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[GavJ]

...for intelligent creatures to breed.

Something like [MARRIAGE_REQUIRED] in the entity raws. If present, then marriage is required for breeding.
[MARRIAGE_PREFERRED] make it the norm, but not absolutely necessary / some children are born out of wedlock.
[NO_MARRIAGE] or just leaving it blank makes the entity (or any creature without an entity) reproduce indiscriminately by global spores, like normal animals do.

This is not just for a touch of realistic flavor, but also an actually pretty important feature if you want to do something like, say, make a playable insect civilization or something.

[FrankMcFuzz]

It's not 100% related, but bastardry has already been suggested.

[Dirst]

...for intelligent creatures to breed.

Something like [MARRIAGE_REQUIRED] in the entity raws. If present, then marriage is required for breeding.
[MARRIAGE_PREFERRED] make it the norm, but not absolutely necessary / some children are born out of wedlock.
[NO_MARRIAGE] or just leaving it blank makes the entity (or any creature without an entity) reproduce indiscriminately by global spores, like normal animals do.

This is not just for a touch of realistic flavor, but also an actually pretty important feature if you want to do something like, say, make a playable insect civilization or something.

I think it might fit better as a set of ETHICs.

[ETHIC:ILLEGITIMATE_PARENT:MISGUIDED]
[ETHIC:ILLEGITIMATE_CHILD:ACCEPTABLE] The only ones that make sense here are ACCEPTABLE, SHUN, PUNISH_EXILE and PUNISH_CAPITAL.

[Witty]

+1

Different cultures had diffrent views on the importance of marriage and having children. I doubt DF really delve into the more dirty options, but more choices is always a good thing.

[therahedwig]

I thought this was one of those 'stand-in' systems.

The devlog says 'Succession and succession struggles' and the old devlist has:

LOVE AND ROMANCE

Though some of the dialog is likely to be an entertaining trainwreck, especially if coupled with a random poem generator (yes, that's a threat), love of all sorts is very important for driving stories and situations and needs to come in all over the place -- world generation, the world during play, dwarf mode and adventure mode.

HEIRS

Having playable heirs in adventure mode would be fun. Dwarves should also do a bit more for their children than sometimes running to pick them up when they are crawling toward the magma vent as infants, and the notion of the family in general could afford to have more impact on the game.

SUCCESSION, ASSOCIATED CONFLICTS AND SCHISMS

First of all, succession for positions needs to occur in play, so that dead liaisons are replaced, as well as dead monarchs. Then the process needs to be made messier all around. Wars over succession, schisms over religious disagreements, etc., starting from world gen and coming into regular play. In dwarf mode, you might be involved on one side or the other, directly or indirectly, relying on more involved diplomacy and army code than we currently have, and adventure mode can also gain a lot from such conflicts.

PROPER PREGNANCY
Currently creatures become pregnant from a distance, although it does do a gender check at least.

I can't seem to find bastards in the old system, but I'd be surprised if it wouldn't be sneaked in somewhere to generate nice succession/inheritment struggles.

Then got distracted with how crazy the power goals are o_o

Anyhow, it doesn't seem out of place...

[Scruiser]

Can you confirm what the numbers in the ORIENTATION token mean? Research tells me they're probably female_chance:bisexual_chance:male_chance, but I could be wrong (especially in the middle).

It's a by-caste tag, so you'd use it twice for each caste if you want to set all the numbers.  <male/female>:<disinterested chance>:<lover-possible chance>:<commitment-possible chance>  It uses the chances to put an individual critter into any of the 9 possible configurations.  Defaults are, if I remember, 75:20:5 for the same gender, and 5:20:75 for the opposite.  That leads to a 3x3 grid, with numbers in it.  I'm not invested in the current ones if there are better ideas, but it's probably not all that easy to make a good selection when the categorization is ad hoc anyway.  I would have used caste instead of gender to allow more interesting outcomes for many-casted critters, but the optimizations would be a nightmare (already had to jump from 2 to 6 relationship pools...).  Of course, all relationships are still eternal, so the lover thing is kind of broken now (sometimes it won't advance beyond lover because one of the parties is not interested in committing, but still neither ever breaks it off, ever...  not unrealistic in individual cases, but strange overall).

Oddly enough, we thought retired adventurers would start forming relationships with 0.40.01+, so we wanted to have a better spectrum available, but then we didn't get around to the gen/pre-retirement specification menu, so all adventurers are still tagged with the special "undetermined" flag...

Somewhat relevant quote from recent future of the fortress.
Hopefully, various states and states of marriage will be incorporated into the next relationship expansion/rewrite (which is definitely planned, like most things, as indicated by quote).  Ideally there will be an entire set of tokens for setting polygamy and polyamory on both the creature and entity level.

I think in the short term if you specifically want an insect civ, you could do like the old versions of the Masterwork Mod did and make a subcaste of your race non-sentient and pets.  Then the player could embark with more of them by selecting them as pets.  As pets, they also give birth outside of marriage.  I recall it was taken out because it was deemed too squicky (the subcaste was called "concubines") in the case of dwarfs, but it would work nicely with insects.

[Shazbot]

I think this would work well as an ethic, although I still love our fiercely monogamous dwarves. It seems to suit a jealous little race quite well.

And don't forget the joy of love-triangle-murders. Can you convict Urist McLegendaryMiner, coming home from two months of digging out the new grand palace, only to find his wife with Urist McHaulerSlacker? So what if the severed part flew off in an arc!

[GavJ]

Jealousy is not healthy for relationships.... Thus the fact that they are so successfully and lifelong monogamous is on the contrary evidence that they are much less jealous than we are, if anything (in the absence of any sort of infidelity murders or other features like that as of this point)

[Bohandas]

...for intelligent creatures to breed.

Something like [MARRIAGE_REQUIRED] in the entity raws. If present, then marriage is required for breeding.
[MARRIAGE_PREFERRED] make it the norm, but not absolutely necessary / some children are born out of wedlock.
[NO_MARRIAGE] or just leaving it blank makes the entity (or any creature without an entity) reproduce indiscriminately by global spores, like normal animals do.

This is not just for a touch of realistic flavor, but also an actually pretty important feature if you want to do something like, say, make a playable insect civilization or something.

I second this. There are many possible civilizations that this would be very useful for; not just insects.

[Shazbot]

Jealousy is not healthy for relationships.... Thus the fact that they are so successfully and lifelong monogamous is on the contrary evidence that they are much less jealous than we are, if anything (in the absence of any sort of infidelity murders or other features like that as of this point)

I'd wholeheartedly disagree, but its not the thread for it.

This is the thread for discussing fertility as a "hidden stat", menopause finally ending a female's reproductive career, and the notion of a priest noble officiating marriages versus the present common-law approach. I say yes to all.

[GoblinCookie]

This is not the main problem.  The problem is that they do not remarry. 

[GavJ]

This is not the main problem.  The problem is that they do not remarry.

It is a problem itself, because marriage is an abstract legal construct that does not alter the biological reality of fertilization, implantation, and pregnancy. It may be correlated, for social reasons, but should not be necessary to have children. It's also just very stiff and boring and culture-normative, which is especially out of place given Toady's usualy modus operandi of allowing you to let your dwarves torture, enslave, and eat their enemies and jam their heads on stakes, etc.

The issue of re-marriage is also an additional problem on top of that.

[GoblinCookie]

It is a problem itself, because marriage is an abstract legal construct that does not alter the biological reality of fertilization, implantation, and pregnancy. It may be correlated, for social reasons, but should not be necessary to have children. It's also just very stiff and boring and culture-normative, which is especially out of place given Toady's usualy modus operandi of allowing you to let your dwarves torture, enslave, and eat their enemies and jam their heads on stakes, etc.

The issue of re-marriage is also an additional problem on top of that.

It is a problem because we are work on the assumption that marriage actually does represent the entirety of sexuality in the culture, then we cannot have a prohibition on remarriage. 

We have also no evidence to believe that marriage is an abstract or legal concept in the dwarf fortress world.  The lack of illegitimacy can be explained if all lovers are considered married, but the lack of remarriage rather stretches the realms of what is believable in that case.