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[GoblinCookie]

You raised a concern, I put forward six adaptations to the proposal, and you have made no reference to my ideas save to say they are greatly inferior.

The initial site population yields four last names due to four surviving married couples? Fine. Accepting this premise, how many children will each lineage have? 2,325? If last names cull from pre-existing names you have some nine-thousand unique names of living dwarves in a given civilization. This presumes no new last names are generated through heroic deeds, artifact generation, or becoming a noble. If we say one in one hundred dwarves make a new name for themselves, we have every generation in a 10,000 dwarf civilization opening 100 new clan names and open slots for another 2,325 unique names.

Furthermore, the primary fix for your concern, which I put in boldface, was that the first generation of worldgen children generate their own random names. This could be extended to the entire first age of the world if needed, but considering that each married couple can generate over a dozen children any given civilization from year one until the death of the initial pairs would have new names generated for the initial century or two. This is enough time in worldgen to form whole civilizations of children from the first few entities.

Combine this with some portion of entities generating names throughout worldgen and there is really no shortage of identifiers for adventure or fortress mode.

Caste tokens seem better for granting certain naming rules based on gender. The civ entity tokens seem too broad-brushed.

There is no point in proposing complex fixes to the problems created by an idea when the idea itself does not work.  The idea was supposed to serve a function of allowing us to determine at a glance who is related to whom.  Surnames not only fail in this respect, but they create a new problem which is that the present system is totally reliable in allowing us to identify specific individuals out of thousands because it will essentially never happen that two people have the same surname and the same first name, since the latter is a combination of two random strings out of a list of thousands. 

What we actually setting out to do is better done by giving specific surnames to each individual family member, generated in the same fashion as the current surnames are but shared by all members of a family defined by relationship to their parents.  Everyone has two surnames, the first is what we have at the moment allowing us to identify the individual, the second is the family name created by their parents when they married allowing us to identify the family.  Unmarried people use their parents family name, married people use the family name created upon their marriage and which their unmarried children also share.

We can determine how many family names we have by a numerical value written in the entity raws.  At 0 we have what we have at the moment (no family name), while at 5 we would have family names going back 5 generations, which means very long names. 

You raised a concern, I put forward six adaptations to the proposal, and you have made no reference to my ideas save to say they are greatly inferior.

Be cautious when arguing with GoblinCookie. In my dealings with him, I find he tends to go off on long-winded tangents that are only obliquely related to the actual topic.

People have a tendency to not understand what they were actually talking about.....

[SixOfSpades]

People have a tendency to not understand what they were actually talking about.....

I don't think that's it at all. It seems to me that the hiccup in your reasoning could be described as "I can't help you because my hands are in my pockets." You stated that all dwarves in a civ are descended from a remarkably small number of starting historical figures--which is true. You went on to say that having inherited last names would inevitably result in pretty much every dwarf in a civ having the same last name, thus making its use as an identifier completely meaningless--which is also true. But then you used those facts, facts according to the game's current version, to argue that family surnames must be "a step backwards". Instead of recognizing that this is the Suggestions forum, where we advocate change, you kept your hands firmly in your pockets and pooh-poohed name inheritance as a pipe dream. Possible improvements were put forward--you casually dismissed them. In the Suggestions forum, it is that attitude, and not attempts to approximate real-world behavior, that represents a step backward.

Last name inheritance could exclude the first generation of worldgen, creating a massive number of first names.

I'm not sure why you specified first names, frankly I think the problem has always been too many few last names. But either way, I don't think this is the way to go; the original, primeval dwarves should be the most honored by tradition, not immediately forgotten about.
[EDIT]Whoops, brain fart.[/EDIT]

A marriage could generate a new last name if the couple has low tradition values.

Yes, or if one (or both) of them do not get along well with most other family members, or if one/both of their names are already very common in their settlement, or if one/both are trying to lose an unsavory reputation (the logical extension of which would be moving the family to a new fort). And that's without going into an individual civ's randomized cultures about naming conventions.

Larger initial civilization populations would begin with a larger pool of names.

GoblinCookie is right in that increasing the number of starting names just kicks the problem further down the road--if the number of surnames is never increased, then lineage death (or, more accurately, dwarves' counterproductive reproductive taboos) must eventually reduce the number of living surnames to 1. So the answer, obviously, is to allow certain dwarves to change their surnames; either by reviving a "lost" ancestor, or creating an entirely new surname. This has been suggested multiple times before, and I don't think I've seen a single good reason why it would be a bad idea.

Repeating first names in the same family means Urist McUrist may beget an Urist McUrist II.

Interesting, haven't seen that one before. Sure, why not?

Duplicated first names generate middle names.

Ehhh, maybe, but it could be a bit awkward to code. It'd be simpler to just give every dwarf a middle name as the default.

Caste tokens seem better for granting certain naming rules based on gender. The civ entity tokens seem too broad-brushed.

Why not both? I've always been a firm proponent of very wide ranges of randomized civ behavior; having each new civilization feel pretty much the same as the last one you played doesn't do much for the game's replay factor. But the concept of having societal outcasts (e.g., foundlings, orphans, bastards, exiles) who aren't allowed family names is also very appealing.

What [I am] actually setting out to do is better done by giving specific surnames to each individual family member, generated in the same fashion as the current surnames are but shared by all members of a family defined by relationship to their parents.  Everyone has two surnames, the first is what we have at the moment allowing us to identify the individual, the second is the family name created by their parents when they married allowing us to identify the family.  Unmarried people use their parents family name, married people use the family name created upon their marriage and which their unmarried children also share.
We can determine how many family names we have by a numerical value written in the entity raws.  At 0 we have what we have at the moment (no family name), while at 5 we would have family names going back 5 generations, which means very long names.

Let's extrapolate on that. Suppose I think my civ should REALLY care about their ancestry (hardly a radical idea), so I edit my raw file so that the number is "really high", like 25. I usually generate words with 1000-year histories--therefore, assuming an average generation time of 50 years, that would mean my dwarves have names forty-three words long. How can they be expected to make friends, when it takes 5 minutes just to introduce yourself to each new acquaintance? Or to bring it back down to your more conservative example, to know your family "only" 5 generations back still means every single dwarf has a 13-element name, which again seems far too ungainly for casual use.
It seems that I must AGAIN point out that it's very possible to give every dwarf a reasonably unique first name, an immediate-family middle name, and a last name that stretches all the way back to a time before time, using only three name elements.


SOMEWHAT RELATED SUGGESTION:
Allow dwarves (and the player) to commission (and Clerks to create) a new type of book/scroll, a Genealogy, at a library. It would list an individual dwarf's family--everyone that he (or the Clerks researching the subject, or the game itself) can remember. The more pompous dwarves could carry it on their person, Pooh-Bah style, and whip it out at the slightest mention of anyone's illustrious heritage. Dwarves with a touch more decorum could hang it up to decorate their bedrooms. Players could view it to be reminded of just where Urist stands in the line of succession, should some far-off barony lose its noble once again. That, to me, seems a lot more straightforward than having to dig backwards through 5 layers of family names, and then compare that result with the list of government officials.

[Starver]

Can I just point out that I gave loads of suggestions, yet very much agree with GC that just enforcing a family-name tradition (an anthropcentric one at that) into a culture will solve very little¹ and also fully recongise that I "tend() to go off on long-winded tangents that are only obliquely related to the actual topic" and had to check you weren't talking about me as I was probably the one who more went off on tangents. Your beef should be with me on that issue, maybe you're mixing us up.

Maybe there could be something, but the basic request just isn't fit for purpose and I agree with the points raised against it in its apparent original form. Pushing the suggestion further is at the cost of overloading the screen-width, though, so thoughts as to a compromise system (your own suggested system, which neither I nor GC have actually commented about, definitely has merits to it but I'm sure could stand to suffer tweaks or be used to inspire yet other variations) would are probably more relevent than the original idea that unfortunately has pitfalls outweighing what I presume is its intended utility.

Let the conversation move on. I think GC was blunt (and talking about general situations, in which I've been at both sides) when talking about people not having had understanding. This does not mean that Shazbot is still not understanding, or suggesting that they should not continue with the evolving ideas (which then have to shine out like a beacon to be adopted by Toady, and until then is just a half-warmed fish).

If you don't mind me being tangential and meta about suggestions. Please now return to the matter

¹ -

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NaQxUEfxt0 )

[GoblinCookie]

I don't think that's it at all. It seems to me that the hiccup in your reasoning could be described as "I can't help you because my hands are in my pockets." You stated that all dwarves in a civ are descended from a remarkably small number of starting historical figures--which is true. You went on to say that having inherited last names would inevitably result in pretty much every dwarf in a civ having the same last name, thus making its use as an identifier completely meaningless--which is also true. But then you used those facts, facts according to the game's current version, to argue that family surnames must be "a step backwards". Instead of recognizing that this is the Suggestions forum, where we advocate change, you kept your hands firmly in your pockets and pooh-poohed name inheritance as a pipe dream. Possible improvements were put forward--you casually dismissed them. In the Suggestions forum, it is that attitude, and not attempts to approximate real-world behavior, that represents a step backward.

What was being proposed created more problems while not actually even solving any existing problems.  The ability to add a huge number of additional fixes to a problem that does not need to exist in the first place does not work as an argument for the initial problem being introduced in the first place. 

Let's extrapolate on that. Suppose I think my civ should REALLY care about their ancestry (hardly a radical idea), so I edit my raw file so that the number is "really high", like 25. I usually generate words with 1000-year histories--therefore, assuming an average generation time of 50 years, that would mean my dwarves have names forty-three words long. How can they be expected to make friends, when it takes 5 minutes just to introduce yourself to each new acquaintance? Or to bring it back down to your more conservative example, to know your family "only" 5 generations back still means every single dwarf has a 13-element name, which again seems far too ungainly for casual use.
It seems that I must AGAIN point out that it's very possible to give every dwarf a reasonably unique first name, an immediate-family middle name, and a last name that stretches all the way back to a time before time, using only three name elements.

You edited the raw files to create really long names.  Unless you were a complete idiot, you know full well that creating 25 generations of names is going to ultimately result in really long names.  Unless this is something the game generates on it's own (it should not be) then there is no actual problem there, it is what was ordered.

We are generally only going to be really interested in fairly current family relationships.  After 1000 years why does it matter which of the ancestral dwarves from a millenia ago they are descended from, so that name is just taking up space that could be better used for the extra names for their grandparents families.

[Shazbot]

Last name inheritance could exclude the first generation of worldgen, creating a massive number of first names.

I'm not sure why you specified first names, frankly I think the problem has always been too many last names. But either way, I don't think this is the way to go; the original, primeval dwarves should be the most honored by tradition, not immediately forgotten about.

My wording was unclear and corrected in that post. I meant to say a massive number of first-generation last names. So Durin the Deathless begets Rovod Granitebreeches, Urist Steelrejoices, and fourteen other children before he's eaten by a dragon in year 40. These time-before-time dwarves, men and elves are honored by the tradition of being "I am from the lineage of the great father Durin the Deathless", rather than directly assuming their last name. You see this "first ancestor" in Tolkien at least, among other sources. Furthermore, the long lives of dwarves and elves means a lucky couple could really produce an enormous number of last names.

Onto that you add the other means and I believe enough last names would be generated.

[SixOfSpades]

I had to check you weren't talking about me as I was probably the one who more went off on tangents. Your beef should be with me on that issue, maybe you're mixing us up.

Brief related tangents are fine--derailing entire threads is not. GoblinCookie and I have something of a history, but we manage to keep it civil.

Maybe there could be something, but the basic request just isn't fit for purpose and I agree with the points raised against it in its apparent original form.

Hmm, it's not necessarily unfit for purpose. For example, let us suppose that the founder of a new dwarven outpost decrees that all children born there MUST take a family surname (whatever naming system gets chosen doesn't much matter). It's a local government, it's a fair bet that it would have that kind of authority. A low number of surnames wouldn't be an issue, because every single migrant to the fort would have a different one. This system wouldn't be perfect (children who were born prior to migrating to the fort would not have their parents' names), but it would be quite useful to the player, at least for the first couple of generations, because everyone's family ties would be visible in every screen, with no need to dig into their thoughts or relations. And I think it's safe to say that most forts don't last more than a couple of generations, as they're retired due to boring stability and/or FPS death. So, for the vast majority of cases, simple name inheritance while a fort is being managed by an overseer is a MORE than viable suggestion.

What was being proposed created more problems while not actually even solving any existing problems.  The ability to add a huge number of additional fixes to a problem that does not need to exist in the first place does not work as an argument for the initial problem being introduced in the first place.

The proposal created problems, in your opinion. It didn't solve any existing problems, in the form of the game that lives in your head. You are emotionally invested in your own system, where every dwarf carries around not just their own random surname, but their parents' and grandparents' as well, and you apparently refuse to seriously consider any other. I showed just above how name inheritance (even without additional improvements, like dwarves being able to change their names) does solve a problem that does exist in the current game. It created zero drawbacks, at least in the short or medium term (the span in which ~80% of forts are played). I'll thank you to acknowledge that.

You edited the raw files to create really long names.  Unless you were a complete idiot, you know full well that creating 25 generations of names is going to ultimately result in really long names.  Unless this is something the game generates on it's own (it should not be) then there is no actual problem there, it is what was ordered.

Isn't "editing the raw files" precisely what you were suggesting when you said "We can determine how many family names we have by a numerical value written in the entity raws"? Perhaps you only meant bringing the number down, like to 1 or 2. That would generate names only five or seven words long. While such names would actually be fairly manageable in conversation, there would still be many lists in the game (especially the medical screen, or assigning furniture) where they'd get truncated to the point of illegibility. Which is a large part of why I'm pushing to keep names short.

We are generally only going to be really interested in fairly current family relationships.  After 1000 years why does it matter which of the ancestral dwarves from a millenia ago they are descended from, so that name is just taking up space that could be better used for the extra names for their grandparents families.

If you were found to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ, would you care? How about Queen Elizabeth I, or Galileo, or Confucius, or Mohammed? Now, I'm not saying you would change your name upon hearing the news (although plenty of people have changed their names for less meaningful reasons), but there's a good chance it would influence what you named your kids . . . or even affect your decision to have kids at all, if it meant carrying on the line. To bring it back to dwarves, yeah, a Tolkien dwarf would definitely care if he were descended from Durin the Deathless. (Would he include that fact in his name? Impossible to say, Tolkien never wrote any dwarf's true name.)
     To say that carrying on the name of a distant ancestor "is just taking up space that could be better used for the extra names for their grandparents families" is based purely on your assumptions and your preferred naming convention. Besides, it's highly subjective: I for one never got along with either of my sets of grandparents, there's no way I would lump their names with mine. Of course I'd prefer to associate myself with some theoretical ancestor that I admire but never met. Who's to say that all dwarves have great relationships with their extended families? And if they did, would that make their personalities more interesting . . . or less?

These time-before-time dwarves, men and elves are honored by the tradition of being "I am from the lineage of the great father Durin the Deathless", rather than directly assuming their last name.

Okay, though I'd still prefer Durin's children taking his name by default, unless they did something to earn the names Granitebreeches and Steelrejoices. I will never like surnames that are random for the sake of being random; if a dwarf's last name is "Swallowedboot" (which I did get once), there had BETTER be a DAMN good reason for it.

Onto that [a larger number of initial last names] you add the other means and I believe enough last names would be generated.

Again, simply increasing the number of starting names does nothing but delay the inevitable crash. It doesn't matter how much money you start with, if your rent exceeds your income you WILL get evicted eventually. So if long-lasting family names are going to be a thing at all, the "other means" (dwarves creating or reviving surnames) are absolutely necessary . . . as well as desired by most(?) players.

- - - - - - -

     The fact that the vast majority of dwarves do not have children is death to the idea of inherited family surnames. Yet that in itself does NOT mean that inherited family surnames are a bad idea, or even an unworkable one. All it does is throw additional light on the larger problem: The vast majority of dwarves never having children is not a sustainable species model. Don't use an obviously bad idea (current reproduction dynamics mean dwarves willingly go extinct of their own accord) to justify saying that a perfectly plausible idea (name inheritance) could never work. Instead, you should assume that the obviously bad idea WILL be fixed, and that dwarven child-breeding traditions WILL change, and that family surnames WILL become feasible.

     Multiple users have suggested that certain dwarves (especially those with notable achievements) be allowed to spontaneously change, and/or add to, their name. The combat nicknames that militiadwarves have sported for years strongly support the idea that Toady One himself agrees with this suggestion. Again, there seems to be a definite lack of user dislike for this proposition, so it seems safe to assume that this too WILL one day be part of the game.

     Yes, these are both only assumptions--but they're well-supported ones. And any future critique on the possibility of name inheritance (whether it's as simple as one-generation patronymics, or full-fledged clan names) can and should take them fully into account.

[Shazbot]

Six, I agree its best not to have a purely RNG name. I'd like names to have something to do with the dwarf, at least in the founding of the lineage. I am in no way closed to different ways of performing this task, so long as it is powerful enough I can mod it to my liking.

Family lineage into the extended and mist-shrouded past matters differently to different people. You may not care beyond your immediate relations. My family has a shovel from our first settlers in America, and I live in the house they built. I would be thrilled to know the full line into the distant past. I can find that out by family names, newspaper clippings, birth certificates, marriage records in churches, headstones...

But if everyone has an RNG last name, it becomes very difficult to trace things, in real life or in game. And some people, in game, want to find out the lineage of a slain dwarven king without exporting legends mode.

[GoblinCookie]

The proposal created problems, in your opinion. It didn't solve any existing problems, in the form of the game that lives in your head. You are emotionally invested in your own system, where every dwarf carries around not just their own random surname, but their parents' and grandparents' as well, and you apparently refuse to seriously consider any other. I showed just above how name inheritance (even without additional improvements, like dwarves being able to change their names) does solve a problem that does exist in the current game. It created zero drawbacks, at least in the short or medium term (the span in which ~80% of forts are played). I'll thank you to acknowledge that.

No it creates problems irrespective of what my opinion on the subject is.  The present system works very well to identify individuals out of lists, if we replace it with the surnames system the OP proposed then we lose that functionality.  The surnames themselves do not work very well at tracing families or anything else really since it is quite plausible for two only very distantly related people to have the same surname, so the new function works worse at it's function than the present system works at it's own function.

Opinion and my 'emotional feelings' are irrelevant.  It is an objectively better system to reuse the current system for naming individuals to name families, since it allows us to pinpoint individual families with the same precision that we can presently identify specific individuals from a list of thousands of individuals. 

Isn't "editing the raw files" precisely what you were suggesting when you said "We can determine how many family names we have by a numerical value written in the entity raws"? Perhaps you only meant bringing the number down, like to 1 or 2. That would generate names only five or seven words long. While such names would actually be fairly manageable in conversation, there would still be many lists in the game (especially the medical screen, or assigning furniture) where they'd get truncated to the point of illegibility. Which is a large part of why I'm pushing to keep names short.

How long you want your names to be is determined by the number, there is just no reason why the system should not allow people to voluntarily make names as long as they like.  I was never proposed that the number should be set by the devs to 5, only that there is no reason the system should disallow such a large number.  The vanilla entity raws should probably have 1 or 2 by default, with some entities having 0 (so no family names at all). 

If you were found to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ, would you care? How about Queen Elizabeth I, or Galileo, or Confucius, or Mohammed? Now, I'm not saying you would change your name upon hearing the news (although plenty of people have changed their names for less meaningful reasons), but there's a good chance it would influence what you named your kids . . . or even affect your decision to have kids at all, if it meant carrying on the line. To bring it back to dwarves, yeah, a Tolkien dwarf would definitely care if he were descended from Durin the Deathless. (Would he include that fact in his name? Impossible to say, Tolkien never wrote any dwarf's true name.)
     To say that carrying on the name of a distant ancestor "is just taking up space that could be better used for the extra names for their grandparents families" is based purely on your assumptions and your preferred naming convention. Besides, it's highly subjective: I for one never got along with either of my sets of grandparents, there's no way I would lump their names with mine. Of course I'd prefer to associate myself with some theoretical ancestor that I admire but never met. Who's to say that all dwarves have great relationships with their extended families? And if they did, would that make their personalities more interesting . . . or less?

The further back you go the larger the number of descendants you have.  If we go back thousands of years, pretty much everyone ends up being descended from pretty much everyone, including all manner of famous characters.  That is because every generation the number of ancestors tend to double (inbreeding aside), so a dwarf being descended from Durin the Deathless is not very interesting if he lived thousands of years ago. 

To put it in terms of my proposed family surnames system, if I set that value to 1 then I get 2 surnames, the dwarf's personal surname and his family surname.  If I set the value to 2, then I get 5 surnames, because the dwarf has two sets of grandparents.  If I set the value to 3 then I get 9 names, since the dwarf has four sets of great-grandparents.  If I set the value to 4 then I get 17 names since the dwarf has 8 sets of great-great-grandparents. 

     The fact that the vast majority of dwarves do not have children is death to the idea of inherited family surnames. Yet that in itself does NOT mean that inherited family surnames are a bad idea, or even an unworkable one. All it does is throw additional light on the larger problem: The vast majority of dwarves never having children is not a sustainable species model. Don't use an obviously bad idea (current reproduction dynamics mean dwarves willingly go extinct of their own accord) to justify saying that a perfectly plausible idea (name inheritance) could never work. Instead, you should assume that the obviously bad idea WILL be fixed, and that dwarven child-breeding traditions WILL change, and that family surnames WILL become feasible.

     Multiple users have suggested that certain dwarves (especially those with notable achievements) be allowed to spontaneously change, and/or add to, their name. The combat nicknames that militiadwarves have sported for years strongly support the idea that Toady One himself agrees with this suggestion. Again, there seems to be a definite lack of user dislike for this proposition, so it seems safe to assume that this too WILL one day be part of the game.

     Yes, these are both only assumptions--but they're well-supported ones. And any future critique on the possibility of name inheritance (whether it's as simple as one-generation patronymics, or full-fledged clan names) can and should take them fully into account.

I don't get where you got the idea that majority of dwarves not having children is not a sustainable species model.  If anything it is the normal situation in nature, have you noticed how many creatures can produce huge numbers of offspring at a time, hundreds or even thousands in some cases.  If all individuals successfully produced hundreds or thousands of babies, then how viable do you think it would it be if the majority of the members of the species actually reproduced?

If we have a larger number of the original dwarves reproducing, all we end up with is more surnames overall.  However, nothing keeps two basically unrelated individuals from happening to end up with the same surnames.  Since we cannot reliably determine anything about the relatedness of two people by their surname, then the surnames are just taking up space on the screen.  No fixes can ever change this situation fundermentally, I don't really care if you can somewhat increase the probability of two people who have the surname being related, when I still cannot reliably determine this to be so. 

Dwarves adding names for their achievements is another topic, unless these are inherited in which case it is still a separate system to the regular name inheritance. 

Six, I agree its best not to have a purely RNG name. I'd like names to have something to do with the dwarf, at least in the founding of the lineage. I am in no way closed to different ways of performing this task, so long as it is powerful enough I can mod it to my liking.

Family lineage into the extended and mist-shrouded past matters differently to different people. You may not care beyond your immediate relations. My family has a shovel from our first settlers in America, and I live in the house they built. I would be thrilled to know the full line into the distant past. I can find that out by family names, newspaper clippings, birth certificates, marriage records in churches, headstones...

But if everyone has an RNG last name, it becomes very difficult to trace things, in real life or in game. And some people, in game, want to find out the lineage of a slain dwarven king without exporting legends mode.

Why cannot we have a RNG last name AND a family name?

[SixOfSpades]

Family lineage into the extended and mist-shrouded past matters differently to different people. You may not care beyond your immediate relations. My family has a shovel from our first settlers in America, and I live in the house they built. I would be thrilled to know the full line into the distant past.

Agreed. If family names ever becomes a thing, there should be a fair amount of cultural variation, as well as individual variation within each culture. It'd be great if the game eventually developed this sort of detail to the point where different civilizations have different knowledge and traditions: for instance, Civ A still uses the names of the first of their kind as their own last names, in fact each child over the age of five can recite the full list of their longfathers of old, while Civ B names each dwarf after their parents and that's it, all names more than 4 generations back are lost to time--but hey, they're still preserving all of their ancient songs, word for word & note for note.

No, [inherited surnames] creates problems irrespective of what my opinion on the subject is.  The present system works very well to identify individuals out of lists, if we replace it with the surnames system the OP proposed then we lose that functionality.

I take it you're again referring to the fact that the RNG often gives different dwarves the same 1st name, and so the 2nd & 3rd names are required to help tell those dwarves apart. Fair enough--but you seem to be forgetting the very simple tweak of telling the RNG to just not give a newborn any name that's already being used by someone in the fort. Being unwilling to consider an easy fix, and instead painting the whole idea as "greatly inferior", does indeed smack of prior emotional commitment on your part. In my opinion, you're clinging to the "1st names are unreliable identifiers" status quo because it supports the "need" for your desired system of longer names.

I'm not firmly opposed to (slightly) longer names. But I am opposed to biased and/or fallacious arguments for them. To wit:

. . . nothing keeps two basically unrelated individuals from happening to end up with the same surnames.  Since we cannot reliably determine anything about the relatedness of two people by their surname, then the surnames are just taking up space on the screen.

As I recall, you brought up this straw man in the last thread on this topic as well. Something along the lines of, "This plan has a statistical chance of what I consider a failure, therefore the plan has already failed and you should abandon it entirely." I believe that at the time, my reply was something like "Yes, that happens in real life too. A couple of distantly-related dwarves having the same last name can be a minor difficulty . . . but a difficulty is not the same as a flaw."

If you were found to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ, would you care? How about Queen Elizabeth I, or Galileo, or Confucius, or Mohammed?

The further back you go the larger the number of descendants you have.  If we go back thousands of years, pretty much everyone ends up being descended from pretty much everyone, including all manner of famous characters.  That is because every generation the number of ancestors tend to double (inbreeding aside), so a dwarf being descended from Durin the Deathless is not very interesting if he lived thousands of years ago.

Oh, it makes a hell of a difference if you stand to inherit. If you were (somehow) in the direct legitimate line of Elizabeth I, for instance, that would literally make you (or your father/grandfather) the rightful King of England. You do have a point about bloodlines mixing, but bloodlines aren't names. If everybody's name is Durin, then yes, the whole question becomes moot--which is why not all of his descendants got to keep his name.

To put it in terms of my proposed family surnames system, if I set that value to 1 then I get 2 surnames, the dwarf's personal surname and his family surname.

Point of terminology here: Only a name specifically shared with other family members can actually be called a surname. So your dwarf would have name elements [1] [23] for a three-word given name, and then elements [45] for a surname.

I don't get where you got the idea that majority of dwarves not having children is not a sustainable species model.

If anything it is the normal situation in nature, have you noticed how many creatures can produce huge numbers of offspring at a time, hundreds or even thousands in some cases.

True, many animals produce absolute swarms of offspring--as a counterbalance to offset the fact that the vast majority of them will not survive to be able to reproduce. That works for them, because the forces they're working against--hunger and predation--ensure the evolution of the species through the survival of the fittest. Not so with dwarves, because the forces arrayed against them are their own damn social mores about love and sex. From what I've seen, only roughly 5% of dwarves born in the fort will ever have children; not because of goblins or forgotten beasts, but for pitiful reasons like being 11 years apart in age, or having differing views on purring maggots, or having briefly been in love with someone who died 40 years ago. Every dwarf fort is populated primarily by walking Darwin Awards, and in their case the result is NOT a more rigorous gene pool, but instead some very intense inbreeding, as in only a handful of generations you're left with nothing but the same 2 groups of cousins.

Dwarves adding names for their achievements is another topic, unless these are inherited in which case it is still a separate system to the regular name inheritance.

Why should it have to be separate? If the dwarf who earned the name feels that it's more prestigious than her link (which might be tenuous) to her famous ancestor, then she might see fit to [/i]replace[/i] her (or her kids') ancestral name with her own combat title.

[Ninjabread]

Pretty sure everyone can be happy here if naming conventions or the available variants can be set in the entity raws, allowing you to set the number of (randomised) forenames and the list of surname traditions available for instances of the entity to choose from during worldgen, so the current system would be [FORENAMES:3][SURNAME:NONE] for all entities. All random names must be considered forenames as surnames by definition must be either inherited or earned, but a variable number of forenames allows names to be as unique or compact as you like, while still allowing people to give dwarves tags like [SURNAME:PARENT_SAME_SEX] for surnames like Uristson and Ducimdaughter, taking one of the given names of their parent of the same sex as their surname, [SURNAME:PATRIARCH] to simply inherit the father's surname as most humans do, or [SURNAME:HIST_FIG] to take the surname of the most recent historical figure that they are directly descended from. There could also be tags for which conditions are required for a creature to assume a new surname, such as [RENAME:CREATE_ARTEFACT] for artefact crafters, [RENAME:KILL_CREATURE:20] for creatures that have killed at least 20 other creatures, [RENAME:KILL_MEGABEASTS:3] for slayers of 3 or more megabeasts, [RENAME:MARRIAGE_MATRIARCH] to have husbands take their wives' surnames, and [RENAME:PROFESSION] for creatures taking surnames from their profession (irl examples are people with the surnames "Smith", "Priest", or "Baker"), though it may be wise to add another number afterwards to determine the percentage chance for name change so that names aren't too fluid and can still be used to identify families for the most part, so you may want [RENAME:CREATE_ARTEFACT:10] because fortresses make quite a few artefacts and you kinda wanna know their families cause like 90% of the artefacts I've made have been claimed as heirlooms, but you may also want [RENAME:KILL_MEGABEASTS:3:100] so you can always recognise your amazing beastslayer dwarf at a glance.

[Starver]

The roots of 'family names', here on Roundworld, sometimes come from a(n original) parent's name¹, then solidified into a dynastic identifier, but at other times come from profession², locality³, appearance⁴, temperament⁵, achievement⁶, sometimes quite ambiguously⁷.

At some point, a person's personal identifier meant to just distinguish them (for good or bad) from others possessing their common given name then got passed on to a descendent, and the ones we see today (in some cultures, not counting those that still track immediate descendancy to 'n' degrees) are the ones that solidified back then and survived to this day. Not always appropriately. Someone with a surname of Preston no longer comes from Preston, not everybody with the surname of White is fair-haired (though the girl I once knew, of this name, was as fair as you can get without being actually albino), Harry Potter hadn't any obvious connection to clay-firing, and there are probably less people called Davidson whose fathers were called David than any comparable number of people not called Davidson.


If we're memorialising major historic figures, we should perhaps also 'honour' major historic crafts created by an ancestor ("ExcaliburCrafter", or equivalent), other important jobs done ("FamineLifter"), significant settlements ("OfTheHallsOfWonder") or something in the psychology/physiology of a given ancestor ("ImplacableFighter"/"LongBeard"). At least until an intermediate ancestor, or the descendent him/herself we're currently examining, establishes a better reason to immortilise a new name-marker to be remembered for another generation or three.

If we're just placeholding a means for establishing continuity, it can be absolutely anything (and, given that all words are names and all names are words/word-pairs, we already have that, just need the option to 'freeze' them upon Worldgen year zero, and a sensible way of merging them as each copulating couple with possibly two different ancestries, vie upon the birth of each child (or every child, or upon the point of marriage, in one decision that then applies from then on) to provide enough meaningful history without exponentially increasing the fully-credited family name. We can have the worldgen guide the name, or decide for ourselves that the (relatively, maybe chosen by sphere and wide association) unguided name must refer to a Year Minus-One event.


That's all with only a partial nod to (non-deceptive) name changes during life. Some Earthly cultures give a babe-in-arms a placeholder name that is replaced by a child's name once past the difficult time of high infant mortality, and/or give a child the opportunity to adopt a self-selected new name upon attaining (one degree or other of) adulthood, and/or adopt an adult-baptismal/membership name at the point they move into a given calling (regnal names, the Popes, Paul (nee Saul), etc), then there's marriage where women (or men!) can/ought to/must opt to change their surnames in full or by hyphenation (with pre-existing children possibly renaming as well). And I'm sure there are other


It's complicated, IRL. It can be made simple in DF (or at least a significant subset of simplifications, chosen either at design-time, during worldgen or at arbitrary points of settlement), but true realism is a difficult beast to fake, and true utility wouldn't be realistic. Thus we still need to, think, about what we're trying to do.

(More than that, what is Toady trying to do. C14^th-ish application of names was at the less sophisticated end of the spectrum amongst hoi polloi, and for the ruling classes it was convenience/propaganda and other things to go beyond getting some 'authoritative' cleric to maintain the scroll upon which family tree leading back to Adam had been drawn, in (possibly disingenuous) detail most especially around the way the Divine Right To Rule can be seen to lead specifically to themselves.)


¹ Johnson (son of John), Fitzroy (possibly illegitimate son of the king) or Price (son of(/'ap') Rhys)
² Hunter (hunter), Miller (miller), Farmer (tax collector)
³ Kent (Kent), Hill (one or other local rise of ground), Moore (Morocco)
⁴ White (fair), Black (dark or, from a different root, also fair), Blunt (fair-haired, as per the previous alternative)
⁵ Fareweather (optimist), Frost (unfriendly), Tyson (unruly firebrand)
⁶ Pilgrim (visited/came back from upon one or other significant destination/journey)
⁷ Barnes (warrior or farmhand or from various places)

[Manveru Taurënér]

Just a small anecdote to add regarding my own last name, but it was apparently originally given to my great great great something something grandfather when he moved to an area where someone with the same last name already lived, and the local dude in charge promptly gave him a new one so there wouldn't be any confusion (he didn't really have a say in the matter afaik). So even if one would end up with people with the same last names in a fort it would simply be historically accurate to rename one of them with whatever one sees fit. So yeah, basically a non-issue. My ancestor ended up with Hultman, hult (holt in archaic english) being an old norse word for forest, so yeah, not a whole lot of thought put into that I assume ^^

Procedural names definitely seems like exactly the thing Tarn and Zach enjoy implementing whenever they can, so I have no doubt it's coming sooner or later. One thing I'd like to see is that when you have a dwarf naming himself or being renamed in relation to some grand feat or event or skill, say Elfbane, Giantslayer, Peacebringer, Thunderhammer, Foamrider etc. that you might end up with a sort of family culture that lives on and have ancestors try and live up to their name/ancestor (or renounce it and end up with a new name). Of course the majority would still have regular "filler" names, but it would be cool when starting a new game to maybe have a few dwarves with noticeably interesting names where you could go into legends and find their family history and where the names come from.

[Ninjabread]

Starver, it was the first "If" paragraph that I was kinda going for, hence the RENAME tags, which I admit could be significantly broader than the few examples I gave, the lifting of famine is an interesting thought though: who earns that name change? is it the hardest working and most productive farmer/hunter/butcher/cook? or a trader from the hillocks with a wagon full of plump helmets? or does a noble take all the credit because nobles are nobles and they like to pretend they're useful? could be a tough one to code since there are so many ways a famine might end and so many people involved, not to mention famines in worldgen probably won't happen until farming is overhauled and sites actually start producing and using goods, and that one probably won't happen till the economy is a thing. An equivalent in the same category that would more likely function in the game as it is now would likely be something like "Hamletsaviour", "Fortressfounder", or "Spellsage" after mythgen happens.

The thought does occur to me now, however, that maybe percentage chances aren't the way to go, maybe there should be more of a level of significance variable that can be set instead, to avoid Urist McDragonslayer suddenly deciding "nah my name Chef", but then maybe have that level of significance degrade over the generations so Urist McDragonslayer's great x 10 grandson who actively avoids conflict and has trained to become a legendary+5 cook, with monarchs of multiple civilisations from across the world coming to the fortress just to try his ☼roc liver roast☼ just might decide to change his surname from McDragonslayer to Chef

[Starver]

Spoiler: And what have you got against professional dragon slayers who actually take pride in being good chefs? (click to show/hide)

[dragdeler]

I did not read the whole thread so sorry for that.

Family names should be inherited by one of the parents, and I'd suggest defining which one in the raws of the different races (with an option to make civs have it either way: so one human civ might be matriarchal while the next is patriarchal; which might explain to some point why they understand themselves as two distinct entities). There is a risk that the namepool might become tiny, but I think it's very likely that we'll see clans die out and new ones being drawn out of the more abstract population pools. And if not it should be an indication of an interesting world.

But what I consider more important would be making use of all the pieces of our name syntaxe; specifically "the" and "of"... We allready have titles, but "the" should be used to point at their achievements while "of" should be used to point at their provenance. The titles would still be dicerolled (except for hometowns but even then... if the settlement name is really long it might be easier to let rngeesus steer the wheel) but at least they'd relate to something. And if done right you might be able to tell apart different wings of a family that live in different places. Some titles would be inheritable but as a general rule of thumb only dwarves who settled would carry titles (maybe even making it an indication which of your citizens are likely to migrate to a new fort). Now you add a suffix to titles (peterSON) in case we have a person on our hands that is the descendant of somebody famous (also maybe a new lifegoal: do something remarkable enough to not be defined by your ancestors) et voilà... no?