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[LMeire]

Toady made dwarven culture. Toady made dwarves. These dwarves are Toady's dwarves, not anybody else's dwarves. If he says they accept homosexuality, then they accept homosexuality. If he says that they are monogamous like some birds are, they are monogamous like some birds are.

Indeed. What I am suggesting is that Toady changes it. And last I checked, dwarves aren't birds, wouldn't they be more likely to be like mammals, where polygamy is the norm?...

Not necessarily, mythological dwarfs and elves were said by the Norse to have evolved from "maggots"- spontaneous generation style, like how rats were thought to magically appear in piles of grain and trees would magically regrow just because trees are found in forests. So if we go by the original source material, dwarfs are actually insect larvae and shouldn't actually have any sexuality at all, since maggots are just infant flies and there's no reason for transmogrified infants to have sexual instincts.

[Urist Tilaturist]

DF dwarves, as I have already said, are not the dwarves of anyone else's mythology. How traditional dwarves in Norse myths came about does not decide how DF dwarves came about.

[LMeire]

DF dwarves, as I have already said, are not the dwarves of anyone else's mythology. How traditional dwarves in Norse myths came about does not decide how DF dwarves came about.

I know, I'm just saying, interjecting real world taxonomy and/or other equally realistic canons into a fantasy universe is doomed to failure because despite every outside source being equally applicable, most will contradict one another.

[Urist Tilaturist]

The laws of the universe must be internally consistent, and this can be informed by reality, but not so much by other fantasy works.

[LMeire]

Well, fair enough. I'll try again using DF canon.

Giant animals are described as "giant monsters in the shape of a ___" rather than an "unusually large ____" or whatever. This tells me that a cigar is not always a cigar in DF just because it bears a mild resemblance, it might just be a walrus that looks like a cigar. Likewise, dwarfs resembling humans shouldn't be considered proof of common ancestry.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Giant creatures may or may not be relatives of normal creatures. I personally think they are, since real giant creatures were relations of the small ones (giant sloths and normal sloths, for example). I would also like to see pygmy creatures in DF, like pygmy elephants and horses.

What makes me think that dwarves and humans are not very closely related is cave adaptation. Dwarves are creatures suited to living underground. I think this means that they may be primates, but not very closely related - maybe as far away as a gibbon or even a monkey. They may also be unrelated and just similar by coincidence (some things evolve several times independently). Nothing is confirmed either way, but I think assuming that they are very similar to humans is a mistake.

[Deboche]

I think dwarves and humans are intimately related. They're certainly more similar to humans than any ape. We can't really discuss dwarven evolution though since we don't know enough about what happens before year 1.

Personally, I dislike this suggestion. I would be a little saddened to see it implemented for intelligent races.

EDIT: It would be nice, however, to see dwarven relationships expanded on some more to include cheating and divorce.

Well I saw a male human vampire had a husband. Think about that maybe polygamy is not as strange at all.

Please don't compare gay marriage to polygamy.

It seems that you have some prejudice against polygamy. Any rejection of polygamy is the same as rejection of homossexuality because it's an attempt to control someone else's sexuality and therefore their freedom.

In fact, cheating is a form of polygamy which scientist call sexual polygamy when it occurs in animal groups. The animals are socially monogamous yet have sex with several partners.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Do you not think that living underground and not needing any sunlight to stay healthy makes them somewhat less human like than other apes? Not all sapient beings are human like.

I would not say that chimps or even most mammals are monogamous in any way. What is "social monogamy"?

[LMeire]

It's hard to study animal relationships because we can't interview them and thus don't know what they're thinking when they do things, but the phrase I hear to describe human relationship preferences is typically "serial monogamy", meaning one partner at a time, but a lot of partners over time. The pattern seems to come from the fact that our brains physically and chemically restructure themselves over extended periods of time, effectively resulting in one person transforming into another seemingly overnight once the differences are too big to ignore.

People fall in love based on criteria unique to each person, then both partners become different and the relationship falls apart because one or both individuals fail to continue meeting the criteria. (Or else, because the criteria itself has changed to not fit the person.) Life-long faithful relationships only occur when a couple changes at the same rate and continue to complement one another. The chance is small, but with literally billions of potential matches over the course of history, it's a statistical inevitability that some couplings will be purely monogamous and perpetuate the myth that we're supposed to be that way.

[Lord_lemonpie]

I'm not really keen on dwarves being Polygamous, but i think Polygamous elves are a good idea. They're all hippies, so it kinda makes sense.

[Deboche]

Do you not think that living underground and not needing any sunlight to stay healthy makes them somewhat less human like than other apes? Not all sapient beings are human like.

I would not say that chimps or even most mammals are monogamous in any way. What is "social monogamy"?

I still think they're more like humans. They're apparently as intelligent, same body structure though with shorter stature and their facial features greatly resemble those of humans.

Definition from wikipedia:
Social monogamy refers to a male and female's social living arrangement (e.g., shared use of a territory, behaviour indicative of a social pair, and/or proximity between a male and female) without inferring any sexual interactions or reproductive patterns. In humans, social monogamy equals monogamous marriage. Sexual monogamy is defined as an exclusive sexual relationship between a female and a male based on observations of sexual interactions. Finally, the term genetic monogamy is used when DNA analyses can confirm that a female-male pair reproduce exclusively with each other.

the phrase I hear to describe human relationship preferences is typically "serial monogamy", meaning one partner at a time, but a lot of partners over time

This is up for debate right now among anthropologists, archaeologists and other experts but humans have been found to spontaneously develop several different kinds of moral dogma which affect the way they relate sexually. However, polygamy is very common among primitive peoples and perhaps it's our social conditioning that leads us to try having monogamic relationships which end up being short lived or where one or both partners ends up cheating.

[Urist Tilaturist]

I do not think that dwarves are as intelligent as humans - they see no problem with building workshops out of soap, for Armok's sake - but I may just have too high an opinion of humans.

[Putnam]

There is something called modding.

And the one instance of that was so awful that everyone agreed never to bring it up again and the instigator was banned.

[Sheb]

I do not think that dwarves are as intelligent as humans - they see no problem with building workshops out of soap, for Armok's sake - but I may just have too high an opinion of humans.

On the other hand, what human is capable to build a kitchen out of soap?

[SixOfSpades]

As for dwarven monogamy itself, I'd like to see it made less rigid than it is currently, but still far more strict than the serial monogamy (to say nothing of infidelity) of real-life humans. In general, I think dwarves should stay firmly attached to one partner--but if the partner dies or causes deep feelings of betrayal, the relationship should end and a period of 'mourning' should begin, during which time the dwarf will not seek romance, and rebuff all advances. A widowed dwarf will mourn for a period 50% as long as the couple was together (as lovers + spouses, as applicable), and the 'wronged' party of a divorced couple will mourn for 20% of that time. (The 'guilty' party might not mourn at all.) This would almost completely eliminate the "Oh you kissed me right before you marched out to your death so now I'm permanently condemned to a loveless existence" problem that we have now, thanks to the strictness of DF's romance laws.

For specific dwarves, I think the existing personality traits of Love_Propensity and Lust_Propensity should be augmented by a new trait, Promiscuity. Love_Propensity would determine a dwarf's willingness to let their loved ones into their hearts, Lust_Propensity would control a dwarf's desire to get into their loved one's pants, and Promiscuity would influence the number of loved ones a dwarf would want to have at a single time. A very high value of Promiscuity would lead a dwarf to cheat with multiple partners, even in a perfectly happy marriage, while an extremely low Promiscuity might cause a dwarf to direct all romantic and sexual impulses toward just one other--even if that other is already happily (and very exclusively) married, or not even living in the same fort any more.

Getting back to real-life biology for a minute: In general, males feel cheated on when their mate has physical sex with males OTHER than him--thus increasing the chance that the offspring she bears will not carry on the male's genes, so that the time & energy spent on courting her was wasted, not to mention the fact that he might be using HIS energy to help support some OTHER male's offspring.
In contrast, females primarily feel cheated on when their mate's emotional, rather than physical, attentions are directed at females other than her. He can inseminate all the women he wants to, that's not going to affect the genetics or welfare of HER children . . . but if he starts spending TIME with another woman, forming an emotional bond, then he might leave his spouse & devote the majority of his time & energy raising the kids he's had with this OTHER woman, leaving his original spouse (and their children) out in the cold.
For this reason, a husband might divorce his wife if her high Promiscuity and Lust_Propensity lead her to do the deed with another man, and a wife might do the same if her husband's high Promiscuity & Love_Propensity cause him to spend most of his free time with women other than her. For homosexual couples . . . I dunno.

As for polyamory, and homo/bisexuality, each dwarf could have these as personality traits: Promiscuity and one other. (You may argue that a single variable could not possibly encompass the wide array of genders & sexualities, like "effeminate male who is attracted to masculine females", and you'd be right--but since these are dwarves, and all dwarves are pretty darn masculine, I think we're fine using a single value, at least for now.)
Each civilization would have these same traits, randomized at worldgen: One for that civ's acceptance of citizens engaging in free love, and another for that civ's understanding of homosexual relationships. (Each civ's Promiscuity must be kept above a certain minimum, and Homosexuality below a certain maximum, or the whole civilization would likely die out in just a generation or two.) As each child is born, his stats in these traits are modified (to some degree) by the culture into which he was born--he will be expected to conform to society's standards, leading him to possibly feel confined by constrictive rules, and/or disgusted by the depraved antics of others.