopia of a Fortress, you breed, someone's job is taking care of all the kids, and you're off doing your thing.  So you're not getting married to make babies.

Logically there's no reason to have marriages, it create a loyalty other than that to the fortress.  Dwarves don't learn their parents trade or anything iiRC, so they're not helping continue the fortress.

You're not putting allegory above simulation; ~1% of human populations are gay and less than 2% are bi, so yeah it's rare, but it would seem to have been with us from the beginning.  "This wasn't a thing before" is a myth, and particularly amongst nobility homosexuality was far, far from unheard of. 

I again call back to Hellenic cultures; Achilles went on his tirade and got stabbed in the heel 'cause his lover, a dude, got killed on the battlefield.  I'm not seeing what we know about dwarves (in love with material possessions and violence) suggesting they're card-carrying Republicans.  Nobles live a life of decadence and war, so would the rest of dwarfkind were they nobles it should seem.

Eugenics should be possible, and should make people unhappy--as it does and would in real life scenarios where breeding is dictatorially mandated.

As someone pointed out, breeding in DF is simply "is there a male on the map?  Is there a female on the map?  Out of cages?  BOOM" and then there's babies.  So all your dwarves could be gay and equally "productive."

This isn't true either, though; dwarves and other sentients have to be married first.

Yeah, you're right, I was incorrect there--should've read the whole thread first, especially because the person in question redacted their statement.  Sorry about that, II.

[kingubu]

I agree with the person who said this game needs more hate crimes. We could have hate groups and they can throw rallies instead of parties. And there could be other groups that hate hate groups and they can throw counter rallies.

Ooh, and the children could form gangs. And they would only wear certain articles of clothing. And they would punch other children wearing the wrong articles of clothing in the wrong parts of the fortress.

And we will need Molotov cocktails, because you can't have a hate group without them.  And they will need to be able to construct religious icons, so they can set them on fire and place them in other dwarves front yards.

[FowlJ]

In fact, I dare you guys to find a single pre-industrial society which allowed and celebrated gay marriages.

Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Polynesia, and the Americas, according to some brief research on the topic. That is in addition, of course, to the traditions in Greece and Rome of partnership with a younger person of the same gender, which was a little bit different admittedly.

Of course, your point holds as much weight as that many of those cultures don't seem to have featured 'normal' marriages in the regard, but that doesn't really matter in the context of Dwarf Fortress, (as little as that mattered in the first place because dwarf fortress is made up) because Dwarf Fortress doesn't feature marriages of the sort that existed for most of history at all. Dwarf marriage features no apparent arrangement of any sort, and is predicated purely on the relationship of the partners, becoming friends and then lovers and then formally married, without any obvious outside influence or political motivations. That being the case there is no real reason to assume (even ignoring the whole 'made up' thing again) that dwarven marriage conforms to the marriage standards of 'history' in the first place.

[Azrayel]

In fact, I dare you guys to find a single pre-industrial society which allowed and celebrated gay marriages.

MesoAmerican priests, while they sometimes took on priestesses with whom they would breed to create new priests, in some regions were essentially married to their fellow male priests. 

There were lots of religious ceremonies involving fucking young boys in drag, but that's pedastry not anything like marriage.

If we knew more about MesoAmerican cultures I'm willing to bet there'd be priest-class exemptions, because they're a small minority (it wasn't a priest per village deal, I'm talking High Priests at the ceremonial temple-cities) of the population and them having official "priestly lines" would challenge the actual Royal Lines, because although supreme leaders were often God-like beings much as in Egypt, they seemed distinct from the priest class due to their executive authority and military commandership.

I often wonder what Mesoamerican civilization could've become had nobody bought into Columbus's shit and it took hundreds more years to develop trade.  In particularly I like the idea of parts of the Beringia land bridge remaining on the surface as islands allowing trade between American and East Asian societies sparsely over time, from an alt.history jumping off point perspective...

Anyway, I think the issue is human cultures represent a small sliver of a fractal of a minutia of all \possible\ cultures that \could\ have been; things are often done the way they are because some idiot made a superstitious connection eons ago and nobody's taken as anything other than conventional wisdom since.

[Viking]

Hah.. interesting. Like someone else said it is not really going to affect population growth anyways. My population caps prevent a lot of couples from procreating anyways. If we could ship off excess population to found new colonies population limits would not be so important.

[Loud Whispers]

1. This game doesn't support lysenkoism
2. A small subset of the population not breeding is really no different from how it was before

1. It does, it works with all physical attributes for both animal husbandry and Dwarven eugenics.
2. Yes, it is different. All Dwarven socialization serves three purposes in Dwarf Fortress:

• Electing mayors.
• Causing tantrum spirals.
• Forming lovers.

The third one is the important thing here, as two Dwarves of the same sex will normally at most become friends or grudges, meaning you can allow your Dwarves to freely socialize and expect a new generation of Dwarves to be spored. When there is a risk of same sex marriage you have to micromanage your Dwarves or fully expect a very sizeable portion of your breeding stock to become as worthless as widows. It turns Fortress breeding from a natural process that occurs in all dining halls to a megaproject requiring creches and mandatory socializing cabins.

[Putnam]

i think you're exaggerating a bit

[PDF urist master]

last time I checked, married dwarves breed like rabbits, so I don't think this will affect population in a significant way.


I don't really care if a dwarf wants to shag another dwarf in the ass. As long as they get the magma forge done gay dwarves are okay with me.


to honour this thread, I think someone should have this as their flavour text: [ETHIC:GAY_MARRIAGE:ACCEPTABLE]

[Urist McVoyager]

That would depend on how likely same sex marriages are to occur in-fortress. If they were a fifty/fifty proposition, then it probably would be a megaproject to keep them down.

I, personally, have no problem with there being same sex marriage in the game, but I'd rather Toady temporarily fix or optionalize this with the qualifier that he'll implement it again when marriage isn't required to have babies in-game.  It isn't in real life, so there's shouldn't necessarily be a requirement in the game.

And as for anyone who talks about practicalities, honor, and duty to have kids, stuff it. Children get subjected to so much Hell from their parents' natural inclinations that there's no good basis in-game for barring same-sex marriages for the sake of child rearing. Need a list?

1. Female soldiers carrying their babies into battle, or even training.
2. Women, knowing full well that snatchers can come at any moment, wandering outside with their babies and no armed escort.
3. Children being allowed to run free, without even the existence of an official crèche zone to protect them. (You can burrow them, but there's no standard for it, so we can assume there's no mandate for us to even bother.)

If women with babies, who had dangerous jobs, were really SUPPOSED to be childbearers, they'd have some instinct to protect their children. They'd hand their precious children off to trusted non-combatants during deadly situations, not carry their babies like damn shields. We all know how common it is, after all. It's why so many of us are careful to avoid female soldiers.

[Sumyunguy]

I don't play dwarf fortress for the political arguments and someone's opinion being shoved in my face. I play to escape the real-world after being stuck at work.

It was inevitable. Nothing is sacred.