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Definitely, yes.

I believe he should consider it.

Maybe.

I don't think it'd be a good idea.

Definitely not.

Don't care.

[GoblinCookie]

Seems a little tricky for kidnapped youngsters then. Do they recognize the goblin culture as their own, are are dwarven mental traits still inscribed in them? I've had no firsthand issues with dwarves taking part in a goblin siege.

The family is defined both biologically and culturally.  At the biological level we have a set of family arrangements that the creature *can* practice and then we have the culture that determines what the creature actually does. 

In this instance the children will adopt the goblin family system if the dwarf creature has that family system biologically defined in the raws.  If it is not then the dwarf will revert to monogamy which is the default dwarf biological setup. 

Humans are fairly flexible when it comes to marriage strategies, at least the "normal" ones.

Humans only have three marriage strategies, listed in terms of commonness.  One man and one woman, one man and several women, and one woman and several men.  What the common theme here is that all human marriage arrangements are inflexibly individualistic.  They are linear relations between individuals and not groups. 

While human polygamy does exist it does not resemble the polygamy of for instance a gorilla.  All the wives of the husband husband are separately married to him irrespective of their relationship to each-other.  A gorilla 'husband' however does not 'marry' the female gorillas individually, instead the whole female group 'marriage group' exists independently and is 'married' to a single gorilla.

We cannot really relate to the thinking of the female gorilla 'marriage groups', the idea of a non-sexual bond in a group that proceeds the marriage and involves the whole group 'marrying' a spouse.  We can even less relate the lion system by which it is two marriage groups and the groups relationship is not even to an individual. 

Again, there are types like cuttlefish, where the females lay so many eggs, they can afford to allow fertilization by multiple different donor males, choosing some who are strong, and some who are better at camouflage, but outside of that, humans can be anything from strictly monogamous to purely polyamorous. 

It is not best modeled as a spectrum.  It is better modeled as a set of competing sexual systems that exist in the same creature.  One of these systems is used by the entity to establish the 'legal' family structure but the others also continue to function extra-legally.

Also, to go back to swans for a second, many birds are strictly monogamous.  Much like how the game treats marriage now, they do not remarry.  In fact, many birds simply stop eating and die if their partner dies.  This is because, biologically, many birds have children so dependent upon both parents being there that the whole family will die if either parent dies.  A good example can be seen in the March of the Penguins documentary - if the mother for any reason fails to return, (such as being killed by a predator while hunting to restore her fat reserves,) father and child will starve to death waiting for her. 

Comparatively, most humans are serially monogamous.  (Although it differs in whether they remarry after death, remarry after divorce, or just start cheating after their old relationships grow cold.)

You have got it backwards.  Penguins are actually serially monogamous, only a few kinds of birds (swans) are actually monogamous. 

A penguin 'marries' only for the year and then the couple separate having raised their chicks to maturity. That is what serial monogamy as a system means, it means that the relationship is temporary, lasting only for a set period at the end of which the creatures separate.

Humans are very far from being serially monogamous, a human relationship is indefinite and the whole concept of a relationship having a set time frame is an alien one to human thinking (but not penguin thinking).  What you are clutching at is the dysfunctionality of the human system of monogamy rather than humans practicing a different system.

On the other end, a cheetah father does not stick around to care for his children, as the mother is capable of taking care of her young on her own, and as such, a cheetah male can mate with as many different females as he can successfully court. 

A male cheetah however makes sure to keep other male cheetah's from mating with the females in his territory.  Cheetahs therefore practice individual polygamy by which a male 'marries' a number of females that are not bound to each-other, ironically this is a human system also. 

Not that it isn't hard for a single mother now, but in a world before daycare was common in businesses and there were social welfare programs for mothers, single mothers that didn't have wealth (and weren't disinherited) were staring death in the face.  Throughout most of human existence, a single mother might possibly make it, especially thanks to her own family helping, but odds were far, far better for a child if both mother and father were raising the child together.  With that said, it's also just possible enough for a single mother to make it to make cheating, from a biological/evolutionary standpoint, worthwhile.  A male can have a "real" family, and have a mistress, and possibly raise twice as many children.  (A wealthy enough man can afford to have multiple wives/concubines/mistresses, regardless of official laws, and make sure they all are financially capable of surviving.)  It's also speculated that apes can show a reason why women have a biological capacity for cheating - when a new alpha male overthrows the old alpha, they tend to kill the children of the old alpha to make the females of the group no longer care for the children of another man, and make them ready to mate again.  A female that had cheated with the potential challenger to the throne, however, will put at least enough doubt in the mind of the challenger that they wouldn't automatically kill the female's offspring. 

Women have the biological capacity for 'cheating' probably because it allows them to replace their existing husband with a better one.  That gives them collectively a degree of leverage over the men and also allows them to avoid wasting their fertile years waiting for the perfect man but instead marry an 'acceptable' man; cheating allows them to ditch him for the perfect man if he comes along. 

So on the one hand, so long as it fits within the spectrum of what a human is biologically capable of doing, it would make sense that humans could adopt the moral rationale of the society they join.  On the other hand, humans are notoriously incapable of all being governed by the same set of marital rules. 

Some people are just born to philander no matter what the rules may be, and others will be singlemindedly monogamous even in a society that allows for polygamy.  Social mores will have significant impact, but ultimately, MANY people have cheated even in societies whose views of marriage ethics were [ETHIC:SEX_OUTSIDE_WEDLOCK:PUNISH_CAPITAL] and [ETHIC:INFIDELITY:PUNISH_CAPITAL]. 

Hence, for humanoid styles of reproduction, I would say it is probably best to have a strong innate tendency for some place on the spectrum, and it is moderated to a limited extent by the ethics of the civilization as a whole.  If you had it as a scale from 0 to 100 for human reproduction strategies, with 0 being strict (never remarry) monogamy, and 100 being Wilt Chamberlain levels of polyamory, then you might have a random number assigned at birth for their natural tendencies, and then average it out with the number in that spectrum where the society's ethics says they "should" be, and give the natural tendencies a weight of 3 or 4 times the size of the ethics. 

What I would do is give everyone all the marriage systems their creature type is capable of and give each of them an individual strength.  Marriage systems could be defined as follows at both caste and entity levels. 

Type of Marraige
Speed of marriage (how quickly the creature forms relationships along these lines)
Length of marriage (if present you have a serial marrying creature)
Marital instability (the probability of random breakdown)
Resurgence (the probability of a broken down marriage being restored)
Sexuality (this marriage type does not exist for a particular sexual orientation of the creature)

We have a distinction between biological and legal marriage status.  Creatures follow their biological marriage habits and form relationships accordingly.  Once those relationships exist creatures will try and legalize those relationships, but that can only happen if that is the marriage type the entity they belong to accepts. 

However once the marriage exists legally at the entity level it can break down at the biological level, resulting in a gap between the legal reality and the actual reality (empty shell marriages).  Once marriages have broken down the instability level of the entity determines how quickly we will end up with a divorce.

We do not model promiscuity as something that all creatures have that opposes marriage.  Instead we model it as another 'type' of marriage that competes with the other ones.  Let us say the humans are capable of four marriage systems.

Monogamy.
Male centric individual polygamy.
Female centric individual polygamy.
True promiscuity. 

In a monogamous human entity a human male forms a monogamous relationship with a human female.  They then get married because their relationship fits the legal form of the family in their entity.  Their marriage has a certain chance of breaking down resulting in an empty shell marriage.  The human male may then cheat on his wife either because another system than monogamy has competitive strength but he also may cheat because his marriage is an empty shell and he is monogamously forming another de-facto monogamous relationship.

Adultery is modeled just like normal relationships.  You have monogamous adultery, polygamous adultery and promiscuous adultery.  Jealously happens when a setup defined as illegal in a marriage system (such as having a second spouse for the monogamous) exists, so essentially it is the result of having clashing marriage systems biologically defined in the same creature.

[NW_Kohaku]

Humans only have three marriage strategies, listed in terms of commonness.  One man and one woman, one man and several men and one woman.

Even presuming you meant "one man and several women", that's just not true, as it assumes humans can only bear children within wedlock, which, again, is far from the case. 

After all, in modern society, near-anonymous sex with strangers isn't terribly uncommon, and throughout history, there have been people patronizing prostitutes who clearly have no exclusive sexual relations with one client, nor do those clients have exclusive relations with one prostitute.   

In spite of talking about how cultural concepts of family and biological family are different things later in your post, you are focusing purely upon biological family as being absolutely the same thing as a cultural family (through exclusive sexual bonding via marriage).  It basically enforces a Western European Tradition As All That Exists mindset.

A culture can have more wolf-like child-raising strategies, where a woman might become pregnant with a man, and not form a family with the man, but have extended family members or close friends in a social clique help take care of the children. 

In an extreme, in a strongly communal society, it might even be state-run creches where children are raised by the state, and not their biological parents, similar to Brave New World.

We cannot really relate to the thinking of the female gorilla 'marriage groups', the idea of a non-sexual bond in a group that proceeds the marriage and involves the whole group 'marrying' a spouse.  We can even less relate the lion system by which it is two marriage groups and the groups relationship is not even to an individual. 

We certainly can. 

Humans are not such special snowflakes that they have no parallels in their mating strategies in the animal world.  Besides which, from what you are writing, I believe you misunderstand what those animal mating strategies even are. Human child-raising strategies are hardly constricted to purely being based upon the biological father and mother rearing their children together ala bird strategies. Extended families, such as grandparents, sisters, and cousins, are frequently involved, and that very much replicates the strategies of lions or wolves. 

Lions and wolves, for that matter, do not practice as a "harem" where the male mates with all the females.  The male (which usually drives off the competition, so there usually is no "harem" of males, although some males live in pairs for most of their lives, and take on prides together,) only has sexual relations with the alpha and possibly beta lionesses.  This is more strongly pronounced with wolves, where alphas are generally the only ones to mate, and the deltas and so on are generally the mothers or aunts of the alpha female, who care for the young so the alpha can go back to hunting... again, much like a human grandparent babysitting for a mother who has to go to her job. 

And frankly, the only real dividing line between humans and bonobos in terms of biological imperatives is the strong (but hardly absolute) tendency for desire for sexual exclusivity in humans.  If a (human) woman finds out that her boyfriend is sleeping with her sisters or girlfriends, we generally expect she will be out for blood, however, that's hardly the only scenario, and there are those who practice polygamy with the likes of one male to multiple related females.  Whether it's done "all at once" or not could very much be within the bounds of cultural tradition.  (In fact, the one-female-many-men societies are almost exclusively based upon brothers all marrying a single woman at the same time simply by dent of being brothers. Taking one means taking them all.)

It is not best modeled as a spectrum.  It is better modeled as a set of competing sexual systems that exist in the same creature.  One of these systems is used by the entity to establish the 'legal' family structure but the others also continue to function extra-legally.

That is not really any different from what I already said; The culture has some stated expectations, and the people behave according to their own drives that are modified by social expectations.

In fact, I think most of what you are harping on as differences is that you're talking about what's legal and expected, and I'm talking about what's actually practiced, regardless of legal status.

You have got it backwards.  Penguins are actually serially monogamous, only a few kinds of birds (swans) are actually monogamous. 

A penguin 'marries' only for the year and then the couple separate having raised their chicks to maturity. That is what serial monogamy as a system means, it means that the relationship is temporary, lasting only for a set period at the end of which the creatures separate.

Humans are very far from being serially monogamous, a human relationship is indefinite and the whole concept of a relationship having a set time frame is an alien one to human thinking (but not penguin thinking).  What you are clutching at is the dysfunctionality of the human system of monogamy rather than humans practicing a different system.

Actually, I was only using penguins as an example of why strictly monogamous relations are more prevalent among birds than among humans, but sorry, I did state that in a way that could easily be confusing.  That said, there are other bird species that are long-term or lifelong monogamous, as well, besides just swans. 

(As an aside, Expwnent,  here's a good list of differentiating terms I found while looking for counterexamples...)

Beyond that, your assessment of how humans behave is just... wrong. Grabbing Wikipedia for ease of reference:

Serial monogamy is a mating practice in which individuals may engage in sequential monogamous pairings,[80] or in terms of humans, when men or women can marry another partner but only after ceasing to be married to the previous partner.[81]

One theory is that this pattern pacifies the elite men and equalizes reproductive success. This is called the Male Compromise Theory.[82] Such serial monogamy may effectively resemble polygyny in its reproductive consequences because some men are able to utilize more than one woman’s reproductive lifespan through repeated marriages.[83]

Serial monogamy may also refer to sequential sexual relationships, irrespective of marital status. A pair of humans may remain sexually exclusive, or monogamous, until the relationship has ended and then each may go on to form a new exclusive pairing with a different partner. This pattern of serial monogamy is common among people in Western cultures.[84][85]

Repeated cheating isn't just some "bug in the system" that has no bearing upon the nature of monogamy, it is the total failure of the system.  If you're cheating on your spouse, then you're not being strictly monogamous.  In fact, many humans aren't even really serially monogamous, as they can cheat while still having relations with their spouse, and some go so far as to set up "secret families".  (In some cases, even forging identities to be (il)legally married to both spouses...)

Again, this seems to be a problem of an unwillingness to see relationships through any lens other than legal marriage.  People are fully capable of having sex with strangers and permanent relationships with friends and family with whom they do not have sex, but which does have a bearing upon child-raising strategy and both should be modeled.

On the other end, a cheetah father does not stick around to care for his children, as the mother is capable of taking care of her young on her own, and as such, a cheetah male can mate with as many different females as he can successfully court. 

A male cheetah however makes sure to keep other male cheetah's from mating with the females in his territory.  Cheetahs therefore practice individual polygamy by which a male 'marries' a number of females that are not bound to each-other, ironically this is a human system also. 

Glad you can see the parallels...

Anyway, it should also be added that a male doesn't necessarily control the same territory for the entire reproductive life of a female, and females may be forced to migrate into the territory of other males.  Such cases would lead to a female accepting other males as her mate, although this would fall more under "Serial Monogamy" on the female's part.

Women have the biological capacity for 'cheating' probably because it allows them to replace their existing husband with a better one.  That gives them collectively a degree of leverage over the men and also allows them to avoid wasting their fertile years waiting for the perfect man but instead marry an 'acceptable' man; cheating allows them to ditch him for the perfect man if he comes along. 

This is sort of an aside to the original point, but your argument is assuming a "perfect man" is not only objectively definable, but statically defined.  Humans are social creatures, and, much like said apes, it can pay to hitch your wagon to a rising star, and abandon a falling one before it drags you down with it.  Although men definitely abandon women as they grow older at a far greater rate, women may find attraction to different types of men as they enter different life or emotional stages.  (They might prefer an "older man" that seems "protective" when in their late teens and emotionally vulnerable, then find that the same man is "stifling" when they are older, and seek out someone who has less expectations of control.  Such talks really start to head down the path of lower forums discussions, though...) 

Considering the history of human marital relations, especially where the male social elite were (and still are) serially monogamous (if not outright polygamous) in practice, where wealthy/socially powerful older men may take on extremely young brides, cheating may be the only way to produce "heirs" for said man. 

What I would do is give everyone all the marriage systems their creature type is capable of and give each of them an individual strength.  Marriage systems could be defined as follows at both caste and entity levels. 
[etc.]

While I can understand what logic you might have in these token suggestions, they rest upon flawed assumptions...

I'm not sure there is really a "speed of relationships" that you could set for humans.  A pair of birds or spawning salmon or monarch butterflies might have some biological clock that demands searching for mates at specific times, and courtships that are programmed into them to be a certain length, but this is not something that happens in humans.  Some humans rush into marriages after a month or two, while others go several years before marriage. 

You're also assuming serial monogamy can only exist based upon time, and that it's, again, strictly equal for all individuals.  Some people "lose the flame" a few months into said marriage (I can't help but snarkily note that it's frequently the same people who had one-month courtships...) and divorce and go out to try remarrying someone else.  Others go decades, then have some mid-life crisis affair.  Others still can go their whole lives.  (The way that we're all told we're supposed to, but 50% of us don't.)

Marital instability and resurgence being a biological thing defined in the raws is a rather bad way of modeling the concepts. Instability should be a matter of modeling proper "rough spots" in relationships, and possibly a decay in interest in the partner based upon time and tendency towards serial monogamy, until relationship values drop below the level where they are willing to maintain the relationship. Resurgence should really be a matter of emergent gameplay, with characters that have a falling out deciding to patch it back up, or else, in animal terms, with the same mate happening to keep rights to a given female. 

That said, you're again defining relationships and marriage as the same thing in this model, in spite of acknowledging that it's really not how human relationships work.

In a monogamous human entity a human male forms a monogamous relationship with a human female.  They then get married because their relationship fits the legal form of the family in their entity.  Their marriage has a certain chance of breaking down resulting in an empty shell marriage.  The human male may then cheat on his wife either because another system than monogamy has competitive strength but he also may cheat because his marriage is an empty shell and he is monogamously forming another de-facto monogamous relationship.

Adultery is modeled just like normal relationships.  You have monogamous adultery, polygamous adultery and promiscuous adultery.  Jealously happens when a setup defined as illegal in a marriage system (such as having a second spouse for the monogamous) exists, so essentially it is the result of having clashing marriage systems biologically defined in the same creature.

Mildly off-topic, but I do just have to chuckle at how utterly ridiculous it is to sit here talking about a seeming dice-roll boardgame view of relationships where a toss of the die determines whether you have an "empty shell marriage".    Sorry, try divorcing, and rolling again! 

Anyway, you're setting up much too stiff and formal a system that relies primarily upon marriage as the defining trait of human relationships, and then treats other relations as some percentile side-event. 

Rather than that, it makes much more sense to set up a framework whereby individual characters have innate drives that push them to seek out specific kinds of relationships, sexual, romantic, legal, social, or familial, or some combination of those, with different drives.  You set up conditions whereby someone will declare an intent to enter into marriage (a formal, legal relationship) but where someone might still have a thing for another character, and it might eventually turn into a both sexual and romantic relationship without the legal relation of marriage.  (This is actually how the game already seems to work...)

You just add in some sorts of personality traits that have certain powers

A good way to make this variable between species is making some sort of multiplier based upon species that makes personality traits more or less influential in the individual's behavior.  Hence, a serially monogamous bird that never seeks to mate again with the same mate (except by sheer random accident) may have something like that length of relationship timer with little variability, but a human may have a personality trait (or traits) that significantly differentiate how long they will be in a relationship before they start losing interest in their partner. 

This sort of model would be far more emergent in its behavior, rather than forcing a top-down approach of a strictly defined marital relationship and some other cheating relationship.  People who are serially monogamous are people who "lose the flame", and seek out new partners, but are monogamous to those partners while they still have "the flame".  People who are strictly monogamous are people who form deep attachments (I.E. very high EMOTIONALLY_OBSESSIVE personality trait).

It would also be helpful to make relationships more than simply a single number with the top number representing "marriage"...

You might have different values for every relationship, with a "Sexual Attraction" value, which likely goes down with time.  If someone has a personality where sexual attraction is a key part of their interest in others (high LUST_PROPENSITY), and low emotional attachment (low EMOTIONALLY_OBSESSIVE), this may result in love dropping easily as sexual attraction fades. 

Then, you have a "Social Relations" value that applies to how friendly they are in general.  This would keep love from just being a higher value of friendship than just being friends, and making sexual orientation just a cap on relation values.  It could also open up the amusing and storytelling-appropriate chance for two people to be sexually attracted to one another, but hate each other socially.  (ENVY_PROPENSITY, HATE_PROPENSITY, DISCORD, CONFIDENCE, VANITY, CRUELTY, HOPEFUL, TOLERANT, TRUST, GREGARIOUSNESS, and possibly some others can all float around to make different relations better or worse.)

"Love" would be suited to powerful relations that would drive one towards forming family with the object of their love.  Depending on how you want to put it, you might have a distinction between "romantic" and a "familial love", as well.  (Not all brothers or parents and children love each other as much as others do.) Regardless, strong love means a strong desire to help, protect, and be with the object of that love.  (Which is why you might make it just "Love" for both familial and romantic love, and just differentiate them with the (hopeful) absence of sexual desire.)

"Legal Status" could then just be a binary status as to whether someone is married, or possibly otherwise related, such as a sister, uncle, or cousin.  This may have some effect upon people who view marriage as a high ideal trying to keep a marriage going, but it wouldn't be directly related to how two individuals strictly feel about one another, and divorces, then, would just be a matter of crumbling love scores.

You could also potentially throw in other factors, like "Trust" or "Familiarity".  (As the saying goes, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.)  Such factors could be required building blocks of solid relationships, and damage to something like trust could lead to severely unstable relationships.   

Cheating, when one has an expectation of or desire for faithfulness, could be sharp blows to love relationships, then.  High EMOTIONALLY_OBSESSIVE types might desire faithfulness even in a social structure where it is not expected.  (One wife in a polygamous relationship is highly upset when her husband spends time with the other wives.) Low ones might not care much, even if shown proof of infidelity in supposedly exclusive relationships, like monogamous marriage cultures. 

Even outside cheating, you could set up ways for relationships (romantic or not) to be damaged routinely.  A simple way would be to make dwarves experiencing stress "have a bad mood" and take it out on those they have relationships with, whose effect is multiplied by the likes of ANGER_PROPENSITY, DEPRESSION_PROPENSITY, VENGEFUL, or VIOLENT. 

[GoblinCookie]

Even presuming you meant "one man and several women", that's just not true, as it assumes humans can only bear children within wedlock, which, again, is far from the case. 

After all, in modern society, near-anonymous sex with strangers isn't terribly uncommon, and throughout history, there have been people patronizing prostitutes who clearly have no exclusive sexual relations with one client, nor do those clients have exclusive relations with one prostitute.   

In spite of talking about how cultural concepts of family and biological family are different things later in your post, you are focusing purely upon biological family as being absolutely the same thing as a cultural family (through exclusive sexual bonding via marriage).  It basically enforces a Western European Tradition As All That Exists mindset.

A culture can have more wolf-like child-raising strategies, where a woman might become pregnant with a man, and not form a family with the man, but have extended family members or close friends in a social clique help take care of the children. 

In an extreme, in a strongly communal society, it might even be state-run creches where children are raised by the state, and not their biological parents, similar to Brave New World.

I do not know why you think I am Western European Tradition biased given that Polygamy and Polyandry are not part of the Western European Tradition.

99.9% of societies fit the bill.  Perhaps there are 0.01% of societies that are different but pretty much all family structures of pretty much all societies fit the bill, the overwhelming majority of societies are either monogamous or polygamous with a tiny number being polyandrous.  On analysis then while true promiscuity manifests itself in all societies, virtually all societies do not construct their family structure on a promiscuous basis. 

It is certainly feasible to constuct a social order on that basis yet no such social order has ever came about despite it's feasability.  Therefore it is realistic to model promiscuity as something that exists at the creature level for humans (and so will always occur in human societies) but exclude it as an option for human societies. 

We certainly can. 

Humans are not such special snowflakes that they have no parallels in their mating strategies in the animal world.  Besides which, from what you are writing, I believe you misunderstand what those animal mating strategies even are. Human child-raising strategies are hardly constricted to purely being based upon the biological father and mother rearing their children together ala bird strategies. Extended families, such as grandparents, sisters, and cousins, are frequently involved, and that very much replicates the strategies of lions or wolves. 

Lions and wolves, for that matter, do not practice as a "harem" where the male mates with all the females.  The male (which usually drives off the competition, so there usually is no "harem" of males, although some males live in pairs for most of their lives, and take on prides together,) only has sexual relations with the alpha and possibly beta lionesses.  This is more strongly pronounced with wolves, where alphas are generally the only ones to mate, and the deltas and so on are generally the mothers or aunts of the alpha female, who care for the young so the alpha can go back to hunting... again, much like a human grandparent babysitting for a mother who has to go to her job. 

And frankly, the only real dividing line between humans and bonobos in terms of biological imperatives is the strong (but hardly absolute) tendency for desire for sexual exclusivity in humans.  If a (human) woman finds out that her boyfriend is sleeping with her sisters or girlfriends, we generally expect she will be out for blood, however, that's hardly the only scenario, and there are those who practice polygamy with the likes of one male to multiple related females.  Whether it's done "all at once" or not could very much be within the bounds of cultural tradition.  (In fact, the one-female-many-men societies are almost exclusively based upon brothers all marrying a single woman at the same time simply by dent of being brothers. Taking one means taking them all.)

I was the one that said that humans were not special snowflakes first.  Humans are quite ordinary in their sexual/family behaviors, bonobos are however indeed special snowflakes. There is a massive gulf between the sexual behaviors of bonobos and humans.  Indeed not only is that the case but bonobo sexual psychology is incredibly alien not only to humans but actually to every other creature in existance that I am aware of.  All other creatures have sexual desires that are directed at particular sexual objects (social order and harmony be damned), bonobos however have sex almost entirely to avoid conflict, with no apparant discrimation or sexual 'orientation' to speak of. 

Your ignorance of modern knowledge of animal family structures is pretty great.  Wolves usually operate on a monogamous basis, the male "alpha" and female "alpha" wolves are normally mated and the other wolves are their children.  The children wander off on their own, meet other wolves of the opposite sex and breed their own packs.  Why the existing extended family does collectively help bring up the pups once it exists, the extended family is initially bred by two wolves monogamously bonding and bringing up their pups alone.  The problem with relying on extended family is that initially no such thing exists, the grandparents are forced to start off alone so that such a thing can exist.

Lions on the other hand are rarely alone in a pride; kions form groups before trying to claim a group of lionesses that is usually larger than their group.  The reason they do this is that there is strength in numbers, a bigger group of lions defeats a smaller group of lions and a single lion is defeated by a small group of lions.  The lions share the lionesses among them and the lionesses themselves largely determine how fair that distribution is (sexual selection is believed to be why lions have manes).  The confusing thing to us is that lions care who sires the cubs, but they do not object to sharing fatherhood with the other members of the same group of lions but yet actually kill off out-group lion cubs. 

Similar (male) arrangements exists among chimpanzees, by which a group shares fatherhood in order to increase their own combat power.  The difference is that while lion groups are bonded to a lioness group that is itself bonded irrespective of anything they do, chimpanzee females are not bonded to eachother but are bonded to the whole group of male chimpanzees.  Like lions champanzees exhibit a violent 'collective jealousy' by which they kill off babies concieved by other groups of chimpanzees but no individual jealousy, being happy to share the females in their group freely (this why they have enormous testicles). 

That is not really any different from what I already said; The culture has some stated expectations, and the people behave according to their own drives that are modified by social expectations.

In fact, I think most of what you are harping on as differences is that you're talking about what's legal and expected, and I'm talking about what's actually practiced, regardless of legal status.

  Yes we are largely in agreement.  All I was pointing out is that it is better to model promiscuity as a rival system defined alongside the others rather than as a value because that way we can have promiscious societies where that is the legal norm.

Actually, I was only using penguins as an example of why strictly monogamous relations are more prevalent among birds than among humans, but sorry, I did state that in a way that could easily be confusing.  That said, there are other bird species that are long-term or lifelong monogamous, as well, besides just swans. 

(As an aside, Expwnent,  here's a good list of differentiating terms I found while looking for counterexamples...)

Beyond that, your assessment of how humans behave is just... wrong. Grabbing Wikipedia for ease of reference:
Serial monogamy is a mating practice in which individuals may engage in sequential monogamous pairings,[80] or in terms of humans, when men or women can marry another partner but only after ceasing to be married to the previous partner.[81]

One theory is that this pattern pacifies the elite men and equalizes reproductive success. This is called the Male Compromise Theory.[82] Such serial monogamy may effectively resemble polygyny in its reproductive consequences because some men are able to utilize more than one woman’s reproductive lifespan through repeated marriages.[83]

Serial monogamy may also refer to sequential sexual relationships, irrespective of marital status. A pair of humans may remain sexually exclusive, or monogamous, until the relationship has ended and then each may go on to form a new exclusive pairing with a different partner. This pattern of serial monogamy is common among people in Western cultures.[84][85]

Yes there are a number of truly monogamous birds but serial monogamy is essentiallly the norm.  Serial monogamy is not when a creature that happens to end up by dint of 'marital' breakdown or mate death end up pair-bonding with more than a single other individual in it's lifetime.  The use of the serially monogamous penguins as examples of monogamy is one of the more irritating bad habits of culture, especially given that there are actually monogamous birds like swans around. 

A penguin pair gets together in order to raise a single batch of chicks to adulthood and once the job is done the penguin pair seperate and go their own seperate ways.  If humans were serially monogamous on this basis then they would have a few children, wait until they got to 16 and then they would immediately divorce on perfectly good terms.  Instead we see some human marraiges break down in weeks and others last for 60 years. 

Swans by contrast are actually monogamous.  A swan pair gets itself a lake all to itself and settles down.  Every year they produce a batch of cignets and then if they survive to adulthood those cignets fly off by the end of the year.  Next year they repeat the process until one of the swans dies.  Now serial monogamy as a thing is not the same as serial monogamy as a system (see above).  If every year I decided to have the female swan for dinner and left the male swan alive then the male swan might then 'marry' again, I then eat the next female swan (and so on).  We cannot simply declare that swans are serially monogamous like penguins simply because circumstances have resulted in a swan having multiple partners over it's lifetime. 

Repeated cheating isn't just some "bug in the system" that has no bearing upon the nature of monogamy, it is the total failure of the system.  If you're cheating on your spouse, then you're not being strictly monogamous.  In fact, many humans aren't even really serially monogamous, as they can cheat while still having relations with their spouse, and some go so far as to set up "secret families".  (In some cases, even forging identities to be (il)legally married to both spouses...)

Again, this seems to be a problem of an unwillingness to see relationships through any lens other than legal marriage.  People are fully capable of having sex with strangers and permanent relationships with friends and family with whom they do not have sex, but which does have a bearing upon child-raising strategy and both should be modeled.

Perhaps there is no point of looking at relationships through any other lens than legal marraige?  That is because it clearly did not happen that somebody decreed 'let there be marraige' in the distant past and then everybody got married.  Instead they likely just took the existing sexual order and tried to make a register of who was 'pair-bonded' to eachother for taxation/inheritance/administrative reasons but that order was the way it was for other reasons than their will. 

There is a difference between different systems and a single system breaking down.  If one monogamous relationship that is stronger crushes a weaker monogamous relationship and destroys it, that is not a breakdown of monogamy as a system, since both are singular examples of the same system.  If the two relationships were able to coexist harmoniously together then that *would* constitute a breakdown of monogamy and the rise of polygamy even if legally speaking one was only able to be married to one spouse. 

An adulturous love affair then is often more of an example of the battle of the monogamies than an example of any opposing system. 

Glad you can see the parallels...

Anyway, it should also be added that a male doesn't necessarily control the same territory for the entire reproductive life of a female, and females may be forced to migrate into the territory of other males.  Such cases would lead to a female accepting other males as her mate, although this would fall more under "Serial Monogamy" on the female's part.

Not really since the female is still not trying to establish any tempory exclusive relationship with any particular male.  It is an example of individual polygamy since the jealously is one-way.  It is also potentially a case of the stronger polygamy winning out since the male with the best territory will tend to be where the immigration goes. 

This is sort of an aside to the original point, but your argument is assuming a "perfect man" is not only objectively definable, but statically defined.  Humans are social creatures, and, much like said apes, it can pay to hitch your wagon to a rising star, and abandon a falling one before it drags you down with it.  Although men definitely abandon women as they grow older at a far greater rate, women may find attraction to different types of men as they enter different life or emotional stages.  (They might prefer an "older man" that seems "protective" when in their late teens and emotionally vulnerable, then find that the same man is "stifling" when they are older, and seek out someone who has less expectations of control.  Such talks really start to head down the path of lower forums discussions, though...) 

Considering the history of human marital relations, especially where the male social elite were (and still are) serially monogamous (if not outright polygamous) in practice, where wealthy/socially powerful older men may take on extremely young brides, cheating may be the only way to produce "heirs" for said man.

The perfect man evolutionary speaking is pretty much solidly defined.  Problem is that a minority of individuals are always evolutionary deviants (homosexuals are such) who do things that make no reproductive sense but the majority always does what makes sense.  The perfect human man in evolutionary terms for instance would have all these things.

+Generous - Selfish
+Nonviolent towards females -Violent towards females.
+Powerful - Powerless.
+Wealthy - Poor
+Young - Old
+Nonviolent towards children -Violent toward children.
+Monogamous -Polygamous
+Adores children -Hates children
+Strong -Weak
+Healthy -Sickly
+Intelligent -Stupid
+Agile -Clumsy
+Skilled -Unskilled
+Fertile -Barren

Quite a long list really.  A female can either wait for the perfect man that has all the above traits wasting valuable reproductive years or she can immediately marry the male that is the best that can be gotten at the moment and then 'defect' when a better man comes along. 

While I can understand what logic you might have in these token suggestions, they rest upon flawed assumptions...

I'm not sure there is really a "speed of relationships" that you could set for humans.  A pair of birds or spawning salmon or monarch butterflies might have some biological clock that demands searching for mates at specific times, and courtships that are programmed into them to be a certain length, but this is not something that happens in humans.  Some humans rush into marriages after a month or two, while others go several years before marriage. 

You're also assuming serial monogamy can only exist based upon time, and that it's, again, strictly equal for all individuals.  Some people "lose the flame" a few months into said marriage (I can't help but snarkily note that it's frequently the same people who had one-month courtships...) and divorce and go out to try remarrying someone else.  Others go decades, then have some mid-life crisis affair.  Others still can go their whole lives.  (The way that we're all told we're supposed to, but 50% of us don't.)

This is a computer game so of course we have to have a clock for it.  That is how computer games work.  Obviously how quickly a creature develops new romances of a given type is a factor and I never said there cannot be individual variations away from the mean.

Your serial monogamy idea is wrong for the same reason you have a problem with my idea of a speed of relationships clock.  There is simply no consistant ending point at which human relationships break down.  For serial monogamy to be a system there has to a built in clock by which a fully functioning relationship simply ends.  If there is no built in clock what we are talking about is something breaking down because of something.  Either an internal thing or an external thing, but fact is still the case that human relationships do not break down in some kind of bubble when some kind of clock strikes 12. 

Marital instability and resurgence being a biological thing defined in the raws is a rather bad way of modeling the concepts. Instability should be a matter of modeling proper "rough spots" in relationships, and possibly a decay in interest in the partner based upon time and tendency towards serial monogamy, until relationship values drop below the level where they are willing to maintain the relationship. Resurgence should really be a matter of emergent gameplay, with characters that have a falling out deciding to patch it back up, or else, in animal terms, with the same mate happening to keep rights to a given female. 

That said, you're again defining relationships and marriage as the same thing in this model, in spite of acknowledging that it's really not how human relationships work.

If a couple is unable to marry for legal reasons or because they choose not to for whatever reason, the relationship tends to behave exactly as it would if they married.

The only real difference legal marraige actually makes is that it creates a situation where two people are "supposed to be together" but are not.  That is it creates a fictional relationship between people.  If they are in an (entirely) fictional marraige then there is no reason why a perfectly monogamous creature could not have an extral-legal relationship. 

Mildly off-topic, but I do just have to chuckle at how utterly ridiculous it is to sit here talking about a seeming dice-roll boardgame view of relationships where a toss of the die determines whether you have an "empty shell marriage".    Sorry, try divorcing, and rolling again! 

Anyway, you're setting up much too stiff and formal a system that relies primarily upon marriage as the defining trait of human relationships, and then treats other relations as some percentile side-event. 

Rather than that, it makes much more sense to set up a framework whereby individual characters have innate drives that push them to seek out specific kinds of relationships, sexual, romantic, legal, social, or familial, or some combination of those, with different drives.  You set up conditions whereby someone will declare an intent to enter into marriage (a formal, legal relationship) but where someone might still have a thing for another character, and it might eventually turn into a both sexual and romantic relationship without the legal relation of marriage.  (This is actually how the game already seems to work...)

I do not consider discussing how to develop dwarf (and other creature's) relationships/marriages to be ridiculous at all.  I am not using marraige as the defining trait of human relationships, I am using a creatures relationships as the template for it's legal marital behavior. 

There is a potential for all manner of interesting extra-legal relationships in my system.  Since legal marraiges are based upon the entity's marraige system it is quite possible for an extra-legal relationship to become a marraige when the relationship's members move to a different entity that has a different marraige system. 

You just add in some sorts of personality traits that have certain powers

A good way to make this variable between species is making some sort of multiplier based upon species that makes personality traits more or less influential in the individual's behavior.  Hence, a serially monogamous bird that never seeks to mate again with the same mate (except by sheer random accident) may have something like that length of relationship timer with little variability, but a human may have a personality trait (or traits) that significantly differentiate how long they will be in a relationship before they start losing interest in their partner. 

This sort of model would be far more emergent in its behavior, rather than forcing a top-down approach of a strictly defined marital relationship and some other cheating relationship.  People who are serially monogamous are people who "lose the flame", and seek out new partners, but are monogamous to those partners while they still have "the flame".  People who are strictly monogamous are people who form deep attachments (I.E. very high EMOTIONALLY_OBSESSIVE personality trait).

It would also be helpful to make relationships more than simply a single number with the top number representing "marriage"...

You might have different values for every relationship, with a "Sexual Attraction" value, which likely goes down with time.  If someone has a personality where sexual attraction is a key part of their interest in others (high LUST_PROPENSITY), and low emotional attachment (low EMOTIONALLY_OBSESSIVE), this may result in love dropping easily as sexual attraction fades. 

Then, you have a "Social Relations" value that applies to how friendly they are in general.  This would keep love from just being a higher value of friendship than just being friends, and making sexual orientation just a cap on relation values.  It could also open up the amusing and storytelling-appropriate chance for two people to be sexually attracted to one another, but hate each other socially.  (ENVY_PROPENSITY, HATE_PROPENSITY, DISCORD, CONFIDENCE, VANITY, CRUELTY, HOPEFUL, TOLERANT, TRUST, GREGARIOUSNESS, and possibly some others can all float around to make different relations better or worse.)

"Love" would be suited to powerful relations that would drive one towards forming family with the object of their love.  Depending on how you want to put it, you might have a distinction between "romantic" and a "familial love", as well.  (Not all brothers or parents and children love each other as much as others do.) Regardless, strong love means a strong desire to help, protect, and be with the object of that love.  (Which is why you might make it just "Love" for both familial and romantic love, and just differentiate them with the (hopeful) absence of sexual desire.)

"Legal Status" could then just be a binary status as to whether someone is married, or possibly otherwise related, such as a sister, uncle, or cousin.  This may have some effect upon people who view marriage as a high ideal trying to keep a marriage going, but it wouldn't be directly related to how two individuals strictly feel about one another, and divorces, then, would just be a matter of crumbling love scores.

You could also potentially throw in other factors, like "Trust" or "Familiarity".  (As the saying goes, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.)  Such factors could be required building blocks of solid relationships, and damage to something like trust could lead to severely unstable relationships.   

Cheating, when one has an expectation of or desire for faithfulness, could be sharp blows to love relationships, then.  High EMOTIONALLY_OBSESSIVE types might desire faithfulness even in a social structure where it is not expected.  (One wife in a polygamous relationship is highly upset when her husband spends time with the other wives.) Low ones might not care much, even if shown proof of infidelity in supposedly exclusive relationships, like monogamous marriage cultures. 

Even outside cheating, you could set up ways for relationships (romantic or not) to be damaged routinely.  A simple way would be to make dwarves experiencing stress "have a bad mood" and take it out on those they have relationships with, whose effect is multiplied by the likes of ANGER_PROPENSITY, DEPRESSION_PROPENSITY, VENGEFUL, or VIOLENT.

I generally like your above ideas.  However they are overly based upon your own view of human nature and limit all creatures to operating according to how think human beings work.  How exactly do we model swans or swan-like monogamous creatures in your model?  My model would model it well by setting the swans marital instability value to 0.  Swans therefore never get divorced because there is 0 probability of their relationship ever losing point. 

You have lustful swans, loving swans, emotionally obsessive swans etc, but none of them ever get divorced.  The way we do this is to have the creature's lustful and loving scores set up two values which must not both reach 0 or else the relationship is considered over.  Then we model the instability of love AND lust within the particular form of relationship as different values.  Swans both have 0 love instability and 0 lust breakdown, meaning that swans will never breakup whatever their personality is.  When there is a positive value then there is a random % of damage being done to the relationships lust or love value, this damage accumalates over time.  Emotionally obsessiveness can work directly to repair 'damage' and restore the other values to their original level.  Ideal personalities for a relationship are highly lustful, high loving and highly emotionally obsessive. 

We use the lowest values whether of the entity (when legally married) or the creature, this means that legal marraige can potentially increase relationship stability (or not).  Other issues are group marraiges (like lions), we could solve that by taking the average personality of all the marraige group and relating it to the other marraige group or to a single individual's personality and serial relationships.  Serial relationships would always break down according to the clock but could also break down prematurely according to this system.

[Rex Invictus]

There's a lot of talking here.

[NW_Kohaku]

There's a lot of talking here.

Yes, yes there is. 

It's what tends to happen when fairly verbose types collide.

I'll try to get more to the point on this one. (HAHA! Screw that, I spent the half of the day I wasn't sleeping at this one post!)  I'm not feeling particularly well, anyway...

I do not know why you think I am Western European Tradition biased given that Polygamy and Polyandry are not part of the Western European Tradition.

99.9% of societies fit the bill.  Perhaps there are 0.01% of societies that are different but pretty much all family structures of pretty much all societies fit the bill, the overwhelming majority of societies are either monogamous or polygamous with a tiny number being polyandrous.  On analysis then while true promiscuity manifests itself in all societies, virtually all societies do not construct their family structure on a promiscuous basis. 

It is certainly feasible to constuct a social order on that basis yet no such social order has ever came about despite it's feasability.  Therefore it is realistic to model promiscuity as something that exists at the creature level for humans (and so will always occur in human societies) but exclude it as an option for human societies.

I say this because you are treating what a society proclaims its values and institutions  to be, and how people actually live their lives to be one and the same. 

You are treating extra-marital affairs as just some something that has no particular impact and no relevance to whether someone is monogamous or not, and dismissing a tremendous proportion of human social relations because of it. 

Even within the context of Western Civilization, the current President of France is practicing promiscuity.  That is, going through a series of relationships with different women without marriage or any other legal relation like one to any of them.  Yes, he may have stayed with one woman for a long time without marrying her, but that, in and of itself, is not something your plan models, and it's not really monogamy if he then separated with her and started going through at best serial monogamy with multiple other partners afterwards.

Genghis Khan infamously raped his way through so much of Eurasia that nearly a quarter of Asia is believed to be among his direct biological descendants. (Not that we necessarily want to model THAT in the game...) Even Charlemagne, grandfather of modern Europe, and first "Holy Roman Emperor" had concubines before the Roman Catholic Church managed to muster enough power to put an end to the practice in later generations of kings and emperors. 

You are discounting the role of extended families in the raising of children, which is a large point of why I bring up wolf-type strategies.  You are focusing exclusively upon mother and father.  And yes, extended families absolutely are a part of most society's child-raising strategies. 

Children being raised by aunts, brothers, grandparents, adoptive parents, or state institutions such as orphanages has always existed.  Not to the Brave New World or Plato's Republic levels of universality, for sure, but in effect, the system you are arguing (and the partially-implemented system as we have it now) essentially states that nobody but the biological parent are even capable of child-rearing. 

You are expressing a very narrow band of human experience as the only way that families can ever possibly be formed. 

Segment starting with: "I was the one that said that humans were not special snowflakes first." 

Simply because I skip to the relevant points of behavior does not mean I do not understand the existence of said behavior.  Wolves build the social structures I said they build, and just because this isn't the sum total of their behavior, that does not disprove the assertion. 

If the fact that wolves can fit into two-wolf "monogamous packs" when they have gone off on their own somehow disproved extended familial child-rearing, then the mere existence of cheating and divorce would be capable of disproving monogamy in humans. 

As for bonobos, if you think that humans have never used sex as a social commodity... well, it's called the Oldest Known Profession for a reason.  Sex has always been a powerful social weapon and tool in human society. When used as a way of smoothing relations to get further up the social ladder, it's called "Sleeping your way to the top." Sex "as a means of preventing conflict" is an apt description of the arranged marriages of Medieval Europe.  The sex that bonobos have isn't at all alien, it's just that they didn't build up complex layers of social stigmatization for all those behaviors such that they are only done in secret where people pretend it isn't the case. 

The problem is, you have to look past that facade to make a real simulation of human social structures. 

Yes we are largely in agreement.  All I was pointing out is that it is better to model promiscuity as a rival system defined alongside the others rather than as a value because that way we can have promiscious societies where that is the legal norm.

I never said that promiscuity shouldn't be a norm, but what I'm saying is that these things aren't really as cut-and-dry as you're (sometimes) claiming them to be. 

Not all swans are strictly monogamous (they are less likely than other birds, but they can simply choose not to pair off again after raising children, without death of the partner,) not all wolves are strictly polygamous, as you yourself just argued, not all humans within the same culture abide by the same rules.

Setting up cut-and-dry systems, and saying "this culture has monogamous marriages as its ONLY relationship" is a flawed system.  You can't say that "most people were monogamous in most societies" as was previously argued in this thread, and just use that to blanket-apply monogamy to all characters while ignoring the polygamous systems that were the legal norm, and which members of other classes used. 

Promiscuity isn't so much a legal structure as just a thing that happens when people aren't monogamous.  (Or polygamous, for that matter.)

This is why I'm saying it should be more like a scale.  Maybe not a 1-dimensional scale, maybe there can be multiple social values that people hold up as different ideals, and that mashes out into some general range of behaviors that are acceptable, and what the punishments for transgressions of those norms should be. 

People will tend to bow to a certain extent to the social norms of their society, but reject them when their own internal bent is too different from what society expects of them. 

America just had its big gay marriage legalization moment, so now, there's official legal recognition of monogamy for gay couples, but that's not the only social metric one should track.  Even 10 years ago, before there was any real momentum for gay marriage, there was a vastly different set of social and legal ramifications for trying to openly be a gay couple than there were 50 years ago. 

"Beards", (not the good, dwarven kind,) "keeping it on the down-low", being a "confirmed bachelor", and just plain denial were the main hallmarks of coping with a society that did not recognize homosexuality as anything but a mental illness or a sin.  Nevertheless, gay people, as per their natural inclinations, just couldn't follow what the law and social structure set out for them.

Similarly, (if not as biologically hardwired into our being,) we have a culture that celebrates monogamy, but there are people who just don't follow it, one way or another.  There are differences in how socially acceptable different cultures see having a mistress on the side, with places like, again, France, generally not caring all that much, even if they are hypothetically a culture that espouses monogamy and disallows polygamous marriages.  (This is before we even get into gender inequality issues - plenty of cultures laud male infidelity as merely a sign of virility, but stone a woman to death for it.)

In that Sister Wives wikipedia article, it also noted that as soon as the show aired, the state started filing polygamy charges against the family, since, to be "legal" the man only legally married the oldest of the three sisters, saying the others were spiritual marriages, but not legally recognized. (And still went on to pursue a fourth wife, and wound up legally divorcing (but "staying spiritually married") the first wife to legally marry the fourth wife... "Reality" television, everyone...) This is someone making a television show basically publicly broadcasting how they are defying traditional conventions.  (Further, one of the stated reasons is to "promote understanding of the lifestyle".) This is in a country that had a serious fight over Mormon polygamy in its past. Sensationalism aside, it's far from the first time that marriage is the proxy in a battle of religious or cultural values, and people refuse to entirely bow to the law.  However, the responses in different times in the same places are quite different because culture changes.

That said, again, many people are functionally polygamous by dent of simply having multiple boy/girlfriends they just don't tell their other boy/girlfriends about, while some go as far as having fake identities to have different families in different locations. 

All these things mean that you can't just paste a binary "Monogamous culture" flag on a civilization, and be done with it.  You need a spectrum of behaviors and norms, and punishments for breaking out of those norms.  Ideally, with a way that these might even change over time for one reason or another as a culture adapts to, for example, taking in more and more citizens of an animalman race that doesn't biologically conform to standard human (or elf or dwarf) standards. 

For that matter, Toady has said that he wants to make citizens that shift cultures (as with conquered citizens that adopt the conquering civilization's values) be a gradual process, and a spectrum is far more conducive to a gradual process than a binary behavior. 

Section starting with, "Yes there are a number of truly monogamous birds but serial monogamy is essentiallly the norm.  Serial monogamy is not when a creature that happens to end up by dint of 'marital' breakdown or mate death end up pair-bonding with more than a single other individual in it's lifetime."

This is a semantic argument. 

You are trying to argue the definition of "serial monogamy", rather than arguing its presence or effects.

To that, I can only point again at Wikipedia's definition and also several online dictionary definitions:

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/serial-monogamy
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/serial+monogamy
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/serial+monogamy
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/serial-monogamy

And here is an example article from Psychology Today talking about serial monogamy as a phenomenon in humans as I am describing it. 

All of these sources agree that this term applies to human marriages.  Regardless, even if you don't agree with how I use the term, that doesn't mean you are unaware of what I mean when I use it.  I don't see a point in pursuing this topic further.

We cannot simply declare that swans are serially monogamous like penguins simply because circumstances have resulted in a swan having multiple partners over it's lifetime.

Again, swans are not uniformly STRICTLY monogamous, as they can just choose not to pair up again, but in any event, there are terms for these differentiations. 

Some creatures ARE lifelong pair-bonded monogamous creatures.  They never mate with any more creatures after they choose a single mate. 

That said, there are a lot of other options on that list:

• Short-term pair-bond: a transient mating or associations
• Long-term pair-bond: bonded for a significant portion of the life cycle of that pair
• Lifelong pair-bond: mated for life
• Social pair-bond: attachments for territorial or social reasons, as in cuckold situations
• Clandestine pair-bond: quick extra-pair copulations
• Dynamic pair-bond: e.g. gibbon mating systems being analogous to "swingers"

Perhaps there is no point of looking at relationships through any other lens than legal marraige?

And you started this off by saying how against Western Cultural Imperialism you were...

Of course there is a point in looking at relationships through other lenses.  In fact, you've practically already agreed with me on this point by even admitting that cheating even exists. 

You are never going to properly model human relationships if you see them in terms of nothing but either married couples or total strangers. The entire point of this thread is talking about how shallow and binary the current system of relationships in this game happens to be, and the problem I'm trying to beat through is that simply ignoring all other relationships as though they don't exist is simply putting random labels on the same shallow, unbelievable system. 

There needs to be a better system of even explaining what "friends" are in this game, much less parents and grandparents and who is in charge of childcare. 

This is even while we're still fixated on mere human child-bearing strategies.  Again, this system needs to handle ant-women colonies where almost every single member is a sister of almost every other, and cuttlefishpeople where the women can selectively mate with multiple men in a single mating season. 

An adulturous love affair then is often more of an example of the battle of the monogamies than an example of any opposing system.

Not to start another semantic fight, but this is showing a seriously warped interpretation of the definition of "monogamy"...

Someone who is having an affair is by definition not being monogamous.  And, no, you cannot be "having two monogamies at once". 

The perfect man evolutionary speaking is pretty much solidly defined.  Problem is that a minority of individuals are always evolutionary deviants (homosexuals are such) who do things that make no reproductive sense but the majority always does what makes sense.  The perfect human man in evolutionary terms for instance would have all these things.

No it really isn't.  I'm getting tired of linking at the moment, so I'll lay off another google search for sources to cite right now, but the definition of attractive features in men is not as set in stone as it generally is for women. 

Beyond that, many of your criteria are generally false.  Many women go for older men.  Not as an "evolutionary deviant" (what fantastically coded language that is) but an evolutionary strategy.  Older, socially or financially powerful men attract younger women all the time, and in the cold, emotionless world of evolutionary strategies, there's good reason to go for a mate that wields enough social power to secure one's child's future. 

At the same time, there are women who go for the fat ugly comedian type.  Or the younger, handsome, but "dangerous" (read: potentially quite violent, including towards women) type. 

The fact that men are supposed to compete for a single definition of an attractive woman, (and even this is somewhat iffy, as straight men at least prioritize different features in women differentl) while women spread out to pair up with different types of men is, itself, a part of a social strategy.  After all, if those women ALL wanted the same man who rose to the top of the heap, they'd pretty much all be forced into just having affairs.  Your previous assertion that affairs only occur for this reason would then have the opposite problem: Why isn't EVERY woman cheating on her husband? Why, for that matter, don't they all agree on who is the most attractive man in the office?

Different standards of beauty for men to make different ones attractive to different women keep said women hunting for different types of mates, lowering competition for the relatively few times they can successfully carry a child.

This is a computer game so of course we have to have a clock for it.  That is how computer games work.

You can't even conceive of any other possible mechanics at all? 

Again, I think it better to just use a "mood" system to make random events when characters meet that can push relationships in positive or negative directions.  That doesn't strictly need a clock to work, and it makes more sense to have a simplified system of "I had a bad day at work, so I yelled when I got back home" to simulate relationship building and decay. 

Again, we still need a relationship system that handles even "mere" friendship or characters that other characters find annoying, so these sorts of mechanics are far better suited to a broader usefulness.

And yes, there should be some decay of relationships if they don't see each other over a long period of time, but even that doesn't strictly need to be based upon time.  You can make it based upon social relations with other characters, with a character constantly building new relationships letting older ones decay a few points every time there is significant time spent with new people, while a character out in the wilderness not speaking to others holding onto their remembered friendships.

The degree to which this effect takes place can be a matter of personality and personal and social values. 

If a couple is unable to marry for legal reasons or because they choose not to for whatever reason, the relationship tends to behave exactly as it would if they married.

The only real difference legal marraige actually makes is that it creates a situation where two people are "supposed to be together" but are not.  That is it creates a fictional relationship between people.  If they are in an (entirely) fictional marraige then there is no reason why a perfectly monogamous creature could not have an extral-legal relationship.

The first paragraph presumes that people don't stay together longer than they otherwise would because marriage presents a powerful social obligation to stay together.  The second paragraph acknowledges the inherent conflict - I believe you, yourself, used the phrase "empty shell marriage". The problem is, that second paragraph is just another dismissal of a critical concept that must be modeled because it's inconvenient towards your argument that all relationships are marriage, and anything that isn't marriage (including affairs) secretly is marriage, anyway.  (Amusingly, this is a concept you map onto animals, even the ones that forget their "spouse" after a single mating cycle is over. When I say that you're pushing Western European or Judeo-Christian values, this is the stuff I'm talking about.)

Yes, there is a reason why there should be a way to model people "trapped in an empty shell of a marriage", and you just gave a decent reason for an effect of that shell marriage. 

It's also entirely possible for cultures to marry people who just plain don't love each other, especially in the Middle Ages, where there were often politically arranged marriages by family patriarchs, and many peasants got married just because a peasant girl became pregnant, and someone believed to be (one of) her lover(s) was selected to be her husband just to make sure she didn't give birth unwed. 

I do not consider discussing how to develop dwarf (and other creature's) relationships/marriages to be ridiculous at all.  I am not using marraige as the defining trait of human relationships, I am using a creatures relationships as the template for it's legal marital behavior. 

Then why did you say, "there is no point of looking at relationships through any other lens than legal marraige?"

Even if that's not what , you're saying there are no other relationships at all worth modeling.

I generally like your above ideas.  However they are overly based upon your own view of human nature and limit all creatures to operating according to how think human beings work.  How exactly do we model swans or swan-like monogamous creatures in your model?

Fair enough, I was focused mainly upon humans, since that has been the focus of this latest argument. 

Anyway, I do believe that there should be a distinction between "just animals" and "sentient beings", (CAN_LEARN) the kind that actually form relationships measured in the game.  Most animals don't need relationship meters because we generally expect bulls to have a lengthy courtship with the cows. 

That said, the freaky menagerie of animal people opens up a real headache of potential systems. 

The best way to handle it may be to consider them case-by-case asking if a given type of animal warrants a new dimension of behavior.  I'm a little too tired at the moment to go into drawing up a big list (give me a day and I might be able to go through it...)

It's entirely possible, however, that mosquitopeople just plain don't form romantic relationships at all.  The females deposit eggs, and males fertilize them, just like the base animal does.  They might form personal relationships of friendship, but no sense of love or lust exists in them at all, and that can be modeled by simply taking the "human model", and shutting off the "love" and "physical attraction" meter.

Whether they do or don't depends on just how anthropomorphized they're really supposed to even be at all... which is kind of an open question, really.  These things exist, and they're supposed to be able to have rudimentary tribes, but Toady has only given the barest of hints through things like the Threetoe stories about what their lives are supposed to be like. (And it's as an animal that is just magically given a humanoid body and humanoid intelligence, but with an imperative to act "towards preserving nature" or somesuch.)

That said, I'm thinking there could be a case for a few other values.  There could be separate values for hate than simply a negative social ("friendliness") relation, for example, and the aforementioned Trust value that could allow for bitterness and true grudges to arise that could possibly be a way to introduce interpersonal crime that has real roots within gameplay mechanics, rather than just arresting dwarves that bring booze to the trade depot before a barrel embargo or the like.

Anyway, I'm probably missing a couple things, but I need to go back to sleep...

[GoblinCookie]

I say this because you are treating what a society proclaims its values and institutions  to be, and how people actually live their lives to be one and the same. 

You are treating extra-marital affairs as just some something that has no particular impact and no relevance to whether someone is monogamous or not, and dismissing a tremendous proportion of human social relations because of it. 

Even within the context of Western Civilization, the current President of France is practicing promiscuity.  That is, going through a series of relationships with different women without marriage or any other legal relation like one to any of them.  Yes, he may have stayed with one woman for a long time without marrying her, but that, in and of itself, is not something your plan models, and it's not really monogamy if he then separated with her and started going through at best serial monogamy with multiple other partners afterwards.

Genghis Khan infamously raped his way through so much of Eurasia that nearly a quarter of Asia is believed to be among his direct biological descendants. (Not that we necessarily want to model THAT in the game...) Even Charlemagne, grandfather of modern Europe, and first "Holy Roman Emperor" had concubines before the Roman Catholic Church managed to muster enough power to put an end to the practice in later generations of kings and emperors. 

You are discounting the role of extended families in the raising of children, which is a large point of why I bring up wolf-type strategies.  You are focusing exclusively upon mother and father.  And yes, extended families absolutely are a part of most society's child-raising strategies. 

Children being raised by aunts, brothers, grandparents, adoptive parents, or state institutions such as orphanages has always existed.  Not to the Brave New World or Plato's Republic levels of universality, for sure, but in effect, the system you are arguing (and the partially-implemented system as we have it now) essentially states that nobody but the biological parent are even capable of child-rearing. 

You are expressing a very narrow band of human experience as the only way that families can ever possibly be formed. 

The Genghis Khan one is utter nonsense and I will not bother to take it into account.  All that they can possible establish is that Ghenghis Khan shares a common male ancester with 1/4 of Asia at some point, the rest is simply rape fantasy; Ghenghiz Khan could never have conquered so much territory if he was distracted by having to chase after the literally 1000s of women he would to have to rape to make even a 1% difference. 

Nearly everything you are saying is based upon a misunderstanding.  Yes a society does not declare it's values and institutions to be something that is fundermentally opposed to the lived experiance of the majority of it's members.  We do not start off living into a promiscuous romp and then some god-king comes along, decreeing that monogamy is the only legal form of sexual relationship; at which point everyone becomes monogamous. 

Instead basically monogamous societies end up creating laws establishing monogamy as law and oppressing non-monogamous minorities.  Conversely our promiscuous romp society will make laws establishing promiscuity as law oppressing monogamous minorities.  We know what the former looks like but what about the latter?

The promiscuous romp society will legally recognise only motherhood, there will be no legal fathers.  However the oppressed monogamous minority will continue to practice fatherhood extra-legally, so we will have a de-facto fatherhood existing in the mechanics that is not legally recognised by the society and does not have the status of fatherhood in the monogamous society.  This is promiscuity legalised; that is why I want promiscuity to be modelled as a rival system rather than simply being a value. 

Creatures have either a sexual need alone or a sexual and romantic need; these are keyed in to the lust and love values.  A creature has a number of sexual strategies that are wired into it at the creature level.  Humans have promiscuity, monogamy, polygamy and polyandry as possible strategies.  These all are all ranked in order of preference which is inherantly random, but the culturally established setup gets a hefty boost dependant upon strongly the creature values family.  They also have an instability, which is (on both axis) a determinant of how likely the sexual OR romantic element is to take damage over time.  The ranking would start at 100 and take random damage over time, if the value fall below HALF the relevant personality value then the relationship no longer satisfies that need fully.  If the ranking reaches 0 on both axis then it ceases to exist unless it is a legal setup in which it continues as an "empty shell" that only exists on paper. 

If one of the axis is not presently being satisfied then the creature will try to form another relationship that is eligable under the system they are using.  If that is not possible (inherantly the case under monogamy) for whatever reason then they will go for the highest ranking alternative system of sexuality.  Promiscuity is set as a system that does not meet romantic needs but only sexual ones, therefore we can have a husband in a loving but sexless marraige casually cheating on his wife to meet his 'needs'.  Polygamy/Polyandry however like monogamy can meet both needs so if our husband is in a loveless and sexless marraige he will go for one of those systems even if they are lower ranked than promiscuity.

Another key concept is something we might call 'marraige group', this concept is hard to grasp because it is not a HUMAN concept but is very common among animals.  As an example of this take 'elephant promiscuity', by which we have a group of female elephants that live together as their primary family relationship and have sex with outgroup males.  This is done by creating two relationships, we stick the female elephants together into one party and then have that party relates to a number of individual male elephants on a promiscious basis (no fathers for children), calculating the groups by the average female elephant.  All other female elephants to the elephant be be considered mother to any baby elephants, *but* this is not legally the case unless elephant promiscuity is the entity's system, operating in a monogamous entity the one that gives birth is the legal mother and the other's are only de-facto mothers.

In this situation the marraige group has a romantic bar and attendant instablity but no sexual bar.  The relationship of the male elephants with the female elephants has no romantic element, it only has a sexual bar.  If the romantic bar reaches 0 the marraige group disintegrates, as to their collective purely sexual relationships to the various individual male elephants.  If the individual male sexual bar with the group reaches 0 then the relationship between the marraige group and the male elephant ends but the marraige group continues to exist. 

Simply because I skip to the relevant points of behavior does not mean I do not understand the existence of said behavior.  Wolves build the social structures I said they build, and just because this isn't the sum total of their behavior, that does not disprove the assertion. 

If the fact that wolves can fit into two-wolf "monogamous packs" when they have gone off on their own somehow disproved extended familial child-rearing, then the mere existence of cheating and divorce would be capable of disproving monogamy in humans. 

As for bonobos, if you think that humans have never used sex as a social commodity... well, it's called the Oldest Known Profession for a reason.  Sex has always been a powerful social weapon and tool in human society. When used as a way of smoothing relations to get further up the social ladder, it's called "Sleeping your way to the top." Sex "as a means of preventing conflict" is an apt description of the arranged marriages of Medieval Europe.  The sex that bonobos have isn't at all alien, it's just that they didn't build up complex layers of social stigmatization for all those behaviors such that they are only done in secret where people pretend it isn't the case. 

The problem is, you have to look past that facade to make a real simulation of human social structures. 

It is frustrating because your entire understanding of sexual relationships is so relentlessly human-centric.  There is no such thing as ape-sexual, all apes differ quite markedly from eachother as to their mating arrangement so any attempt to draw conclusions from one to the other is without merit.

Prostitution is not something that is using sex as a social commodity.  It is the alienation of sex from it's normal social context and proof of how humans are completely unlike bonobos and like pretty much every other animal except them.  Bonobos do not have sex apart from the social context, there is no "sex thing" that could be desired but instead bonobos have sex with eachother when socially neccesery for their social arrangements regardless of whether the other bonobos are sexy. 

A monogamous relationship is also more than two people having sex.  So nobody in the middle ages used sex as a means of preventing conflict, they used monogamous relationships to this end, so more than just sex.  Sometimes sex is a cause of conflict (rape) but no conflict has ever been resolved solely through sex, unless you are talking about bonobo-land.  Because two human people who are angry with eachother have no desire to have (consensual) sex.  Basically stop anthromorphising other animals and try to understand their behavior as it really is and the logics by which they work on their own terms. 

I never said that promiscuity shouldn't be a norm, but what I'm saying is that these things aren't really as cut-and-dry as you're (sometimes) claiming them to be. 

Not all swans are strictly monogamous (they are less likely than other birds, but they can simply choose not to pair off again after raising children, without death of the partner,) not all wolves are strictly polygamous, as you yourself just argued, not all humans within the same culture abide by the same rules.

Setting up cut-and-dry systems, and saying "this culture has monogamous marriages as its ONLY relationship" is a flawed system.  You can't say that "most people were monogamous in most societies" as was previously argued in this thread, and just use that to blanket-apply monogamy to all characters while ignoring the polygamous systems that were the legal norm, and which members of other classes used. 

Promiscuity isn't so much a legal structure as just a thing that happens when people aren't monogamous.  (Or polygamous, for that matter.)

This is why I'm saying it should be more like a scale.  Maybe not a 1-dimensional scale, maybe there can be multiple social values that people hold up as different ideals, and that mashes out into some general range of behaviors that are acceptable, and what the punishments for transgressions of those norms should be. 

People will tend to bow to a certain extent to the social norms of their society, but reject them when their own internal bent is too different from what society expects of them.

America just had its big gay marriage legalization moment, so now, there's official legal recognition of monogamy for gay couples, but that's not the only social metric one should track.  Even 10 years ago, before there was any real momentum for gay marriage, there was a vastly different set of social and legal ramifications for trying to openly be a gay couple than there were 50 years ago. 

"Beards", (not the good, dwarven kind,) "keeping it on the down-low", being a "confirmed bachelor", and just plain denial were the main hallmarks of coping with a society that did not recognize homosexuality as anything but a mental illness or a sin.  Nevertheless, gay people, as per their natural inclinations, just couldn't follow what the law and social structure set out for them.

Similarly, (if not as biologically hardwired into our being,) we have a culture that celebrates monogamy, but there are people who just don't follow it, one way or another.  There are differences in how socially acceptable different cultures see having a mistress on the side, with places like, again, France, generally not caring all that much, even if they are hypothetically a culture that espouses monogamy and disallows polygamous marriages.  (This is before we even get into gender inequality issues - plenty of cultures laud male infidelity as merely a sign of virility, but stone a woman to death for it.)

In that Sister Wives wikipedia article, it also noted that as soon as the show aired, the state started filing polygamy charges against the family, since, to be "legal" the man only legally married the oldest of the three sisters, saying the others were spiritual marriages, but not legally recognized. (And still went on to pursue a fourth wife, and wound up legally divorcing (but "staying spiritually married") the first wife to legally marry the fourth wife... "Reality" television, everyone...) This is someone making a television show basically publicly broadcasting how they are defying traditional conventions.  (Further, one of the stated reasons is to "promote understanding of the lifestyle".) This is in a country that had a serious fight over Mormon polygamy in its past. Sensationalism aside, it's far from the first time that marriage is the proxy in a battle of religious or cultural values, and people refuse to entirely bow to the law.  However, the responses in different times in the same places are quite different because culture changes.

That said, again, many people are functionally polygamous by dent of simply having multiple boy/girlfriends they just don't tell their other boy/girlfriends about, while some go as far as having fake identities to have different families in different locations. 

All these things mean that you can't just paste a binary "Monogamous culture" flag on a civilization, and be done with it.  You need a spectrum of behaviors and norms, and punishments for breaking out of those norms.  Ideally, with a way that these might even change over time for one reason or another as a culture adapts to, for example, taking in more and more citizens of an animalman race that doesn't biologically conform to standard human (or elf or dwarf) standards. 

For that matter, Toady has said that he wants to make citizens that shift cultures (as with conquered citizens that adopt the conquering civilization's values) be a gradual process, and a spectrum is far more conducive to a gradual process than a binary behavior.

We aren't really arguing here.  All the 'mating systems' a creature has in it's makeup exist in all societies, it is just that that only one of those systems that a forms the legal basis for it's marraige/family setup. 

This is a semantic argument. 

You are trying to argue the definition of "serial monogamy", rather than arguing its presence or effects.

To that, I can only point again at Wikipedia's definition and also several online dictionary definitions:

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/serial-monogamy
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/serial+monogamy
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/serial+monogamy
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/serial-monogamy

And here is an example article from Psychology Today talking about serial monogamy as a phenomenon in humans as I am describing it. 

All of these sources agree that this term applies to human marriages.  Regardless, even if you don't agree with how I use the term, that doesn't mean you are unaware of what I mean when I use it.  I don't see a point in pursuing this topic further.

The ability to quote other sources with the same wrongheaded notions as yourself hardely means that you are right.   

You are trying to use the fact that human monogamous relationships break down to prove that humans are serially monogamous.  This is basically about as dumb as you can get, because we are talking about underlying SYSTEMS and not the emergant phenonoma that are the result of those systems.  Human monogamous relationships are the result of the underlying system of monogamy from which they are patterned.

A serially monogamous creature is a penguin.  A penguin relationship ends after 1 years, regardless of how functional the penguin relationship was because that system has an inbuilt clock that ends things.  That we as humans cannot understand the idea of having a fixed relationships clock that is set to off in a year and cause us to break up is because unlike penguins we are *not* serially monogamous.  This is not because the penguin relationship is flawed, it is doing what it is programmed to do and it all makes perfect sense (to penguins). 

By contrast human relationships break down because it's 'machinery' breaks down so to speak.  We are talking about a breakdown of something, a 'relationship breakdown' and not some kind of inbuilt clock going off suddenly terminating the relationship as is the case with a system of ACTUAL serial monogamy, aka penguins. 

Again, swans are not uniformly STRICTLY monogamous, as they can just choose not to pair up again, but in any event, there are terms for these differentiations. 

Some creatures ARE lifelong pair-bonded monogamous creatures.  They never mate with any more creatures after they choose a single mate. 

That said, there are a lot of other options on that list:

• Short-term pair-bond: a transient mating or associations
• Long-term pair-bond: bonded for a significant portion of the life cycle of that pair
• Lifelong pair-bond: mated for life
• Social pair-bond: attachments for territorial or social reasons, as in cuckold situations
• Clandestine pair-bond: quick extra-pair copulations
• Dynamic pair-bond: e.g. gibbon mating systems being analogous to "swingers"

Swans *are* lifelong pair bonded creatures and basically they sound just like humans, which strengthens my argument actually.  That is the system that the swans operate under.  What you have proven is that an (unspecificed) % of swan relationships break down, that however is a breakdown of a systems functioning NOT how the system works. 

Basically function is not the same as dysfunction.  These 'other creatures' are simply better functioning examples of the system, they are not a different system. 

And you started this off by saying how against Western Cultural Imperialism you were...

Of course there is a point in looking at relationships through other lenses.  In fact, you've practically already agreed with me on this point by even admitting that cheating even exists. 

You are never going to properly model human relationships if you see them in terms of nothing but either married couples or total strangers. The entire point of this thread is talking about how shallow and binary the current system of relationships in this game happens to be, and the problem I'm trying to beat through is that simply ignoring all other relationships as though they don't exist is simply putting random labels on the same shallow, unbelievable system. 

There needs to be a better system of even explaining what "friends" are in this game, much less parents and grandparents and who is in charge of childcare. 

This is even while we're still fixated on mere human child-bearing strategies.  Again, this system needs to handle ant-women colonies where almost every single member is a sister of almost every other, and cuttlefishpeople where the women can selectively mate with multiple men in a single mating season. 

We do not fundermentally disagree.

The problem is that why my system can model every creature that exists while your system is human-centric and obsessed with modelling sexual deviance from human social norms.  Every system has to exist as a legal marraige arrangement, hence there is little point of trying to model things except from within the legal marraige framework.  Every legal setup has to have non-legal cogs underneath to decide how the creature's actually behave in practice. 

Not to start another semantic fight, but this is showing a seriously warped interpretation of the definition of "monogamy"...

Someone who is having an affair is by definition not being monogamous.  And, no, you cannot be "having two monogamies at once". 

We are not just talking about whether the individual is behaving monogamously.  We are talking about the kind of affair and the underlying system by which the affair operates. 

If an affair cannot coexist with the existing marraige, that is it's existance undermines the marraige in the sense that even undetected by the spouse it results in a divorce of the marraige and the divorced individual marrying their lover immediately afterwards.  Whatever that system is, it is *not* Polygamy and nor is it Promiscuity. 

The reason there is a conflict is because both relationships are monogamous and there is only room for one of them.  If another system was being used, the lover would not cause the breakdown of the marraige unless they were discovered. 

No it really isn't.  I'm getting tired of linking at the moment, so I'll lay off another google search for sources to cite right now, but the definition of attractive features in men is not as set in stone as it generally is for women. 

Beyond that, many of your criteria are generally false.  Many women go for older men.  Not as an "evolutionary deviant" (what fantastically coded language that is) but an evolutionary strategy.  Older, socially or financially powerful men attract younger women all the time, and in the cold, emotionless world of evolutionary strategies, there's good reason to go for a mate that wields enough social power to secure one's child's future. 

At the same time, there are women who go for the fat ugly comedian type.  Or the younger, handsome, but "dangerous" (read: potentially quite violent, including towards women) type. 

The fact that men are supposed to compete for a single definition of an attractive woman, (and even this is somewhat iffy, as straight men at least prioritize different features in women differentl) while women spread out to pair up with different types of men is, itself, a part of a social strategy.  After all, if those women ALL wanted the same man who rose to the top of the heap, they'd pretty much all be forced into just having affairs.  Your previous assertion that affairs only occur for this reason would then have the opposite problem: Why isn't EVERY woman cheating on her husband? Why, for that matter, don't they all agree on who is the most attractive man in the office?

Different standards of beauty for men to make different ones attractive to different women keep said women hunting for different types of mates, lowering competition for the relatively few times they can successfully carry a child.

Many women go for older men because those men are percieved to have other desirable characteristics on the list that compensate.  Wealthy old millionares get hot young chicks not because they are old but because they are rich, bad boys get girls because they are strong not because they are violent.  There are no horde of women hunting down impoverished, impotent, penniless, bedridden, toothless 90 year-olds and any that would do so fit into the category would definately qualify as evolutionary deviants.

Age is objectively a bad thing because.
1. It increases the probability of early death of partner.
2. It reduces fertility.
3. It increases probability of birth defects.
4. It increases the likely burden due to sickness, competing with children. 

You must not confuse subjective and evolutionary.  The creatures do not always work out 'as intended' because creature's are complicated things and the systems cannot be 100% functional in all creature's.  While creature's follow evolutionary logics, they do not subjectively know they are doing so; a minority of creature's will always develop subjective tendancies that are senseless in evolutionary terms because we live in an intrinsicly unstable universe. 

You can't even conceive of any other possible mechanics at all? 

Again, I think it better to just use a "mood" system to make random events when characters meet that can push relationships in positive or negative directions.  That doesn't strictly need a clock to work, and it makes more sense to have a simplified system of "I had a bad day at work, so I yelled when I got back home" to simulate relationship building and decay. 

Again, we still need a relationship system that handles even "mere" friendship or characters that other characters find annoying, so these sorts of mechanics are far better suited to a broader usefulness.

And yes, there should be some decay of relationships if they don't see each other over a long period of time, but even that doesn't strictly need to be based upon time.  You can make it based upon social relations with other characters, with a character constantly building new relationships letting older ones decay a few points every time there is significant time spent with new people, while a character out in the wilderness not speaking to others holding onto their remembered friendships.

The degree to which this effect takes place can be a matter of personality and personal and social values. 

The clock is used for serially monogamous creatures. 

The random event with preset probability is used for lifetime monogamous creatures whose relationship are prone to breakdown and this can cause them to end randomly.

Random events can also potentially randomly end serially monogamous creature's relationships *before* the clock is up, if they have an instability defined. 

The clock is used to model programmed self-destruction, the instability model is used to model 'system failure'. 

The first paragraph presumes that people don't stay together longer than they otherwise would because marriage presents a powerful social obligation to stay together.  The second paragraph acknowledges the inherent conflict - I believe you, yourself, used the phrase "empty shell marriage". The problem is, that second paragraph is just another dismissal of a critical concept that must be modeled because it's inconvenient towards your argument that all relationships are marriage, and anything that isn't marriage (including affairs) secretly is marriage, anyway.  (Amusingly, this is a concept you map onto animals, even the ones that forget their "spouse" after a single mating cycle is over. When I say that you're pushing Western European or Judeo-Christian values, this is the stuff I'm talking about.)

Yes, there is a reason why there should be a way to model people "trapped in an empty shell of a marriage", and you just gave a decent reason for an effect of that shell marriage. 

It's also entirely possible for cultures to marry people who just plain don't love each other, especially in the Middle Ages, where there were often politically arranged marriages by family patriarchs, and many peasants got married just because a peasant girl became pregnant, and someone believed to be (one of) her lover(s) was selected to be her husband just to make sure she didn't give birth unwed. 

An empty shell marraige is a marraige that exists entirely as a legal fiction.  That is what happens if we end up with a legal marraige that has no existing de-facto relationship that matches up with the legal marraige.  As already mentioned, there are two axis used to measure a relationship, sexual and romantic, if both of them reach 0 then a de-facto relationship ceases to exist but not a de-jure relationship.

Arranged marraiges would be best modelled by having them start de-jure married (obviously) and giving them random sexual/romantic bars for the corresponding actual relationship.  Naturally occuring relationships start off with both values at 100 but may still lose points by the time they actually get legally married.

Then why did you say, "there is no point of looking at relationships through any other lens than legal marraige?"

Even if that's not what , you're saying there are no other relationships at all worth modeling.

All setups must have a corresponding legal arrangement for them and all legal arrangements must have a corresponding actual relationship setup.  Therefore there is no point of looking at relationships through any other lens than legal marraige. 

Fair enough, I was focused mainly upon humans, since that has been the focus of this latest argument. 

Anyway, I do believe that there should be a distinction between "just animals" and "sentient beings", (CAN_LEARN) the kind that actually form relationships measured in the game.  Most animals don't need relationship meters because we generally expect bulls to have a lengthy courtship with the cows. 

That said, the freaky menagerie of animal people opens up a real headache of potential systems. 

The best way to handle it may be to consider them case-by-case asking if a given type of animal warrants a new dimension of behavior.  I'm a little too tired at the moment to go into drawing up a big list (give me a day and I might be able to go through it...)

It's entirely possible, however, that mosquitopeople just plain don't form romantic relationships at all.  The females deposit eggs, and males fertilize them, just like the base animal does.  They might form personal relationships of friendship, but no sense of love or lust exists in them at all, and that can be modeled by simply taking the "human model", and shutting off the "love" and "physical attraction" meter.

Whether they do or don't depends on just how anthropomorphized they're really supposed to even be at all... which is kind of an open question, really.  These things exist, and they're supposed to be able to have rudimentary tribes, but Toady has only given the barest of hints through things like the Threetoe stories about what their lives are supposed to be like. (And it's as an animal that is just magically given a humanoid body and humanoid intelligence, but with an imperative to act "towards preserving nature" or somesuch.)

That said, I'm thinking there could be a case for a few other values.  There could be separate values for hate than simply a negative social ("friendliness") relation, for example, and the aforementioned Trust value that could allow for bitterness and true grudges to arise that could possibly be a way to introduce interpersonal crime that has real roots within gameplay mechanics, rather than just arresting dwarves that bring booze to the trade depot before a barrel embargo or the like.

Anyway, I'm probably missing a couple things, but I need to go back to sleep...

The mosquito person is rather simple to model.  We take the basic promiscuity model we use for humans, make it the only model they are capable of and remove the romantic need altogether.  This means mosquito person 'relationships' are entirely sexual one's with only the sexual bar in operation. 

What is complex to model is the kind of group based family/mating behaviors of for instance lions. 

[Deboche]

I just wanted to throw in how happy I am that polygamy faced such little resistance this time around. Its greatest detractors in the other thread seem to have become the greatest supporters, what a great community. And the poll results are great.

[AceSV]

I can't even tell what you guys are arguing about.  Polygamy would be a valid game mechanic.  If not dwarves, at least one of elves, humans or goblins should practice polygamy, which would allow modders to enable it if they want it. 

[Naryar]

Polygamy should definitely be in, probably for humans and goblins. Maaaybe elves ? lol elf harems But dwarves are definitely monogamous.

But it's a minor addition to the game, really. It doesn't add much apart from a small bit of fluff, so I believe it can wait for a while.

[Calidovi]

Polygamy should definitely be in, probably for humans and goblins. Maaaybe elves ? lol elf harems But dwarves are definitely monogamous.

But it's a minor addition to the game, really. It doesn't add much apart from a small bit of fluff, so I believe it can wait for a while.

Muh elf harem Chinese cartoons incoming.

[SixOfSpades]

I can't even tell what you guys are arguing about.  Polygamy would be a valid game mechanic.  If not dwarves, at least one of elves, humans or goblins should practice polygamy, which would allow modders to enable it if they want it.

Yeah, this thread does suffer from too many tl;dr posts, even for me. But as for polyamory itself, the only real problem with applying it to dwarves that I can see is that it has the potential to take the typical dwarven married couple--the equivalent of a constantly repeating baby gun--and turn it into a baby automatic rifle. Perhaps it should be delayed until the revised economy arc, so that families can at least try to curb their fertility, in proportion to the number of children they can reasonably expect to feed & clothe.

[AceSV]

I can't even tell what you guys are arguing about.  Polygamy would be a valid game mechanic.  If not dwarves, at least one of elves, humans or goblins should practice polygamy, which would allow modders to enable it if they want it.

Yeah, this thread does suffer from too many tl;dr posts, even for me. But as for polyamory itself, the only real problem with applying it to dwarves that I can see is that it has the potential to take the typical dwarven married couple--the equivalent of a constantly repeating baby gun--and turn it into a baby automatic rifle. Perhaps it should be delayed until the revised economy arc, so that families can at least try to curb their fertility, in proportion to the number of children they can reasonably expect to feed & clothe.

I've had a lot of forts where I wish they'd make more babies.  There is a button that caps the number of babies/children if that's the main problem, I don't know if it's vanilla.  If there can be a quota on trees, there can be a quota on children.  And if you need to mod the game to allow dwarves to get polyamorous in the first place, you can mod their birth rates or gestation time or libido while you're at it. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Still under the weather, so I'll postpone another big response to GoblinCookie, but for the rest of you...

The presence of multiple animal types and animal-peoples require different reproduction strategies.  There is little reason to expect mosquitopeople or cuttlefishpeople to marry and be monogamous when it is against the nature of the animal they are derived from. 

Worse, there are some creatures that just plain can't reproduce right now, and others (antpeople in particular) that have reproduction strategies so different from a human's that the game's current system fails to properly let them have a chance to survive.  (For that matter, egg-layers currently cannot survive in the wild because they require dwarves to make nest boxes to lay eggs within...)

Keep in mind that many animals do not have X and Y chromosomes to denote male and female.  Bees, for example, denote males by the total absence of a chromosome, and are only born when a queen's eggs are unfertilized.  Fertilized eggs invariably produce female bees.  (Meaning bee sex is invariably incestuous, as well...)

Since animalpeople are going to play a larger role in the game going forward, there needs to be some way of handling their non-human reproduction strategies. 

[Artarda]

The only thing that I've noticed is that Marriage seems to be either a heavy commitment for Dwarves (even once widowed, dwarves will not remarry as far as I can tell). Whether this was intended as part of a dwarf's beliefs/culture/ethics, or whether it was just a coding oversight, I know not. But I do believe this should be at least considered, seeing as Polygamy is prevalent in early history, especially as leaders. Also, relationships like "Mistress" or other ones for married nobles and such who are less faithful than they ought to be.

Perhaps each race/civ could have marriage flags in the future? [ETHIC:MULTIPLE_WIVES] or even MULTIPLE_SPOUSES for both. Perhaps throw in something along the lines of WIDOWS_REMARRY or something for races that will continue their love lives after a marriage is ended through death, while we're at it.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the devs want to improve the relationships in game, maybe this kind of thing can find its way in during that time?

[AceSV]

The presence of multiple animal types and animal-peoples require different reproduction strategies.  There is little reason to expect mosquitopeople or cuttlefishpeople to marry and be monogamous when it is against the nature of the animal they are derived from. 

Not necessarily.  Animal-People shouldn't have to conform to the rules of zoology.  If you want to venture down that road, you're going to find a lot of absurd little quirks that make us human, or at least mammalian, like sweating, shivering, RGB vision, soft palettes, puberty, plantigrade locomotion, multiple kinds of teeth, the list goes on.  Thumbs, vocal cords and erect posture don't scratch the surface of being human. 

We're all going to be much happier if we allow a fantasy hand-wave to smooth out the details of animal-people biology and I for one don't mind reproduction getting treated more like people and less like animal.  Taking mosquito-people as an example, mosquitoes spend most of their lives as aquatic worms and only live a couple of days as flying adults.  While it could certainly be entertaining to deal with that behavior in Dwarf Fortress, I don't think it would be practical for Toady to code in every kind of absurd animal sexuality. 

If you're a fan of zoology and cartoons, you may have noticed that cartoons (and DF actually) tend to treat exotic animals as if they were something more familiar.  A list of familiar animals might include dogs, horses, chickens and salmon.  A mosquito lays eggs?  Boom, it's a chicken.  A cuttlefish lives in the water?  Boom, it's a salmon.  DF most noticeably does chickenizing for all egg-layers.  Of course that's completely unfair to the mosquito's bloodsucking amphibious nature or the cuttlefish's wild passionate intercourse, but unless Toady decides to add Mosquito-man brothels to adventure mode, it's not going to be super relevant.  I've got no problem with a mosquito-man daddy and mosquito-man mommy raising children with six legs and wings, the suspension of disbelief is firmly established there. 

It might be helpful to consider animal-people as a literary trope rather than as biological constructs:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LionsAndTigersAndHumansOhMy
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FunnyAnimal
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PettingZooPeople
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArtisticLicenseOrnithology
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllAnimalsAreDogs
And, say it with me everyone:  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic