There are 2,325 words in [DWARF] so I presume first names are drawn from a more limited number of the total words. Otherwise GoblinCookie's concern seems be entirely moot.
Having 2,325 first names would mean any duplicate first names in a fortress of 200 isn't that much of an issue. Either way, duplicate first names are relatively uncommon and even duplicate first names and last names from whatever family relationship will still have each dwarf running the gamut of possible profession names.
I suppose it is a question of each name being one of (3x2325)12,568,078,125 nonsense strings, or 2,325 possible first names and a finite number of family names which can become familiar to the player. This is the so-and-so clan over here, that's the so-and-so clan over there, I see the mayor's office went from one family to the other, etc. Right now you have to break out a microscope to see through the clutter of nonsense last names to discover these story elements, and there is really no need for it to exist this way.
Complexity =/= Depth. If you can't see the depth for the complexity or are mired in interface and third party utilities to sort through it, that depth is functionally meaningless. For example, I didn't notice my chief medical dwarf was the wife of my dying, bed-ridden speardwarf until after he died and I got the emotional shock notice from his death, cheating me from the tension of the surgery scene and only being told how tragic it was after the fact.
Add to this the first generation of worldgen not inheriting last names and we have a formula for a lot of lineages being created in even a young world. Then add great heroes, craftsmen, kings and necromancers making their own last names. This makes storytelling easier as family relations are drawn to the forefront, being quite possibly the first detail a player or adventurer might notice. Oh look, a mercenary to hire. Urist McDragonslayer, son of Lobok McDragonslayer, son of Rovod McDragonslayer, who slew the dragon Golddevours in the year 23. I bet this guy is ready to live up to his line.
And it can add the life goal of "Make a name for oneself" among the glory-seeking.
This adds so much. What's the occasional reused name on forgettable background characters?
Starver, what I suggest allows for a lot of customization and tailoring to the individual so I think this is compatible. Notably, [TAKE_SPOUSE_LASTNAME] could just as easily be given to the male caste instead of the female caste.
I would not, however, have these systems procedurally generated when they could be defined by raw tokens, unless one raw token is to procedurally generate a system. Pleasing everyone in a game this easily modded is fairly simple; don't hard-code.
In fact, GoblinCookie really considers this a step backwards, there's always [RANDOM_LASTNAME] on his dwarf castes. There, we all get what we want.
Having 2,325 first names would mean any duplicate first names in a fortress of 200 isn't that much of an issue. Either way, duplicate first names are relatively uncommon and even duplicate first names and last names from whatever family relationship will still have each dwarf running the gamut of possible profession names.
That single concern doesn't seem terribly insurmountable.
Last name inheritance could exclude the first generation of worldgen, creating a massive number of first names.
A marriage could generate a new last name if the couple has low tradition values.
Larger initial civilization populations would begin with a larger pool of names.
Repeating first names in the same family means Urist McUrist may beget an Urist McUrist II.
Duplicated first names generate middle names.
The pool of first names could be expanded.
All of these produce something other than Random McRandomRandom, which as a name is as functional as a hex string. It is a unique identifier, but otherwise meaningless. Replacing randomness with meaningful systems is never a step backwards.
Having 2,325 first names would mean any duplicate first names in a fortress of 200 isn't that much of an issue. Either way, duplicate first names are relatively uncommon and even duplicate first names and last names from whatever family relationship will still have each dwarf running the gamut of possible profession names.It sounds fine until you realize all the historical figures outside of your fort are actually relevant. Child kidnapped? Good luck locating the right dwarf. Want to commission a statue of Urist Bravehammer? He's got dozens of relatives (living and dead) sharing his name.
That single concern doesn't seem terribly insurmountable.
Last name inheritance could exclude the first generation of worldgen, creating a massive number of first names.
A marriage could generate a new last name if the couple has low tradition values.
Larger initial civilization populations would begin with a larger pool of names.
Repeating first names in the same family means Urist McUrist may beget an Urist McUrist II.
Duplicated first names generate middle names.
The pool of first names could be expanded.
All of these produce something other than Random McRandomRandom, which as a name is as functional as a hex string. It is a unique identifier, but otherwise meaningless. Replacing randomness with meaningful systems is never a step backwards.
I don't think you understand the problem. There are only a small number of starting historical characters per civilization and all other historical characters are descended from those few people. That means we will end up with everyone having one of about four surnames, which in turn means that the surnames no longer reveal anything about what family anyone actually belongs too.
If the surnames do not reveal anything about the family relationships of the character, then why bother with surnames at all? It is better to use a second random string combination to identify the family relationships, after the first random string that reliably identifies the individual. Your kind of ideas, while historically grounded are greatly inferior to this system, since any surname system leads to constant duplication given the realities of DF historical figure scarcity.
Yes you could increase the number of first names to a vast number. That however is just creating a solution to a problem that you did not need to introduce in the first place.
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.
Any dwarf worth making a statue of will be almost certain to have a combat nickname, "maker of" moniker, and/or noble title. Combined with the profession name, that reduces the chances of identity match to close to 0%. As for kidnapped dwarves, their names should be unknown anyway--it's not like the goblins publish lists of who they've taken, and those stolen as babies should never even have learned their birth names at all.. . . even duplicate first names and last names from whatever family relationship will still have each dwarf running the gamut of possible profession names.It sounds fine until you realize all the historical figures outside of your fort are actually relevant. Child kidnapped? Good luck locating the right dwarf. Want to commission a statue of Urist Bravehammer? He's got dozens of relatives (living and dead) sharing his name.
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.
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.....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
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
. . . 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."
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.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.
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.
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.[/quote]
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Family names should be inherited by one of the parentsDirection that in go not does time...
I already get dwarves with the exact same name popping up occasionally, when it happens I usually just rename them to something sinilar, so it’s not like the “random gibberish” system is flawless
As I said before, the ability to fix a problem that you needlessly created for no gain is not an argument for adding it in. Why would I be 'emotionally invested' in a system of naming? The people proposing this concept are emotionally attached to the idea of making surnames work like reality, that is the problem; it does not even work very well in reality.And as I've said before, family names do not provide zero gain, multiple users seem to think they would be pretty handy. Every real-world culture that I can think of (except those small enough to give each person only one name) has also come to the same conclusion. Why do you think that is?
By making all first names unique, what we are in effect doing is getting rid of first names and replacing them with the present surnames.Um--what? You yourself stated that shared first names was a problem (essentially "requiring" the other two names to make an exact match virtually impossible), and yet now you appear to be opposed to solving that problem? Am I reading you right? I don't really understand what you mean with the second half of your sentence.
The problem with doing that is the present first names also have a purpose; they allow us to identify culture and if we get rid of the present first names in effect by giving every individual a unique first name then it becomes more difficult to tell what culture any individual comes from than it presently is.By 'culture' do you mean race, as in being able to tell a dwarven name from an elven one by sight? Either way, I never suggested that the RNG should make up all-new word on the spot and assign it as a dwarf's first name, I meant only that when a dwarf is born, it should just keep pulling first names until it hits one that isn't already in use. (Besides, the elven and dwarven languages each use letters that the other one doesn't, so telling them apart is pretty easy.)
With further development we can make it so that first names change over time in a culture, so first names allow us not only to identify culture but what era the person comes from.This suggestion is totally unrelated, why do you bring it up?
"In many cases" it's less than 50%? Is that anything like, "sixty percent of the time it works, every time"? And where exactly are you getting this data, on a DF suggestion that has never been implemented?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."It is when you are replacing a system that has near 100% accuracy with a system that will in many cases have an accuracy of less than 50%.
"Some random peasant" who just happens to be the foremost scion of a senior branch of the family, and who (miraculously) has the historical documents & experts in inheritance law to prove it. Technically, I don't think any two people are ever in the exact same position to inherit--even with identical twins, they still record which one came out first.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.Remember there are literally thousands of other people in the same inheritance position as you are. Hereditary systems simply break down when you end up picking some random peasant out of thousands of other peasants and make him king.
In history nobody has ever cared about extremely distant relations inheritance rights. Their interest tends to stop at about first cousins and aunts/uncles for exactly the reasons I was referring to; it becomes absurd beyond that point.The Hundred Years' War was fought over the King of England's birthright claim to the throne of France. By its conclusion, royals were still debating the succession rights from seven generations prior. And even today, one of the fundamental differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims is over which of Mohammed's relatives was his true successor as leader of the faith.
Yes, if the fort falls, the dwarves inside will most likely fail to reproduce, I considered that all right. My point was that dwarves will still reliably fail to reproduce even if the fort DOESN'T fall. Out of 200 dwarves, maybe 10 of them will get married, and maybe 1 of those marriages is homosexual, so you're probably looking at 4 productive couples--who together churn out enough babies to keep the population right at the cap. No migrants can enter, so each child's dating pool is restricted to kids from the other 3 families (on top of all the rules they faced already). With such a reduced pool, the odds of finding a mate becomes very small--there will still be a few successful pairings, but as each family of children drops out of the running, the number of eligible mates becomes lower and lower--because a larger and larger percentage of the fort's inhabitants are one's own siblings. The number of reproducing families will inevitably shrink to 2, then 1, and finally none. Ironically, the only way a dwarf fort can survive in the long term is by failing, reducing the population below the cap so migrants can bring in new blood.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. . . . 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.Exactly, the majority of the creatures do not get to reproduce, on account of getting eaten; so my point is quite correct. Thing you are not considering is the exact same thing (nearly everyone gets eaten) can happen in Dwarf Fortress can't it, especially in particularly nasty worlds, which will be a thing fairly soon. If a forgotten beast turns up and eats most people, then we end up with the exact same situation due to random factors that presently exists due to the weird sexual repression that dominates the current DF world.
I think I should clarify--there's a reason I said replace. Consider the dwarf Momuz Thunderbreeches, granddaughter of Stakuz Thunderbreeches. Due to her dual professions of Butcher and Axedwarf, Momuz earns the combat title "Slayer of Geese". She then bears a son, whom she names Datan Gooseslayer, because she figures any name related to a combat title is better than being associated with someone famous only for his flatulence. So yes, your response is largely correct--Datan Gooseslayer might very well have elder siblings already named Thunderbreeches, creating a small but noticeable dysfunction. As long as Momuz herself remains alive, with her name & title acting as a reminder that Thunderbreeches and Gooseslayer are the same family, that's largely okay, but after her death it's purely up to the player to remember . . . unless other individuals decide to keep the clan intact under the same name, unilaterally changing their own surnames to Gooseslayer (or back to Thunderbreeches).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 replace her (or her kids') ancestral name with her own combat title.Because that would imply introducing a dysfunctional system into the game. The system is only functional if it is kept separate from other information-bearing words, since it carries different information. It is also of limited value once the distinguished individual that created the name has died, since we are only interested in their fairly immediate family.
I suggest we . . . insist that all creatures, items, minerals and other things DF features, should be included in every language of every race.I'll generally support the second half of that, but also caution against getting involved with the language. It's a huge can of worms unto itself, and in short it's nothing but a placeholder--there's little point in suggesting improvements on a placeholder.
We add suffixes to every language, that are not choosen randomly out of a pool of proper nouns, but always the same in every world (but different for each race). Now those pieces of gibberish are applied to {e} and {f}, in order to signify different meanings, such as: "comes from", "killer of", "creator of", "inheritor of" (...).
Another thing to worry about is the length of your {e} and {f}: Artifacts, creatures, and locations can have names that are quite long, and if they get folded into a dwarf's regular name in all menus, there's your truncation problem again. Titles should probably only appear in screens wide enough to properly show them, like the main Units menu or of course the individual dwarf's Thoughts page.
And as I've said before, family names do not provide zero gain, multiple users seem to think they would be pretty handy. Every real-world culture that I can think of (except those small enough to give each person only one name) has also come to the same conclusion. Why do you think that is?
Um--what? You yourself stated that shared first names was a problem (essentially "requiring" the other two names to make an exact match virtually impossible), and yet now you appear to be opposed to solving that problem? Am I reading you right? I don't really understand what you mean with the second half of your sentence.
By 'culture' do you mean race, as in being able to tell a dwarven name from an elven one by sight? Either way, I never suggested that the RNG should make up all-new word on the spot and assign it as a dwarf's first name, I meant only that when a dwarf is born, it should just keep pulling first names until it hits one that isn't already in use. (Besides, the elven and dwarven languages each use letters that the other one doesn't, so telling them apart is pretty easy.)
This suggestion is totally unrelated, why do you bring it up?
"In many cases" it's less than 50%? Is that anything like, "sixty percent of the time it works, every time"? And where exactly are you getting this data, on a DF suggestion that has never been implemented?
"Some random peasant" who just happens to be the foremost scion of a senior branch of the family, and who (miraculously) has the historical documents & experts in inheritance law to prove it. Technically, I don't think any two people are ever in the exact same position to inherit--even with identical twins, they still record which one came out first.
The Hundred Years' War was fought over the King of England's birthright claim to the throne of France. By its conclusion, royals were still debating the succession rights from seven generations prior. And even today, one of the fundamental differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims is over which of Mohammed's relatives was his true successor as leader of the faith.
Yes, if the fort falls, the dwarves inside will most likely fail to reproduce, I considered that all right. My point was that dwarves will still reliably fail to reproduce even if the fort DOESN'T fall. Out of 200 dwarves, maybe 10 of them will get married, and maybe 1 of those marriages is homosexual, so you're probably looking at 4 productive couples--who together churn out enough babies to keep the population right at the cap. No migrants can enter, so each child's dating pool is restricted to kids from the other 3 families (on top of all the rules they faced already). With such a reduced pool, the odds of finding a mate becomes very small--there will still be a few successful pairings, but as each family of children drops out of the running, the number of eligible mates becomes lower and lower--because a larger and larger percentage of the fort's inhabitants are one's own siblings. The number of reproducing families will inevitably shrink to 2, then 1, and finally none. Ironically, the only way a dwarf fort can survive in the long term is by failing, reducing the population below the cap so migrants can bring in new blood.
I think I should clarify--there's a reason I said replace. Consider the dwarf Momuz Thunderbreeches, granddaughter of Stakuz Thunderbreeches. Due to her dual professions of Butcher and Axedwarf, Momuz earns the combat title "Slayer of Geese". She then bears a son, whom she names Datan Gooseslayer, because she figures any name related to a combat title is better than being associated with someone famous only for his flatulence. So yes, your response is largely correct--Datan Gooseslayer might very well have elder siblings already named Thunderbreeches, creating a small but noticeable dysfunction. As long as Momuz herself remains alive, with her name & title acting as a reminder that Thunderbreeches and Gooseslayer are the same family, that's largely okay, but after her death it's purely up to the player to remember . . . unless other individuals decide to keep the clan intact under the same name, unilaterally changing their own surnames to Gooseslayer (or back to Thunderbreeches).
I wasn't implying that combat titles themselves be inherited--for instance, I never meant that the son should be named "Datan Thunderbreeches, Slayer of Geese".
At the moment the game has the following name structure:
{a} {b}{c} the {e} of {f}
All variables are proper nouns choosen randomly to create a name. I suggest we leave it that way, but insist that all creatures, items, minerals and other things DF features, should be included in every language of every race.
I have actually spent the last year doing just that. It is ton of work to add in all the things in the game as words.
it should be possible for others to name an indivual
By the way, I assume we all agree that the naming systems should be decided on the entity-level and not the species level?
this discussion has barely mentioned the question of how the values and personalities of individual Dwarves and entities would affect these naming conventions
The family name system in real-life works extremely poorly, especially under certain conditions, yes it does work better than having no family name system at all, but that may only be if you consider a false conclusion better than no conclusion.Wow. I'm amazed you feel so strongly about this, and in such direct opposition to pretty much the entire world--but hey, you do you.
I am not proposing that we do not have family names, I am just proposing that we do not simply copy the systems that are used in real-life but come up with a better system. . . . A lot of things real-life cultures do is quite imbecilic, in fact I would say the majority of things that real-life cultures do is such. So if you want things to work properly, blindly copying real-life cultures is definitely not the way to go.True, there are certain cultures that do things that I personally find rather silly--like some Polynesian peoples refusing to ever speak the name of a person who has died, or English speakers making non sequitur nicknames, like shortening "Charles" to somehow get "Chuck". But these are quite definitely the exception, the vast majority of naming protocols seem quite sensible to me--and obviously, to those who use them. Even the real-world chauvinist standard of "the wife takes the husband's surname" would cease to be anywhere near as sexist in DF, if we simply introduce an equally-weighted feminist counterpart. (It makes more sense to claim parentage from the mother, anyway.)
It is not a problem at the moment because there are no family surnames. It becomes a problem if we replace the present surnames with family ones, since we will end will a large number of people with the same name.I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill with this. Sure, let's say the Bunnyhammer family consists of a married couple who produce 15 kids, one of whom manages to marry and have another 9 kids, and outside the fort there's an extended Bunnyhammer clan with 127 living members (I'm not sure how many of those would likely be considered historical figures). So that's about 150 Bunnyhammers . . . but since there are hundreds of viable first names, the game can still name them all with no repeats. (Getting close to an "upper limit" on clan size could be another prompt for members to break off into a new clan.)
By culture I mean culture,That wasn't helpful, but I'll try to play along. Every creature has a race (species), a birth civilization (set of social customs used by their parents [both parents are likely to share the same one]), a formative civilization (where they grew up), and a current civilization (where they live now). A person's culture is going to depend on ALL of these, and in my opinion their name should as well. A dwarven child snatched off to live as a goblin would probably be given a goblin name (and, as I said, might not ever remember their dwarven one).
This raises the question of what the point of first names is at all and the answer is that it allows us to easily identify the culture of our individual. . . . a goblin born in a dwarven civilization, or a non-historical goblin promoted into a historical characters gets a dwarven name.But that's hardly limited to just the first name. Just because we also see the English translations of their names, doesn't mean we can't tell the difference between "Stinthad" and "Ngustpuz". Besides, if it's in a fort, the goblin's going to be shown as a 'g' anyway, not a '☺'. And it's not like we can't just overwrite the special cases with a nickname, so it's a moot point.
We should do the opposite of making first names unique. Having identified that the only function of first names is to identify culture, we can make everyone in the culture have the same 'first name'. That makes things work a lot better, since we have a shared name that tells us what culture the individual belongs to, one shared name telling us what family household they belong to and a third unique name identifying the specific individual.Oh HELL no. You criticize the majority of human cultures' naming conventions as "imbecilic", and then suggest THIS as an improvement!? You never cease to amaze me with your ability to make wild, unfounded suppositions and then immediately treat them as established objective facts. But let's mentally put this plan of yours into practice anyway: Since your home civilization is called "The High Candles", every native dwarf in your fort has "Highcandle" as name elements 1 and 2 . . . which serves no purpose whatsoever except to a) take up valuable space, and b) distinguish them from the fort's various merchants, guests, and possible invaders--who of course are already flagged as Merchant, Guest, or Invader in the Units list. I just checked, you can't use nicknames to completely remove a dwarf's first name--and even if you could, to have them all called "Highcandle" by default is what truly deserves to be called imbecilic.
Hmm, yes and no. For instance, because the Hundred Years' War had interludes of peace, those monarchs who came later had to look further back to find "just cause" to resume hostilities. In Shakespeare's Henry V, a big chunk of Act 1 Scene 2 is literally devoted to a tedious and rather arcane history lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnk1fbGNWrM (and I'm pretty sure this part of the script is actually edited down from the original version).The Hundred Years' War was fought over the King of England's birthright claim to the throne of France. By its conclusion, royals were still debating the succession rights from seven generations prior. And even today, one of the fundamental differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims is over which of Mohammed's relatives was his true successor as leader of the faith.In neither of these cases did the claims originally result from anything beyond the immediate extended family.
Most people don't have families at all since they are not historical characters. The situation you are describing will however not happen, because the population cap will eventually drop as the older generation die off, which causes existing marriages of the middle-aged dwarves to become fertile again. That is because the child cap constrains the reproduction of the married couples once there are a certain number of children. But once the older dwarves die of old age and none of the younger generation can marry since there is only one family, the middle-aged dwarf marriages simply churn out more children.Yes, but the problem is not "babies don't get born", the problem is "couples don't get married". Toady largely "fixed" the issue by making (apparently) all migrants already heterosexually married upon arrival, so the initial number of productive couples in the fort is VERY high at first. Since most forts don't last more than a generation or two, this band-aid solution is nearly perfect in practice (although the resulting babysplosion does make the first few years even more difficult).
In effect, in DF as in nature reproductive potential is seldom actual reproductive outcome. If all the younger generation are one family, then the older generations families will simply make new offspring for them to breed with.
A large number of people end up being called Gooseslayer. Perpetually inherited surnames are no less dysfunctional if they are originally assigned to heroes, since most people are not heroes.A large number of people are named Smith, too, even though most of them are not smiths. Everyone knows this. They also know that the name Smith is so common, there is no reason to assume that any two random people named Smith are related--it's more likely that they are not. Yet this is not a dysfunction, because a) it's so well-known, and b) even all the Smiths together would still constitute only a sliver of a minority, against all the other thousands of names out there. It can be the most popular last name, but as long as it doesn't dominate (the way Highcandle would), it still serves its purpose of distinguishing each Smith family from the rest of society as a whole.
My reply is unrelated to the thread topic, so I sent you a PM.All variables are proper nouns choosen randomly to create a name. I suggest we leave it that way, but insist that all creatures, items, minerals and other things DF features, should be included in every language of every race.I have actually spent the last year doing just that. It is ton of work to add in all the things in the game as words.
Considering this is Dwarf Fortress we're talking about, I'm surprised this discussion has barely mentioned the question of how the values and personalities of individual Dwarves and entities would affect these naming conventions. . . .Agreed, decisions like this should largely be up to the individual dwarf, although certain others should also have enough influence on the dwarf to have some control as well. As previously mentioned, a newly-arrived migrant (or newly-named infant) might be renamed by local authorities if a name is deemed improper or likely to cause confusion. Depending on the social customs of the civ, and a dwarf's regard for tradition & authority, a family elder might be able to control things like baby names or breaking off a new clan. And combat titles should arise from witnesses to the deed(s) in question, so that most likely means the other members of the dwarf's squad . . . or at least those who saw the dwarf returning from the kill.
On the other hand, it should be possible for others to name an indivual, so that new knights can get names from whoever knights them, feared demons getting names from their oppressees, or monarchs taking the names their advisors advises them to instead of their own preferences.
By the way, I assume we all agree that the naming systems should be decided on the entity-level and not the species level?
True, there are certain cultures that do things that I personally find rather silly--like some Polynesian peoples refusing to ever speak the name of a person who has died, or English speakers making non sequitur nicknames, like shortening "Charles" to somehow get "Chuck". But these are quite definitely the exception, the vast majority of naming protocols seem quite sensible to me--and obviously, to those who use them. Even the real-world chauvinist standard of "the wife takes the husband's surname" would cease to be anywhere near as sexist in DF, if we simply introduce an equally-weighted feminist counterpart. (It makes more sense to claim parentage from the mother, anyway.)
When you say we should come up with "a better system", I hope you don't mean just one system: I've always championed the idea that different races, and different civilizations within those races, should have different cultural behaviors, and naming conventions should definitely be part of that. Besides, having a set of random options present in the raws would likely allow players who dislike certain possible behaviors (like yourself) to go into the raws and edit out the options they'd rather not see.
I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill with this. Sure, let's say the Bunnyhammer family consists of a married couple who produce 15 kids, one of whom manages to marry and have another 9 kids, and outside the fort there's an extended Bunnyhammer clan with 127 living members (I'm not sure how many of those would likely be considered historical figures). So that's about 150 Bunnyhammers . . . but since there are hundreds of viable first names, the game can still name them all with no repeats. (Getting close to an "upper limit" on clan size could be another prompt for members to break off into a new clan.)
By culture I mean culture,That wasn't helpful, but I'll try to play along. Every creature has a race (species), a birth civilization (set of social customs used by their parents [both parents are likely to share the same one]), a formative civilization (where they grew up), and a current civilization (where they live now). A person's culture is going to depend on ALL of these, and in my opinion their name should as well. A dwarven child snatched off to live as a goblin would probably be given a goblin name (and, as I said, might not ever remember their dwarven one).[/quote]
But that's hardly limited to just the first name. Just because we also see the English translations of their names, doesn't mean we can't tell the difference between "Stinthad" and "Ngustpuz". Besides, if it's in a fort, the goblin's going to be shown as a 'g' anyway, not a '☺'. And it's not like we can't just overwrite the special cases with a nickname, so it's a moot point.
Oh HELL no. You criticize the majority of human cultures' naming conventions as "imbecilic", and then suggest THIS as an improvement!? You never cease to amaze me with your ability to make wild, unfounded suppositions and then immediately treat them as established objective facts. But let's mentally put this plan of yours into practice anyway: Since your home civilization is called "The High Candles", every native dwarf in your fort has "Highcandle" as name elements 1 and 2 . . . which serves no purpose whatsoever except to a) take up valuable space, and b) distinguish them from the fort's various merchants, guests, and possible invaders--who of course are already flagged as Merchant, Guest, or Invader in the Units list. I just checked, you can't use nicknames to completely remove a dwarf's first name--and even if you could, to have them all called "Highcandle" by default is what truly deserves to be called imbecilic.
The point of a name is to distinguish. A name, or a name element, cannot distinguish if there is nothing meaningful to distinguish it FROM. Bob Higgins doesn't go around calling himself "Human Bob Higgins" all the time, and even the far more specific "Philadelphian Bob Higgins" still doesn't mean a damn thing if he's in Philadelphia. The sort of race-specific or civ-specific names that you're suggesting could only make sense if they were applied to just the fringe elements in a given society.
Hmm, yes and no. For instance, because the Hundred Years' War had interludes of peace, those monarchs who came later had to look further back to find "just cause" to resume hostilities. In Shakespeare's Henry V, a big chunk of Act 1 Scene 2 is literally devoted to a tedious and rather arcane history lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnk1fbGNWrM (and I'm pretty sure this part of the script is actually edited down from the original version).
This tangent has diverted more than far enough from the topic of the thread, and I'd prefer not to continue it. I primarily added this reply just for the YouTube link, because Branagh made a bitchin' Henry V.
Yes, but the problem is not "babies don't get born", the problem is "couples don't get married". Toady largely "fixed" the issue by making (apparently) all migrants already heterosexually married upon arrival, so the initial number of productive couples in the fort is VERY high at first. Since most forts don't last more than a generation or two, this band-aid solution is nearly perfect in practice (although the resulting babysplosion does make the first few years even more difficult).
I too must admit that certain of my conclusions are not empirical--I have not personally run even a single fort long enough to see all the original migrants die off, let alone for the clear majority of their descendants to refuse to marry and thus start the inbreeding train. But I know it is going to work poorly because I, too, can think critically, and I know that when the average dwarf considers perpetuating their species to be LESS important than a shared fondness for a particular metal, that's definitely a bad sign. Yes, when a significant number of old dwarves die, more babies will be born to replace them, and the babies will definitely meet the age requirement with each other. But just because they can marry & reproduce doesn't mean a realistic number of them will.
A large number of people are named Smith, too, even though most of them are not smiths. Everyone knows this. They also know that the name Smith is so common, there is no reason to assume that any two random people named Smith are related--it's more likely that they are not. Yet this is not a dysfunction, because a) it's so well-known, and b) even all the Smiths together would still constitute only a sliver of a minority, against all the other thousands of names out there. It can be the most popular last name, but as long as it doesn't dominate (the way Highcandle would), it still serves its purpose of distinguishing each Smith family from the rest of society as a whole.
I still think that having one monolithic system, no matter how logical and well thought out, is a very poor idea, and that extensive rawability with widespread differences in names between races and civs is important to help keep the world feeling alive rather than homogenousI for one am firmly in agreement. Replay value depends heavily on the dwarves themselves being interesting, and a large part of that is derived from cultural differences, so that each fort you play feels significantly different from your previous ones.
It's not one system, well in a way it is :). We have a large number of names, reflecting all different types of important information and we eliminate those that are not culturally relevant. In some cases, as with family the length of names is controlled by a number of indefinite length. So if we don't think a civilization would care about a particular piece of information, we leave it out even though the player might want to know it. We can do this automatically on the basis of values, so a civilization that does not care about [FAMILY] does not bother with surnames at all and the more they care the more generations of family they record.Variations on a system (especially when the only thing that changes is the magnitude) is still just one system. Please, at least say you'd be open to switching the positions of the names around a bit. For instance, traditional Chinese puts the surname before the given name--and I personally think that makes a lot of sense. It's like biological nomenclature, putting the general words first and getting increasingly more specific: Homo sapiens Honeycutt Barbara. (We already write time as hour:minute:second, now if we could just get people to write year:month:day.)
That is effect an alternative means at carrying out the basic function of my naming, getting rid of old surnames so that they do not pass out context and lose accuracy as regards to family identification for the player. However your idea depends too much on a situation working out in a particular fashion, for instance it breaks down if a forgotten beast scatters the Bunnyhammers about the place and then a whole series of catastrophes ensures that the population never reaches the magic splitting-point which I presume retires that name and creates two new names.I get the impression that you believe my plan is "have the RNG procedurally create an all-new first name for every baby (or at least the historically significant ones), which will never be used again." Just in case, let me clarify: I only want the RNG to "grab a first name that is not currently in use, by anyone in the fort, or by anyone outside the fort who shares the baby's family name." So no two dwarves with matching names will ever be alive at the same time. Sure, Legends mode or engravings may still show dwarves with identical names, but that's hardly a big deal since historical records include the date on every entry. If the name you want shows up on events from 400 years ago, chances are it ain't the same dwarf. (Unless it's a vampire, in which case you've got bigger problems to be worrying about.)
In any case, where did the clans come from? We were never talking about clans, which are more family-site government hybrids to put it in game terms.I said "clan" because that's shorthand for "group of related individuals who live as a (generally) cohesive unit and share the same name", such as Bunnyhammer. The word 'clan' literally means 'family', that is all that the word formally means, and don't you EVER try to equate it with a form of government again, without some reputable sources to back you up.
And what's so wrong about that? It works for vampires. It works for Eminem. It worked for Gandalf. True, there are times where realism should take a back seat to convenience, but I don't think this is one of them. People taking new names (or having names thrust upon them, willingly or not) tells a more interesting story, and can help add depth to the character.A dwarven child snatched off to live as a goblin would probably be given a goblin name (and, as I said, might not ever remember their dwarven one).That would result in us having two names for the same character, one according to the culture of the first civilization from which the child was stolen and the second according to the second civilization.
As a special case we should probably hide their family names (not actually delete) as long as they remain part of a [BABYSNATCHER] civilization, that way if they migrate back into their own civilization (or into any non-babysnatcher one incidentally) their family names will restore, unless they would have been overridden for another reason, for instance they got married to someone in the goblin civilization.Yeah, that sounds right.
In any case, first names are an imperfect system that I am proposing we replace effectively with the two-string surnames and replace their function with a seperate cultural name. In effect, what I am doing is pointing out the cultural-identification function of non-unique first names, a function lost by making them unique and proposing we simply replace this with a reliably uniform name.Just because first names are imperfect doesn't mean they're worthless. Cultural names, in contrast,
My idea was to string together the first string of the civilization's with the last string of the site government. So if my civilization was called the Guilds of Steel and my site government is called the Society of Rabbits, then all it's members would be called the Guildrabbits. That means without having to check, whenever I see someone called Guildrabbit, I can immediately tell that they are part of the Society of Rabbits. I can run a search and I can immediately come up with a list of historical characters that lived in their territory, without having to trawl through lists of "so and so stole a mug in Yr X" with a notepad.I know Toady won't be working on UI improvements for many years to come. But even so, would it be so wrong to just ask for a Personal History Viewer window in Adventurer/Legends mode, where you can pop in somebody's name and see their cultural background? Doesn't that make a hell of a lot more sense than literally everyone, in every game run by every player, starting their name with their country & city, every single time it comes up for any reason?
That is exactly why surnames don't work. If I meet two Smiths, then I cannot in any way determine them to be related to each-other, so why do surnames even exist?Why do you do this? "I have encountered a minor flaw, tear down the entire system and start over!" Surnames exist because they work, or at least historically they did--in farming villages, if 2 people had the same name, it'd be VERY unusual for them to not be related. Now with the Internet, I can Google six of me before breakfast. Personally, I'm of the opinion that DF is a lot more like a farming village than the Internet.
That there are loads of other surnames does not change that, the situation still applies since if I meet two people who have the same surname I cannot by this fact alone determine them to be related; this problem is inherent to the surname system when played out of a long time period.Fair enough, especially in a Legends more that doesn't allow you to view a person's family tree. But consider this: Assuming the two people share a common ancestor (and that the RNG didn't just give someone a surname that was already being used by another family), then a significant number of generations must have passed for those people to be essentially unrelated. And the longer the time elapsed, the greater the odds that one (or both) of the families might have changed their surname in the interim.
The solution is to create a new surname every time two people get married and have this inherited by their children, but when their children get married they replace one of their ancestral surnames with a new surname. That way whenever I run across a person with the same surname I know they are of the same family group, rather than being somebody who shares a common ancestor a thousand years ago.Okay, but the unavoidable downside of that is the remote ancestor gets forgotten, and you have to hop, skip, jump your way from name to name in Legends, as opposed to just searching the whole list for one name. You win some, you lose some.
The argument here seems to be conflating two distinct questions:Tbf geographic regions already have meaningful names to an extent, they have an adjective to describe how good/evil the place is, with neutral being more of a random word not associated with the other two, then there's a noun to describe the terrain feature such as like hills, mountains, deserts, forests, e.c.t.
1) Should DF have a naming system that reflects lineage, occupation, or place of origin, similar to what real-world cultures have?
2) Should DF have an easier way to identify a dwarf's family connections and other relationships?
My answers:
1) No. It would be far too much work for too little benefit. If you're going to assign meaningful names to dwarves, then you may as well try to assign meaningful names to civilizations, sites, and geographic regions. Those are some major logic problems.
2) Yes. Someone should write a DFHack script showing family trees and other relationships. Any volunteers?
We already have meaningful names to civilizations, sites and regions.
Variations on a system (especially when the only thing that changes is the magnitude) is still just one system. Please, at least say you'd be open to switching the positions of the names around a bit. For instance, traditional Chinese puts the surname before the given name--and I personally think that makes a lot of sense. It's like biological nomenclature, putting the general words first and getting increasingly more specific: Homo sapiens Honeycutt Barbara. (We already write time as hour:minute:second, now if we could just get people to write year:month:day.)
I get the impression that you believe my plan is "have the RNG procedurally create an all-new first name for every baby (or at least the historically significant ones), which will never be used again." Just in case, let me clarify: I only want the RNG to "grab a first name that is not currently in use, by anyone in the fort, or by anyone outside the fort who shares the baby's family name." So no two dwarves with matching names will ever be alive at the same time. Sure, Legends mode or engravings may still show dwarves with identical names, but that's hardly a big deal since historical records include the date on every entry. If the name you want shows up on events from 400 years ago, chances are it ain't the same dwarf. (Unless it's a vampire, in which case you've got bigger problems to be worrying about.)
I said "clan" because that's shorthand for "group of related individuals who live as a (generally) cohesive unit and share the same name", such as Bunnyhammer. The word 'clan' literally means 'family', that is all that the word formally means, and don't you EVER try to equate it with a form of government again, without some reputable sources to back you up.
The word clan is derived from the Gaelic clann[1] meaning "children" or "progeny"; it is not from the word for "family" in either Irish[2][3] or Scottish Gaelic. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was introduced into English in around 1425, as a label for the nature of the society of the Scottish Highlands.[4]
The main legal process used within the clans to settle criminal and civil disputes was known as arbitration, in which the offending and aggrieved sides put their cases to a panel that was drawn from the leading gentry and was overseen by the clan chief.[13] There was no appeal against the decision made by the panel, which was usually recorded in the local Royal or Burgh court.[13]
It is a common misconception that every person who bears a clan's name is a lineal descendant of the chiefs.[2] Many clansmen although not related to the chief took the chief's surname as their own to either show solidarity, or to obtain basic protection or for much needed sustenance.[2] Most of the followers of the clan were tenants, who supplied labour to the clan leaders.[3] Contrary to popular belief, the ordinary clansmen rarely had any blood tie of kinship with the clan chiefs, but they took the chief's surname as their own when surnames came into common use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[3] Thus by the eighteenth century the myth had arisen that the whole clan was descended from one ancestor, with the Scottish Gaelic of "clan" meaning "children" or "offspring".[3]
Apart from these different historical traditions of kinship, conceptual confusion arises from colloquial usages of the term.
And what's so wrong about that? It works for vampires. It works for Eminem. It worked for Gandalf. True, there are times where realism should take a back seat to convenience, but I don't think this is one of them. People taking new names (or having names thrust upon them, willingly or not) tells a more interesting story, and can help add depth to the character.
Just because first names are imperfect doesn't mean they're worthless. Cultural names, in contrast,wouldcould only be remotely useful in Legends mode, or in a fort specifically (and painstakingly) run in order to attract a majority of citizens not from your own home civ.
I know Toady won't be working on UI improvements for many years to come. But even so, would it be so wrong to just ask for a Personal History Viewer window in Adventurer/Legends mode, where you can pop in somebody's name and see their cultural background? Doesn't that make a hell of a lot more sense than literally everyone, in every game run by every player, starting their name with their country & city, every single time it comes up for any reason?
Why do you do this? "I have encountered a minor flaw, tear down the entire system and start over!" Surnames exist because they work, or at least historically they did--in farming villages, if 2 people had the same name, it'd be VERY unusual for them to not be related. Now with the Internet, I can Google six of me before breakfast. Personally, I'm of the opinion that DF is a lot more like a farming village than the Internet.
Fair enough, especially in a Legends more that doesn't allow you to view a person's family tree. But consider this: Assuming the two people share a common ancestor (and that the RNG didn't just give someone a surname that was already being used by another family), then a significant number of generations must have passed for those people to be essentially unrelated. And the longer the time elapsed, the greater the odds that one (or both) of the families might have changed their surname in the interim.
Okay, but the unavoidable downside of that is the remote ancestor gets forgotten, and you have to hop, skip, jump your way from name to name in Legends, as opposed to just searching the whole list for one name. You win some, you lose some.
It appears that there are multiple systems because the way the information is displayed to the player, in 'reality' everyone has the full set of names for all possible cultural forms in their file. We don't see them, so it does not matter, but their existence allows cultural transfer and changes to be handled without suddenly having to calculate tens of thousands of names at once.Okay, good, that's where I was going too. We (or somebody) should compile a list of all the suggested naming systems, and from that nail down all the facets (including birth date) of a dwarf's "maximum" (internal) name.
I doubt the resources will be an issue: It can just search by name as you said, and if it comes up with multiple matches (dwarves that happen to use the same specified external name at different points in history), then it can just display all of those hits, each with their own listed birth dates, and the user can choose between them. This will give the computer a unique identity (maximum internal name) to search for, and it then returns all the Legends mode (or wherever) matches for that particular identity.I only want the RNG to "grab a first name that is not currently in use, by anyone in the fort, or by anyone outside the fort who shares the baby's family name." So no two dwarves with matching names will ever be alive at the same time.Firstly I am not sure that the computer can even do what you are asking without using up tons of resources. Secondly, it is more convenient to be able to use a search function to pinpoint individuals according to their various names, than it is to have to trawl through the small print to determine when everyone was born.
The main legal process used within the clans to settle criminal and civil disputes was known as arbitration, in which the offending and aggrieved sides put their cases to a panel that was drawn from the leading gentry and was overseen by the clan chief.Yes--the clans practiced self-government. But they also practiced a lot of other things too, such as warfare, and agriculture, and erecting buildings. So to say that "a clan is a form of government" makes precisely as much sense as "clanning is a method of growing crops", or "clan is a style of architecture". The best match for how you're using "clan" might be "organization", a means of gathering, relating, and directing people. In other words, "the nature of the society." Societies have governments, they are not in themselves governments (or forms thereof).
The word clan is derived from the Gaelic clann[1] meaning "children" or "progeny"; it is not from the word for "family" in either Irish[2][3] or Scottish Gaelic.And now it's semantics time. Your own Wikipedia quote seems to imply a firm distinction between "family" and "progeny"; I submit that this distinction is not the difference of inclusion (as in, progeny is a subset of family), but rather one of formal literalism: The exact same difference between "father" and "father figure". Because that's what a clan chief was: To the actual members of his family, he was the literal father (or at least the paterfamilias), but to his extended household, his "progeny", he was the father figure. Those who served him, but were not related to him, could still claim membership in his clan because of their affiliation--the word itself still bears traces of this:
. . . from French affiliation, from Medieval Latin affiliationem (nominative affiliatio), noun of action from past participle stem of Latin affiliare "to adopt a son," from ad- "to" (see ad- ) + filius "son" (see filial ). Figurative sense of "adoption by a society, of branches" first recorded 1799. -- Dictionary.comSo when I said "The word 'clan' literally means 'family', that is all that the word formally means", that's still quite correct. Formally, a clan is the family, those who are joined by marriage if not blood, the chief's literal sons. Informally, it can mean an entire town, the chief's adopted sons. But even an entire town is still not a form of government, and I'll thank you to not to confuse the two again.
The thing is we already have a large number of false aliases used by individuals. Having multiple 'true' names get's confusing and we don't actually need them.There's a big difference between "don't need" and "shouldn't use". Just picture reading about the historical event, "In 538, the dwarf vampire Kadol Pulleywhips was revealed to be the dwarf vampire Kadol Pulleywhips." (Shocking! What a twist!) So yes, this creature should still have one internal 'true' name like everybody else, but possible aliases are going to have to be considered as facets of external names to be shown.
It [using one's civ and site names as one's first name] is also of great use in adventure mode. I agree that it's utility in fortress mode is limited, but it does have a small functionality there as well in regard to visitors. When there are more visitors in the future from proximate settlements, this functionality would increase.Even in a fort with 90% visitors, Civ/site first names would still be a definite liability for just about every purpose. The only time they'd make sense would be in a separate list that organized everybody by their civilization and site--in which case there would still be no reason to directly include these aspects in a person's name.
That is pretty much what the people in the above mentioned clans did when surnames were introduced, they all adopted the name of their clanI can only assume that this allowed surname adoption was rather unique to the Scottish clans (as opposed to, for instance, the Japanese ones), because the alternative is to think that in other parts of the world, there were a bunch of clan chiefs with names like Fields, Miller, Shepherd, Brooks, Cooper, and Ford running around. I for one feel quite sure that in general, the real clan members would be VERY opposed to the entire population of tenant farmers actually taking up the clan chief's surname. I guess the Scots were okay with it because each clan already knew quite well who was in line to inherit, there was no risk of being usurped by a pretender.
Well, a lot of cultures did use patronymics / matronymics, some of which were carried for only 1 generation--you can consider those to be "true" surnames or not, it matters little, but they commonly were used to help identify an individual and thus certainly count as a name. The Wikipedia page on patronymics lists many cultures worldwide that historically have used them . . . it doesn't specify peasantry (or give many dates), but if such names are "common", they're clearly not limited to the nobility.--in farming villages, if 2 people had the same name, it'd be VERY unusual for them to not be related.People in farming villages did not *have* surnames in most countries for most of history. The only people who had surnames for most of history were not peasants but nobles.
If people keep changing there surnames at random, then that simply makes the whole system work even worse. That is because any of anyone's children might have suddenly decided to adopt a new surname, while the other children did not. Being random there is no rationality to the situation, all the children could decide arbitrarily to adopt new surnames or they might go five generations without doing so.I myself have never suggested random surnames, or "arbitrarily" adopting a new one, in fact my views are quite the contrary. I think the only exact example I gave was of the historical dwarf in question not affecting her OWN name, but only the names of her children born after the fact. I also suggested that any preexisting children of hers might (or might not) change their own names to match, to keep the new clan united under its founder.
The assumption is that we don't care as much about the remote ancestors as we do about the present generations.I think some cultures should care more about the original dwarves, other cultures shouldn't--and their different naming systems should reflect that.
So we've gone from this being a needlessly complicated waste of time that will further obscure the dwarves in practice, to insisting we adopt a system not experienced in Western culture and, without analogue, must have its mechanisms learned by a new player in order to distinguish it from randomness.Wait -- which one of those bad ideas are you associating with me? :P
Okay, good, that's where I was going too. We (or somebody) should compile a list of all the suggested naming systems, and from that nail down all the facets (including birth date) of a dwarf's "maximum" (internal) name.
I doubt the resources will be an issue: It can just search by name as you said, and if it comes up with multiple matches (dwarves that happen to use the same specified external name at different points in history), then it can just display all of those hits, each with their own listed birth dates, and the user can choose between them. This will give the computer a unique identity (maximum internal name) to search for, and it then returns all the Legends mode (or wherever) matches for that particular identity.
Yes--the clans practiced self-government. But they also practiced a lot of other things too, such as warfare, and agriculture, and erecting buildings. So to say that "a clan is a form of government" makes precisely as much sense as "clanning is a method of growing crops", or "clan is a style of architecture". The best match for how you're using "clan" might be "organization", a means of gathering, relating, and directing people. In other words, "the nature of the society." Societies have governments, they are not in themselves governments (or forms thereof).
Yes, not all the people who claimed to be part of the clan were actual family members of the clan chief. Some were related only through marriage, some were deemed useful enough to be "adopted" into the clan and allowed to live with them, and some were mere servants or other vassals, who worked their masters' land and were fed, housed, clothed, and often paid in return for their labors. Yet even the least of these non-family members still felt a strong affiliation with their clan--they would still walk the streets in their master's livery, still march to war at his side, and still refer to themselves as being of "Clan / House [Family Name]". Because that's what was convenient, it told the listener (generally) where they lived, who their master was, and which powerful family you were messing with if you pissed them off, in just 2 or 3 words.
And now it's semantics time. Your own Wikipedia quote seems to imply a firm distinction between "family" and "progeny"; I submit that this distinction is not the difference of inclusion (as in, progeny is a subset of family), but rather one of formal literalism: The exact same difference between "father" and "father figure". Because that's what a clan chief was: To the actual members of his family, he was the literal father (or at least the paterfamilias), but to his extended household, his "progeny", he was the father figure. Those who served him, but were not related to him, could still claim membership in his clan because of their affiliation--the word itself still bears traces of this:Quote. . . from French affiliation, from Medieval Latin affiliationem (nominative affiliatio), noun of action from past participle stem of Latin affiliare "to adopt a son," from ad- "to" (see ad- ) + filius "son" (see filial ). Figurative sense of "adoption by a society, of branches" first recorded 1799. -- Dictionary.comSo when I said "The word 'clan' literally means 'family', that is all that the word formally means", that's still quite correct. Formally, a clan is the family, those who are joined by marriage if not blood, the chief's literal sons. Informally, it can mean an entire town, the chief's adopted sons. But even an entire town is still not a form of government, and I'll thank you to not to confuse the two again.
There's a big difference between "don't need" and "shouldn't use". Just picture reading about the historical event, "In 538, the dwarf vampire Kadol Pulleywhips was revealed to be the dwarf vampire Kadol Pulleywhips." (Shocking! What a twist!) So yes, this creature should still have one internal 'true' name like everybody else, but possible aliases are going to have to be considered as facets of external names to be shown.
Even in a fort with 90% visitors, Civ/site first names would still be a definite liability for just about every purpose. The only time they'd make sense would be in a separate list that organized everybody by their civilization and site--in which case there would still be no reason to directly include these aspects in a person's name.
I can only assume that this allowed surname adoption was rather unique to the Scottish clans (as opposed to, for instance, the Japanese ones), because the alternative is to think that in other parts of the world, there were a bunch of clan chiefs with names like Fields, Miller, Shepherd, Brooks, Cooper, and Ford running around. I for one feel quite sure that in general, the real clan members would be VERY opposed to the entire population of tenant farmers actually taking up the clan chief's surname. I guess the Scots were okay with it because each clan already knew quite well who was in line to inherit, there was no risk of being usurped by a pretender.
Well, a lot of cultures did use patronymics / matronymics, some of which were carried for only 1 generation--you can consider those to be "true" surnames or not, it matters little, but they commonly were used to help identify an individual and thus certainly count as a name. The Wikipedia page on patronymics lists many cultures worldwide that historically have used them . . . it doesn't specify peasantry (or give many dates), but if such names are "common", they're clearly not limited to the nobility.
I myself have never suggested random surnames, or "arbitrarily" adopting a new one, in fact my views are quite the contrary. I think the only exact example I gave was of the historical dwarf in question not affecting her OWN name, but only the names of her children born after the fact. I also suggested that any preexisting children of hers might (or might not) change their own names to match, to keep the new clan united under its founder.
I think some cultures should care more about the original dwarves, other cultures shouldn't--and their different naming systems should reflect that.
None, comrade.
Searching by name frequently takes a little while even when we do it. To have the computer have to do thousands of searches constantly in order to make sure every character does not share a name with an existing living character, that is pretty much going to be a major resource drain. My idea works better because it is just a set of random numbers that are generated based on the seed without any need to 'look back'.This is what hash tables are for.
Also, dwarves aren’t born/migrate that often... it’s not like characters change their names every few secondsSearching by name frequently takes a little while even when we do it. To have the computer have to do thousands of searches constantly in order to make sure every character does not share a name with an existing living character, that is pretty much going to be a major resource drain. My idea works better because it is just a set of random numbers that are generated based on the seed without any need to 'look back'.This is what hash tables are for.
The naming systems are based upon the values of the civ, basically the names record information for the player that the civilisations consider relevant. . . . Over time as the values of those in power shift, naming systems can be changed as a historical event and as a result the 'true name' of the creatures as we see them change accordingly, but with no actual change in the underlying data.I'm generally in agreement, but the more I think about the issue, the more I can see how Toady might not consider it worth it. Even if a civ's naming convention is extremely short and they care nothing for past generations, a member of that culture might marry into a society that considers history very important, and they demand to know short-name dwarf's ancestors at least 3 generations back. So ideally, the game would make every dwarf's internal true name contain every possible thing that any external naming system might need to know. But, seriously. Consider the odds that
This is quite the can of worms we open up by talking about the definitions of these mixed-up things. Yes, clans are not a form of government, they are a form of state with various government forms ruling over them. So they are states not governments, as in they are thing over which a government rules (State) and the means by which they do so but not the actual thing making the decisions (Government).Well, when one of the supporting documents opens with the difference between "family" and "progeny", you just know some hairs are going to be split. :) As for the nature of clans, I myself would say they're more often a society than a state, because they usually didn't exist in isolation, there was more than one family sharing influence over an area. Only when a single clan rose to dominance could they be called a state, and of course the more closely they approached 100% of the population (as some of the Scottish clans may have done), the more they both performed the duties of local government, and were themselves the governed. Whether you (or I) want to cast this in a tribal-system or feudal-system light doesn't much matter: One exerted control militarily, the other more economically, it made little difference to the ruled.
It would be even more convenient to NOT have a big chunk of an entity's visible name be taken up by a fact that, 99.9% of the time, a player couldn't care less about. Why do you insist on defending this notion? Especially when the example I already gave (a menu specifically for listing creatures by their civ/site attributes) precisely overrides the counter-argument you just made (some cultures won't include the civ/site in people's names)? Regardless, it is a bad idea for ANY culture to make its civilization and/or site name be a default, integral part of the average citizen's name. It is a bad idea. The idea is bad.Even in a fort with 90% visitors, Civ/site first names would still be a definite liability for just about every purpose. The only time they'd make sense would be in a separate list that organized everybody by their civilization and site--in which case there would still be no reason to directly include these aspects in a person's name.It is more convenient to know something at a glance than is to have to interrupt your gameplay by using a special search function for that specific purpose. In any case, in certain cases we simply won't be able to see that information in any case because the society in the game did not consider it important and will have to use a less quick means of doing so.
The clan chiefs are not going to object to tenant farmers assuming their surname, because they are not allocating their 'own' land, they are allocating the clan's land. Both they and the farmers are equally members of the exact same clan, the latter are as much 'real' clan members as the former, the former just happen to be part of the clan's government while the latter are not.Your first statement makes no applicable sense that I can discern. Your second is analogous to saying that doctors would not object if hospital janitors claimed that they should be allowed to call themselves "doctors" as well, because both groups of people are equally employed by hospitals, the former just happen to have medical degrees while the latter do not.
The complicated thing here that we have official and unofficial surnames. While lots of people had surnames, only nobility have surnames that were official and those were the names of their HOUSES, *not* the names of their families. Why do we talk about House Lannister, House Targaryen and House Stark, rather than family whatever.GoblinCookie, you are very clearly intelligent. But you are not as intelligent as you are stubborn, at times leading you to let your stubbornness take control. I think you would do well to bring those traits into a more harmonious alignment. Your choice of Game of Thrones does not provide a good example for the point you are trying to make--indeed, it provides a much better example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
| TITLE | NAME | FAMILY SEAT | ||
| Duke of Norfolk | Edward Fitzalan-Howard | Arundel Castle | ||
| Marquess of Lansdowne | Charles Petty-FitzMaurice | Bowood House | ||
| Earl of Oxford | Aubrey de Vere | Castle Hedingham | ||
| Viscount Hardinge | Thomas Henry de Montarville Hardinge | Broadmere House |
There's a BIG difference between deciding which of 2 names to use, and picking truly at random from a pool of thousands. Besides, if each dwarf's "choice" is based on their own personal values, ethics, and affinity for any existing family members of each of the two names, that can hardly be called random at all.I myself have never suggested random surnames, or "arbitrarily" adopting a new one, . . . . I also suggested that any preexisting children of hers might (or might not) change their own names to match, to keep the new clan united under its founder.If they simply 'choose' to do it, given this is not real-life that is exactly the same as saying they do so randomly.
Yeah, when I said "the original dwarves" I meant precisely that, those who had no parents because they were the first of their kind.I think some cultures should care more about the original dwarves, other cultures shouldn't--and their different naming systems should reflect that.The original dwarves had parents in reality did they not? They are just a game-mechanic unless we want to go into the original dwarves of what?.
Shazbot was addressing me--and apparently didn't feel like quoting because I was the last person to address him.None, comrade.This is what happens when we don't quote what we are replying too. Nobody knows what we are responding to nor to whom.
I'm generally in agreement, but the more I think about the issue, the more I can see how Toady might not consider it worth it. Even if a civ's naming convention is extremely short and they care nothing for past generations, a member of that culture might marry into a society that considers history very important, and they demand to know short-name dwarf's ancestors at least 3 generations back. So ideally, the game would make every dwarf's internal true name contain every possible thing that any external naming system might need to know. But, seriously. Consider the odds that
a) an intercultural marriage even happens,
b) the naming systems would be so egregiously different, and
c) the player actually double-checks to see if short-name dwarf's newly lengthened name is in fact historically accurate.
All in all, that's a kinda flimsy reason to keep everyone's entire family tree stored in memory, just in case they should happen to marry someone who cares about it. I mean, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what the game already does (it does it for historical figures, at least), but on the whole, I'd rather have my game Load and Save faster.
Well, when one of the supporting documents opens with the difference between "family" and "progeny", you just know some hairs are going to be split. :) As for the nature of clans, I myself would say they're more often a society than a state, because they usually didn't exist in isolation, there was more than one family sharing influence over an area. Only when a single clan rose to dominance could they be called a state, and of course the more closely they approached 100% of the population (as some of the Scottish clans may have done), the more they both performed the duties of local government, and were themselves the governed. Whether you (or I) want to cast this in a tribal-system or feudal-system light doesn't much matter: One exerted control militarily, the other more economically, it made little difference to the ruled.
It would be even more convenient to NOT have a big chunk of an entity's visible name be taken up by a fact that, 99.9% of the time, a player couldn't care less about. Why do you insist on defending this notion? Especially when the example I already gave (a menu specifically for listing creatures by their civ/site attributes) precisely overrides the counter-argument you just made (some cultures won't include the civ/site in people's names)? Regardless, it is a bad idea for ANY culture to make its civilization and/or site name be a default, integral part of the average citizen's name. It is a bad idea. The idea is bad.
Your first statement makes no applicable sense that I can discern. Your second is analogous to saying that doctors would not object if hospital janitors claimed that they should be allowed to call themselves "doctors" as well, because both groups of people are equally employed by hospitals, the former just happen to have medical degrees while the latter do not.
GoblinCookie, you are very clearly intelligent. But you are not as intelligent as you are stubborn, at times leading you to let your stubbornness take control. I think you would do well to bring those traits into a more harmonious alignment. Your choice of Game of Thrones does not provide a good example for the point you are trying to make--indeed, it provides a much better example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
But let me respond to what you could have said. In real life, the "official and unofficial surnames" you mention are termed titles and surnames--every noble has one of each. Queen Elizabeth II is her title, while her actual name is Elizabeth Windsor, of the House of Windsor--and yes, the family does own Windsor Castle (among others). This would well support your argument--IF it were a typical case. Sadly, it's not, as the family is named after the castle not because it was a key part of their ancestral holdings, but because her grandfather deliberately changed the family's name (from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha), during a wave of public anti-German sentiment.
To nail down what is more usual, I went here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_family_seats_of_English_nobility) and looked for some name commonalities. Here's what I found:Etc., etc.
TITLE NAME FAMILY SEAT Duke of Norfolk Edward Fitzalan-Howard Arundel Castle Marquess of Lansdowne Charles Petty-FitzMaurice Bowood House Earl of Oxford Aubrey de Vere Castle Hedingham Viscount Hardinge Thomas Henry de Montarville Hardinge Broadmere House
Now, mind you, there ARE some cases where the Title and Surname do match, and even some matches between the Title and Seat . . . but I didn't see any between Surname and Seat. Feel free to have a look for yourself, if you wish, I didn't try very hard.
There's a BIG difference between deciding which of 2 names to use, and picking truly at random from a pool of thousands. Besides, if each dwarf's "choice" is based on their own personal values, ethics, and affinity for any existing family members of each of the two names, that can hardly be called random at all.
Yeah, when I said "the original dwarves" I meant precisely that, those who had no parents because they were the first of their kind.
I was talking about a system where a civilization changed it's naming system to add new words, say a civilization in a massive world, with loads of sites and very few civilizations, in which an adventurer has spoken to every single non-historical person in said civilizations. Now we have tens-of-thousands of named individuals, all needing new names but the player is currently lagging on the FPS due to having built too many walls in their fortress, so the game then just crashes.This looks like a flimsy argument to me.
Take the clan stuff to PMs or another thread, guys.Agreed, it seems that my attempts at being a good influence are having precisely the opposite effect. So, dropping everything from recent posts except constructive suggestions about naming systems . . .
and I'm pretty sure discrimination is something toady has said he wants to avoidHe said somewhere that he does not care.
I am really not a fan of gender-specific length since it implies one is less important than the other(s)If it's so rare that it sticks out as noticeably unusual, then it serves the purpose of adding flavor while subtly reminding the player how foolish sexism is. Speaking of discrimination, aren't all elven societies completely matriarchal? There should probably be racial modifiers that influence the cultural modifiers that influence the individual traits.
ordinal numbering should only happen in bloodlines, not on an entire civ level. you shouldn't be able to call yourself "famous person the 2nd" if you're not directly related to themWell, if you're not related to them (you could theoretically be a distant cousin), then the odds of your having the same surname should be zero. Even if somebody "earns" a name that a lot of dwarves would qualify for (e.g., "Goblinslayer"), each civ should probably prevent anyone changing their name to one that's already been taken. But, then again, there could be exceptions: Suppose a dwarf forges an artifact adamantine axe and then decapitates a hydra with it. Centuries later, after her bloodline has died out, another dwarf accomplishes the exact same feat, and is publicly acclaimed as Ingiz Azureblade of the Seven Chops reborn. Personally, I think that if any potential game mechanic allows for a cool story, that's an argument for its inclusion.
wouldn't a "true name" be unnecessary? surely it would be possible to do a one-time calculation from the data we already have when the current name format changes, since it's not like they're going to be changing it often if at allIt's just an expression for what the game knows but doesn't show us. Agreed, Toady might decide it's completely useless (except for aliases), but it's at least an idea worth considering.
Take the clan stuff to PMs or another thread, guys.
This looks like a flimsy argument to me.
1. You suppose the player has talked to every single non-historical figure in a civ.
2. You suppose (I'm guessing) that they must have historical children.
3. You suppose that these children are being born simultaneously.
4. You suppose the naming system is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
It's really just an argument against everyone being a historical figure.
and I'm pretty sure discrimination is something toady has said he wants to avoidHe said somewhere that he does not care.
GoblinCookie's system is something fairly close to this:
1[S<Civ1>]2[S<Fort2>] 3[Gr]4[E4<♥3>] 5[S<+¹3]6[S<-¹3] 7[S<♀¹5]8[S<♀¹6] 9[S<♂¹5]10[S<♂¹6]
1 = First word of home civilization's name
2 = Second word of home settlement's name
3 = Given name, random style. Used to distinguish from among siblings.
4 = Event type, 4th variation (marriage), pointing at the spouse's 3rd name element. If the dwarf has no spouse, this name is null.
5 = The 3rd name of the dwarf's elder parent.
6 = The 3rd name of the dwarf's younger parent.
7 & 8 = The 3rd names of the dwarf's maternal grandparents.
9 & 10 = The 3rd names of the dwarf's paternal grandparents.
Plus, I assume, the game's current profession / combat nickname / noble rank titles.
Possibilities abound for procedurally-generated name formats. Given names, Event names, and Surnames can be placed in any order. Think up some more and I'll add them to this post, unless Shazbot thinks moving them to the start of the thread would be more appropriate.
I'm sorry Bumber but we cannot enter into discussions about the naming system without discussions about the family and it's role in the wider society. To do so would be pure ignorance.The semantics of what defines a clan, state, or society has nothing to do with the inheritance of names. It's a tangent. The parts actually relating to the handling of names and titles are fine.
The civilisation changed their naming system. That is why everyone is having to change their names simultaneously. So not a flimsy argument in context. You also have to think about the various possible outcomes in the game, it does not do to just take the most common situation.If we're bothering to simulate a change in naming systems, there's no reason to have that change propagate faster than light. It can spread using the rumors system.
As long as you grudgingly admitted (again) that clans are not governments, I'm good with that. Clans are, first and foremost, large families that share a name, and I shall continue to refer to them as such. And that's all I'll say about the issue in this thread.Take the clan stuff to PMs or another thread, guys.I'm sorry Bumber but we cannot enter into discussions about the naming system without discussions about the family and it's role in the wider society. To do so would be pure ignorance.
He [Toady] is largely against adding in racial prejudices into the game, or at least that was the general response given on Future of the Fortress to the proposal that they be added in. There was a bit of *on the other hand* but that was about it, it is not something that he is enthusiastic about in any case.I think it's an interesting way of adding flavor, but I definitely think it shouldn't be common, and when it does occur it should show equal-opportunity bias.
The shorthand isn't supposed to be reader-friendly, it's for computers. :) You get the text description. I've updated my post to match your specs (I think), and included a preview of what happens when you adjust "the maximum allowable number in the entity file".GoblinCookie's system is something fairly close to this:It goes like this, yes you got it mostly or entirely right but it is not very readable. The system I advocate currently stands as follows.
The other issue is what happens if, when our dwarves are less well-behaved we end up with illegitimate children?Expect the name algorithm to come back with a lot of "null"s where there should be males, or along both lines if the kid is a foundling or whatever. The longer the names, the longer the child and its descendants are going to be bearing the mark of bastardy.
The same arrangement can also be used for pathogenic reproduction, when that is a thing.Wait--do you mean parthenogenesis? As in, dwarf females spontaneously impregnating themselves with their own clones? This is certainly the first that I've heard of such a suggestion, especially considering that it doesn't happen among mammals. Although it would solve the "dwarves die out because they don't get married" problem . . .
Yes we don't need to display all the name information, actually the player should allways be able to choose which parts to show in menus. What about vampires? Well can a fake identity actually carry information such as age, gender, origin? Can you see the persons toughts?The fake identity doesn't carry any information at all, because it doesn't actually exist: the real identity simply carries the fake name, and hides the real one. The creature's thoughts, preferences, etc., will all be true, except where the creature remembers to lie. He will say his name is "fake name" instead of "real name", and that he prefers to drink "swamp whiskey" instead of "dwarf blood".
But I'm against accumulative names, we don't need to substitute the whole legends mode with naming conventions. Hence I propose to keep our 5 string system, that should be plenty.Yeah, I personally am firmly opposed to personal names being longer than 5 elements or so (apart from rare exceptions like royalty, or truly great heroes). Vanilla DF names have a hard maximum of 8 elements (and to reach that, you'd need to be a "consort" & get a 3-word combat title).
Please consider predefined prefixes and suffixes. Different civs could apply theirs to the two last strings in conversations. It's easy to imagine how they could use them pejoratively or laudatively according to immersive story telling elements. . . . Just define a syllabe you stick to the string to have that kind of important meaning (or meaningful importance :P?).Well, you say you've been feeling mute, why don't YOU take charge of collecting all the prefixes & suffixes you think would be appropriate for names? :)
Well, you say you've been feeling mute, why don't YOU take charge of collecting all the prefixes & suffixes you think would be appropriate for names? :)
The fake identity doesn't carry any information at all, because it doesn't actually exist: the real identity simply carries the fake name, and hides the real one. The creature's thoughts, preferences, etc., will all be true, except where the creature remembers to lie. He will say his name is "fake name" instead of "real name", and that he prefers to drink "swamp whiskey" instead of "dwarf blood".Information pertaining to the current identity needs to remain distinct from any previous ones until cover is blown, however. Not sure how the new secret identities system maintains this. Does legends mode spoil things, or does info get filtered out by name?
-Discovered knowledge
The semantics of what defines a clan, state, or society has nothing to do with the inheritance of names. It's a tangent. The parts actually relating to the handling of names and titles are fine.
If we're bothering to simulate a change in naming systems, there's no reason to have that change propagate faster than light. It can spread using the rumors system.
You at least have to be reasonable about your worst case scenarios. If the player does something extreme, like a 16x16 embark, then they must bear the performance issues.
As long as you grudgingly admitted (again) that clans are not governments, I'm good with that. Clans are, first and foremost, large families that share a name, and I shall continue to refer to them as such. And that's all I'll say about the issue in this thread.
I think it's an interesting way of adding flavor, but I definitely think it shouldn't be common, and when it does occur it should show equal-opportunity bias.
The shorthand isn't supposed to be reader-friendly, it's for computers. :) You get the text description. I've updated my post to match your specs (I think), and included a preview of what happens when you adjust "the maximum allowable number in the entity file".
Expect the name algorithm to come back with a lot of "null"s where there should be males, or along both lines if the kid is a foundling or whatever. The longer the names, the longer the child and its descendants are going to be bearing the mark of bastardy.
Wait--do you mean parthenogenesis? As in, dwarf females spontaneously impregnating themselves with their own clones? This is certainly the first that I've heard of such a suggestion, especially considering that it doesn't happen among mammals. Although it would solve the "dwarves die out because they don't get married" problem . . .
The player is not intentionally doing anything, he just chose to have few civilizations, a lot of sites and then played adventure mode long enough to have spoken to most everyone before setting up a fortress and getting maximum population. I do not claim to know the inner working of Dwarf Fortress, none but Toady One does, however the rumours system is not likely to make things worse, actually it is possible that it would be harder for it to do things than to just calculate everything in an instant.Speaking to everyone in a civ is an undertaking (pun not intended) more difficult than killing everyone in a civ. (The primary roadblock is that not everyone can be loaded simultaneously, and hist-figs take priority.) The issue correlates to an absurd time investment, and exists inevitably by the creation of too many historical figures regardless.
The reason is that rumours are exponential. One person tells ten people, who tell 100 people, who tell 1000 people. At the end of the chain we end up with a lot of calculations for rumours, on top of the number of calcuations themselves. In any case, it is not the case that we *need* to create the problem in the first place, simply because we can make it less bad.
Speaking to everyone in a civ is an undertaking (pun not intended) more difficult than killing everyone in a civ. (The primary roadblock is that not everyone can be loaded simultaneously, and hist-figs take priority.) The issue correlates to an absurd time investment, and exists inevitably by the creation of too many historical figures regardless.
What I meant about the rumors system is that it can be used as a trigger to divide the workload to a handful of sites at a time, as they learn about the new policy. We know the system performs adequately right now. However, you may be correct that this won't help much if it is the case that rumors simply enter a shared global pool once they leave the site of origin.
There doesn't exist a flawless solution. The only way to avoid creating problems is to avoid adding features. Not that I particularly care if name systems can change, but simulating such things is well within DF's scope.
Granted, I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by needing new names. Am I correct in assuming you're talking about adding an additional segment onto each person's name? If you want them to be unique, you merely have to hand them out in order. If you want them to have meaning, you don't expect everyone to figure it out simultaneously.
-Killed "creature".If we're going to be adding specific names, especially creature names, onto other names, then the added names must be designated as titles, not actual names. Otherwise, you could get a near-infinite chain of "Bob who killed Tom who killed Sally who killed Albert who killed . . . " etc. Also, each of these achievements are going to need different "prestige" ratings associated with them, so a dwarf who has accomplished 2 or more noteworthy things can judge which one to add to their name.
-Priest of "deity".
-Winner of "world gen event".
-First to climb "mountain peak"
-Created "artifact".
I think we will need to link at least one title to the life goal,Eh, depends on what the goal is. I don't think a dwarf who "dreams of raising a family" should be honored for accomplishing that feat with an additional name; to me, that sounds more like a cultural distinction--in a given civilization, everyone who has children has a 'parent' string added to their name, whether that was their dream or not. But that may just be my personal preference: I believe that dwarves having their own kids should be much more common, so honoring them for this "distinction" seems a bit silly to me.
I personally think that if you detach the process of gaining a title from the actual event it is related to, . . . . imagine Urist being known as dragonslayer since the day Kulet made that awesome poem about it, that got really famous.I agree, that's a nice touch, but adding that extra "publicity" layer of realism is non-essential. Sure, it can be done: 'Dragonslayer' gets added to Urist's true name, and the rumors system propagates the news of his deed and Kulet's poem, and Urist's Self-Importance and Modesty traits influence how aggressively he self-promotes his title. The game can then use all of that to calculate whether 'dragonslayer' catches on a part of Urist's external name. But all told, I think the CPU cycles would be better spent elsewhere.
. . . we should be able to bypass the title changing problem by setting thresholds prohibitively high, so that titles are kind of rare in order to save precious computation power and grant them more importance and meaningfulness.Agreed. If I see a dwarf with a combat title, I don't know if that means "I've tanked dragons, hydras and bronze colossi by myself", or "Nine of my heavily armed friends and I beat the shit out of a bunch of naked, starving goblins, one by one".
There is some last thing which I would like to mention, which is the english translations of that gibberish and how they're used in the UI. See I allways found it very confusing when and how the game applies which language. Building in translations so that we don't need to know all the gibberish grammar when following conversations should be fairly easy. But maybe it's time to reconsider the "what language where" from a comprehensive design perspective, or just make it completly customizable?I don't play Adventurer mode, so I'm not sure if you're referencing that. Is there part of the game that actually tries to translate dwarven (or any other of the DF languages) into English? I doubt that's possible, as the in-game vocabularies are very incomplete, missing tons of words necessary to create a complete sentence. They're fine for their current purposes (just the names of people, cities, landforms, etc), but you can't actually say anything in them.
Information pertaining to the current identity needs to remain distinct from any previous ones until cover is blown, however. Not sure how the new secret identities system maintains this. Does legends mode spoil things, or does info get filtered out by name?I believe vampires don't simply make up a fake name, they actually assume the identity of one of their victims. So their fake name should also include a pointer to the real (dead) dwarf's background, so they can lie convincingly without requiring any additional memory space. (Of course, how well the vampire succeeds at this is for another thread.)
My idea was to figure out how to implement clans in the game, but Six of Spades did not really cooperate. Clans are pretty much a standard dwarfy thing for most fantasy settings afterall.A clan is a family of related people who value the surname that unites them. This entire thread is about how best to give related dwarves family-based surnames. And literally the very first reply on this thread is you stating that family names are a waste, and random names are the way to go. As for my 'lack' of cooperation with implementing clans, who's the one compiling example name structures?
Whether there's an actual worldgen event where the founders of a culture have reasons to sit down & literally decide "Okay, we're going to oppress X caste of our citizens", or whether Toady just simulates that with a much simpler dice roll, is largely invisible (and likely quite insignificant) to the player.I think [discrimination] is an interesting way of adding flavor, but I definitely think it shouldn't be common, and when it does occur it should show equal-opportunity bias.An equal-opportunity bias implies that it is all somehow random. Prejudices come about for a reason, they are not just created out of nothing by the RNG to fill some prejudice quota. Prejudices if they exist should be based upon the ultimately semi-random events in the game and in mythology, rather than simply arbitrarily conjured up.
Is that . . . scorn? You're aware that we're discussing improvements to a computer game, yet when I reduce descriptions of text strings to a representation of abstract data that more closely approximates code, you express . . . surprise? that I should do such a thing? ???The shorthand isn't supposed to be reader-friendly, it's for computers. :) You get the text description. I've updated my post to match your specs (I think), and included a preview of what happens when you adjust "the maximum allowable number in the entity file".You are writing your post to be read by computers! :D :D :D
Nobody can tell at a glance using my system that anyone is illegitimate, they would have to know the relevant mother or grandmother's personal name first and then they can see if it is the same as that of their child; you could say this system both hides and acknowledges illegitimacy. I think there are no nulls involved, since the personal name of the mother is taking up the whole slot that would normally be taken up by the marriage-name of the mother AND father.Ehh, maybe. The way I've got your system described right now, dwarves have three names all their own: 1[] and 2[] are their given names (random, the way you like it), and 5[] is their half of the "marriage name", also random. Which of those, precisely, are you calling your dwarf's "personal name"? Regardless, in the current description, 5[] isn't (necessarily) used until the dwarf marries--each one then takes their spouse's 5[] name as their 6[]. This means that, if there's no dad, then mom isn't going to have a 6[] to append to her 5[], and the bastard child is going to be missing the names of ALL of his paternal ancestors (unless the mother just writes her own name in there, over & over).
Foundlings however are not a problem since they can just be given the full marriage name of their adopted family, or the personal name of their adopted parent, which could be a male I supposed. The interesting question here is whether illegitimate children should adopt an ordinary marriage name if their parents THEN get married?All answers are possible, and indeed desirable, for increased cultural variation.
If some user comes on the forums and starts talking about bizarre stuff like "I can't wait until Toady finally implements flight, and shapeshifting," then yes, I would automatically give that user the benefit of the doubt and assume that they must be talking about some creatures other than dwarves, because otherwise the suggestion would be absurd.Wait--do you mean parthenogenesis? As in, dwarf females spontaneously impregnating themselves with their own clones? This is certainly the first that I've heard of such a suggestion, especially considering that it doesn't happen among mammals. Although it would solve the "dwarves die out because they don't get married" problem . . .I was obviously not talking about dwarves. There are afterall other creatures in the world with names and families.
If we're going to be adding specific names, especially creature names, onto other names, then the added names must be designated as titles, not actual names.
Dragdeler: I think we will need to link at least one title to the life goal,
Six Of Spades: Eh, depends on what the goal is. I don't think a dwarf who "dreams of raising a family" should be honored for accomplishing that feat with an additional name; to me, that sounds more like a cultural distinction--in a given civilization, everyone who has children has a 'parent' string added to their name, whether that was their dream or not. But that may just be my personal preference: I believe that dwarves having their own kids should be much more common, so honoring them for this "distinction" seems a bit silly to me.
Dragdeler: I personally think that if you detach the process of gaining a title from the actual event it is related to, . . . . imagine Urist being known as dragonslayer since the day Kulet made that awesome poem about it, that got really famous.
Six Of Spades: I agree, that's a nice touch, but adding that extra "publicity" layer of realism is non-essential. Sure, it can be done: 'Dragonslayer' gets added to Urist's true name, and the rumors system propagates the news of his deed and Kulet's poem, and Urist's Self-Importance and Modesty traits influence how aggressively he self-promotes his title. The game can then use all of that to calculate whether 'dragonslayer' catches on a part of Urist's external name. But all told, I think the CPU cycles would be better spent elsewhere.
I don't play Adventurer mode, so I'm not sure if you're referencing that. Is there part of the game that actually tries to translate dwarven (or any other of the DF languages) into English? I doubt that's possible, as the in-game vocabularies are very incomplete, missing tons of words necessary to create a complete sentence. They're fine for their current purposes (just the names of people, cities, landforms, etc), but you can't actually say anything in them.
A clan is a family of related people who value the surname that unites them. This entire thread is about how best to give related dwarves family-based surnames. And literally the very first reply on this thread is you stating that family names are a waste, and random names are the way to go. As for my 'lack' of cooperation with implementing clans, who's the one compiling example name structures?
Whether there's an actual worldgen event where the founders of a culture have reasons to sit down & literally decide "Okay, we're going to oppress X caste of our citizens", or whether Toady just simulates that with a much simpler dice roll, is largely invisible (and likely quite insignificant) to the player.
Is that . . . scorn? You're aware that we're discussing improvements to a computer game, yet when I reduce descriptions of text strings to a representation of abstract data that more closely approximates code, you express . . . surprise? that I should do such a thing? ???
Ehh, maybe. The way I've got your system described right now, dwarves have three names all their own: 1[] and 2[] are their given names (random, the way you like it), and 5[] is their half of the "marriage name", also random. Which of those, precisely, are you calling your dwarf's "personal name"? Regardless, in the current description, 5[] isn't (necessarily) used until the dwarf marries--each one then takes their spouse's 5[] name as their 6[]. This means that, if there's no dad, then mom isn't going to have a 6[] to append to her 5[], and the bastard child is going to be missing the names of ALL of his paternal ancestors (unless the mother just writes her own name in there, over & over).
All answers are possible, and indeed desirable, for increased cultural variation.
If some user comes on the forums and starts talking about bizarre stuff like "I can't wait until Toady finally implements flight, and shapeshifting," then yes, I would automatically give that user the benefit of the doubt and assume that they must be talking about some creatures other than dwarves, because otherwise the suggestion would be absurd.
But when that user is you, GoblinCookie? I'm sorry, but at this point I just can't take anything for granted.
I believe vampires don't simply make up a fake name, they actually assume the identity of one of their victims. So their fake name should also include a pointer to the real (dead) dwarf's background, so they can lie convincingly without requiring any additional memory space. (Of course, how well the vampire succeeds at this is for another thread.)"Rumors of my death at the hand of a vampire were greatly exaggerated!"
As for aliases other than vampires, I lack sufficient knowledge of examples to say how they might be handled.
[...] if the game can really simulate fakeness it should, but else it's no drama if the player is in the same position as a movie viewer (you know the killer is behind the curtains but no matter how loud you scream the actor won't hear you).Unfortunately for the killer, the overseer can, in fact, orchestrate their demise.
I'm not suggesting that their string is the same than the event it relates to. For example Urist Familyname has gained the title "Nokzambibam-" (battleball) "-zora" (killer of) for defeating the megabeast Ithi Questbreaches. It's just an arbitrary random string. As I said earlier, Imagine them obscure references that don't translate well into english.I really can't agree with it being some random string. If I kill a dragon named Albert Trapfurnace Funnywalk, I can see taking the name Albertkiller, or Furnacekiller, or most likely Dragonkiller . . . but not Bucketkiller, or Cloisterkiller, or Inkkiller, whether the words are translated or not. If the title is going to be limited to just 1 or 2 words (with or without a suffix), then it would best say the correct type of creature, rather than attempt to name the precise one.
"Rumors of my death at the hand of a vampire were greatly exaggerated!"Just about the dumbest thing a vampire could do is to assume the identity of one of their victims, and then emigrate to a fort that houses a friend or family member of the dwarf they're impersonating. If they're smart enough to avoid that particular pitfall (and they are . . . aren't they?), then they should also be smart enough to avoid taking the name of someone they failed to kill. (Then again, should it really matter? The safest way to avoid family members would be to travel a long distance, ideally into a different civilization, each time you changed your identity. If someone in a completely different country just "happened" to have your name, it's not likely you'd even hear about it, let alone do anything.)
Yet clans have *nothing* to do with surnames.Clans have pretty much everything to do with surnames. Stop it.
I agree with the first part of that, whether Toady creates a "Social Bias" type of civ-level event or not will make little difference to the player, if the only time it ever gets used is just after worldgen. But, if it can be used more often (especially if it's witnessed or even caused by the player), what's so "ridiculous" about simulating events such as Europe's Catholic/Protestant spasms, or America's Civil Rights Era? But still, as this issue isn't really relevant to names, I won't dwell on it.Whether there's an actual worldgen event where the founders of a culture have reasons to sit down & literally decide "Okay, we're going to oppress X caste of our citizens", or whether Toady just simulates that with a much simpler dice roll, is largely invisible (and likely quite insignificant) to the player.None of it is ever insignificant, unless the player is quite the heartless psychopathic bastard, which he may well be. If we want things to be fixed and unchanging, then what you say is basically true, we can just have things set randomly to begin with and then be forced to live with it. It is when we have new oppressions emerging and/or old one's being overcome then the "folks getting round a table deciding to oppress Group X" starts to verge on the ridiculous.
I am not sure I should take the final point as a compliment or as an insult.To put it bluntly, it was an insult. It meant that I have seen you argue too many points that I found ludicrous for me to have any remaining faith in your powers of judgement. But despite this, I am still trying to represent your naming system as accurately as I can, because I feel that ideas deserve to be approved or rejected on their own merits, not those of their creator(s). So I'll keep asking questions about your convention until I'm sure it's the way you want it. (Or, until you tell me not to, you'd rather handle it yourself--you certainly have that right.)
I don't blame you for not understanding this bit, it is a bit confusing even to me sometimes. The thing is that you don't inherit the family name of your parents, you inherit the marriage name of your parent and all the other generations are marriage names also. The 'family name' is simply the marriage name of your parents, appearing after your own marriage name in order so we can still tell whose children we are dealing with should those children get married.I can't find how my transcription of your system (with generation tracking level = 2) deviates from that in any way. Copied from Page 5:
To put it another way, it never happens that anyone inherit the family names of either of their parents, this is how I avoid the issue of gender. You inherit the marriage name created when your parents married and also inherit the marriage names created when your each pair of grandparents married, you do not inherit the family names of your parents (which are the marriage name of their lines grandparents).
In cases of illegitimacy, we take the mother's personal name (or for foundlings potentially the father's) and use that *as* the absent marriage name. . . . Hence there will never be the gaps you refer to in the lineage, since all that happens is that we fill the slot that would normally be filled by the marriage name with that of the mother.Using one of the mother's given names (1 or 2) would be all right to fill the empty slot 6 left by an unknown father. But what about slots 11 and 12, the marriage names of the absent father's parents? Since you say there will be no gaps, where precisely should the computer look for names to fill those slots? Sure, you can use the mother's 1 and 2 as a stopgap . . . but what if the generational level is raised to 3, and society expects you to be able to mention your father's grandparents as well? That's 4 more name elements for mommy to fill in . . . what does she write, there?
The key concern however is to avoid the situation ever arising where potentially thousands of names will have to be redone in an instant because the culture changed it's naming system. To a certain extent we also want to keep down the size of files as well, so we don't want absolutely enormous names for every eventuality even if nobody ever sees them.Realistically, in most cases there's no need for most people's names to change at all. Suppose the change came from the top down--either the ruling Chinese dynasty was replaced with a Mongol one, or the Pharaoh decided there was actually only one god and changed his name accordingly, or whatever. In such cases, the only people to actually change their names would be those with (relatively) direct contact with the ruler(s)--mostly in order to curry favor and show deference to his whims. Everybody else, meanwhile, would simply name their babies in the new style, while the old one gradually died out. The game can easily keep pace with a civ-wide name change taking place over the span of an entire generation.
I really can't agree with it being some random string. If I kill a dragon named Albert Trapfurnace Funnywalk, I can see taking the name Albertkiller, or Furnacekiller, or most likely Dragonkiller . . . but not Bucketkiller, or Cloisterkiller, or Inkkiller, whether the words are translated or not. If the title is going to be limited to just 1 or 2 words (with or without a suffix), then it would best say the correct type of creature, rather than attempt to name the precise one.
The implication was more like:"Rumors of my death at the hand of a vampire were greatly exaggerated!"Just about the dumbest thing a vampire could do is to assume the identity of one of their victims, and then emigrate to a fort that houses a friend or family member of the dwarf they're impersonating. If they're smart enough to avoid that particular pitfall (and they are . . . aren't they?), then they should also be smart enough to avoid taking the name of someone they failed to kill. (Then again, should it really matter? The safest way to avoid family members would be to travel a long distance, ideally into a different civilization, each time you changed your identity. If someone in a completely different country just "happened" to have your name, it's not likely you'd even hear about it, let alone do anything.)
Clans have pretty much everything to do with surnames. Stop it.
I agree with the first part of that, whether Toady creates a "Social Bias" type of civ-level event or not will make little difference to the player, if the only time it ever gets used is just after worldgen. But, if it can be used more often (especially if it's witnessed or even caused by the player), what's so "ridiculous" about simulating events such as Europe's Catholic/Protestant spasms, or America's Civil Rights Era? But still, as this issue isn't really relevant to names, I won't dwell on it.
To put it bluntly, it was an insult. It meant that I have seen you argue too many points that I found ludicrous for me to have any remaining faith in your powers of judgement. But despite this, I am still trying to represent your naming system as accurately as I can, because I feel that ideas deserve to be approved or rejected on their own merits, not those of their creator(s). So I'll keep asking questions about your convention until I'm sure it's the way you want it. (Or, until you tell me not to, you'd rather handle it yourself--you certainly have that right.)
I can't find how my transcription of your system (with generation tracking level = 2) deviates from that in any way. Copied from Page 5:
1 = Given name, random style.
2 = Given name, random style.
3 = First word of the individual's home civilization's name
4 = Second word of the individual's home settlement's government's name
5 = Given name, random style. When combined with [6], creates the individual's "marriage two-string". Can be left null until marriage.
6 = Event type, 4th variation (marriage), pointing at the spouse's 5th name element. If the dwarf has no spouse, this name is null.
7 & 8 = The marriage names of the dwarf's parents, older one first.
9 & 10 = The marriage names of the dwarf's maternal grandparents.
11 & 12 = The marriage names of the dwarf's paternal grandparents.
All inherited names are marriage names. The marriage name of your parents appears after your own (and your spouse's) marriage name. You also inherit the marriage names created when each pair of your grandparents married, but not (with generations set to 2) your parents' grandparents. As far as I can tell, this system matches your specifications. Which is why it confuses me when you sayQuoteIn cases of illegitimacy, we take the mother's personal name (or for foundlings potentially the father's) and use that *as* the absent marriage name. . . . Hence there will never be the gaps you refer to in the lineage, since all that happens is that we fill the slot that would normally be filled by the marriage name with that of the mother.Using one of the mother's given names (1 or 2) would be all right to fill the empty slot 6 left by an unknown father. But what about slots 11 and 12, the marriage names of the absent father's parents? Since you say there will be no gaps, where precisely should the computer look for names to fill those slots? Sure, you can use the mother's 1 and 2 as a stopgap . . . but what if the generational level is raised to 3, and society expects you to be able to mention your father's grandparents as well? That's 4 more name elements for mommy to fill in . . . what does she write, there?
Realistically, in most cases there's no need for most people's names to change at all. Suppose the change came from the top down--either the ruling Chinese dynasty was replaced with a Mongol one, or the Pharaoh decided there was actually only one god and changed his name accordingly, or whatever. In such cases, the only people to actually change their names would be those with (relatively) direct contact with the ruler(s)--mostly in order to curry favor and show deference to his whims. Everybody else, meanwhile, would simply name their babies in the new style, while the old one gradually died out. The game can easily keep pace with a civ-wide name change taking place over the span of an entire generation.
Well, if we make titles far more difficult to achieve, the repetition potential goes down considerably. As for the vocabulary: Things are happening. That's all I'll say. ;D. . . If the title is going to be limited to just 1 or 2 words (with or without a suffix), then it would best say the correct type of creature, rather than attempt to name the precise one.Yes we could fiddle with spheres, or try to match at least one string, it could be very nice, but I think in the long run names are going to be very repetetive that way. On the other hand: if we had a dictionnary worth of vocabulary, that would be very different.
It needn't be the vampire that blows the cover. Basically anyone talking about them could bring up the rumor. I guess vampires would need to chose aliases of victims nobody saw die.More importantly, victims with very few people who could recognize them. If you kill & impersonate some reclusive hermit who lives out in the woods, nobody's going to say, "Hey, wait . . . YOU'RE not that guy I've never seen before who never comes into town!" In any event, the vampire would still be very prudent to relocate a considerable distance away, to outrun rumor.
Well, that's charming >:( and also against the forum rules.
You have so far made no attempt to establish any relationship between the two things, but just stamp your feet and declare it so.It can hardly be a violation of the rules, or indeed even etiquette, to state that I listen carefully to what you say, and try to give every point just as much recognition as it merits. It is also not uncivil of me to say that I consider your credibility on this forum to be greatly diminished. As far as my disregarding your claims is concerned, it's not that I don't need to prove my points--it's that I don't need to prove my points, to you, personally. I have seen you cheerfully derail several threads with your off-topic tangents, and I decline to waste more of the forum's attention on such pursuits. This is not to say that I find you unintelligent--far from it. I freely admit that you usually raise valid concerns that deserve at least consideration. You use the language well, often with fair arguments . . . it's what you argue for that I sometimes find exasperating, and even inexplicable.
You also seem to think that the merits of the creation can somehow be separated from the merits of the creator, that people can legitimately steal all my ideas and still disparage my 'intellectual judgement' all the same.Intellectual property theft is pretty much the opposite of what I do. I assure you, I have absolutely NO intention of associating my name with your naming convention.
That would mean that the illegitimate child's paternal grandparents will be those of their mother, not their own.Okay, I interpret that to mean that the child lists the mother's paternal grandparents as if they were the child's own paternal grandparents. Is that exactly what you meant? Because I can make that work (provided that Generations =2, at least), but it conflicts with what you said next:
The point is however that no nulls end up in the system, but we instead end up with a paternal lineage by which the absent real father is treated as though he were the half-brother of the mother, so that the babies parental line follows that of his grandfather but not his grandmother.In the previous quote, the mother reached up (to her own grandparents' names) and pulled them down to be her child's grandparents. But in this one, you say the father is treated as the same generation as the mother--meaning, the grandparents' names stay where they are. And why would the baby's "parental" line ignore his grandmother, when it's his father who is presumably anonymous?
That's true, I overlooked the immortals. Well, it's still a reasonable option for the short-lived races, at least . . . the elves & goblins will have to choose other means. Or, potentially, not change at all: Tolkien's elves, at least, are portrayed as being very resistant to change, and the very nature of (near-)immortality lends itself well to the idea of being a staunch traditionalist, not apt to change one's name at the drop of a hat.The game can easily keep pace with a civ-wide name change taking place over the span of an entire generation.That is an idea that would generally work, except for immortal elves and other creatures that are very long-lived;
In any event, the vampire would still be very prudent to relocate a considerable distance away, to outrun rumor.
[...] 'Are you really from Genua?'
'Are you really from Pseudopolis?' Madam smiled at him. 'I find, personally that it pays never to be from somewhere close at hand. It makes life so much easier. [...]'
It can hardly be a violation of the rules, or indeed even etiquette, to state that I listen carefully to what you say, and try to give every point just as much recognition as it merits. It is also not uncivil of me to say that I consider your credibility on this forum to be greatly diminished. As far as my disregarding your claims is concerned, it's not that I don't need to prove my points--it's that I don't need to prove my points, to you, personally. I have seen you cheerfully derail several threads with your off-topic tangents, and I decline to waste more of the forum's attention on such pursuits. This is not to say that I find you unintelligent--far from it. I freely admit that you usually raise valid concerns that deserve at least consideration. You use the language well, often with fair arguments . . . it's what you argue for that I sometimes find exasperating, and even inexplicable.
To put it bluntly, it was an insult. It meant that I have seen you argue too many points that I found ludicrous for me to have any remaining faith in your powers of judgement. But despite this, I am still trying to represent your naming system as accurately as I can, because I feel that ideas deserve to be approved or rejected on their own merits, not those of their creator(s). So I'll keep asking questions about your convention until I'm sure it's the way you want it. (Or, until you tell me not to, you'd rather handle it yourself--you certainly have that right.)
Intellectual property theft is pretty much the opposite of what I do. I assure you, I have absolutely NO intention of associating my name with your naming convention.
Okay, I interpret that to mean that the child lists the mother's paternal grandparents as if they were the child's own paternal grandparents. Is that exactly what you meant? Because I can make that work (provided that Generations =2, at least), but it conflicts with what you said next:QuoteThe point is however that no nulls end up in the system, but we instead end up with a paternal lineage by which the absent real father is treated as though he were the half-brother of the mother, so that the babies parental line follows that of his grandfather but not his grandmother.
In the previous quote, the mother reached up (to her own grandparents' names) and pulled them down to be her child's grandparents. But in this one, you say the father is treated as the same generation as the mother--meaning, the grandparents' names stay where they are. And why would the baby's "parental" line ignore his grandmother, when it's his father who is presumably anonymous?
But regardless, please, just fill this out. Given an unknown father, and an unwed mother whose name is:
Mebzul Dodok TreatyLobster Ezum ItonStakud DatanBer CogLolor
What, precisely, is the child's name? I'm only 100% sure about this much:
random random TreatyLobster random6[null until marriage] 7[Ezum]8[ ? ] 9[Iton]10[Stakud] 11[ ? ]12[ ? ]
(I'm assuming a single parent takes the "older parent" position of Slot 7 by default.) I will convert your answer into an additional "Illegitimacy" variation in the list of naming systems.
That's true, I overlooked the immortals. Well, it's still a reasonable option for the short-lived races, at least . . . the elves & goblins will have to choose other means. Or, potentially, not change at all: Tolkien's elves, at least, are portrayed as being very resistant to change, and the very nature of (near-)immortality lends itself well to the idea of being a staunch traditionalist, not apt to change one's name at the drop of a hat.
Now I kind of get it... Except, why? I mean like, whyyyyyyyyy (sorry)
Atm there are no such things as illegitimate children, and DF's definition of incest is very narrow. And I think if we amend the fact that widows don't remarry, and also make some races/civ's polygamous, and/or detach procreation from marriage, that's fine. Don't we exclude cultural differences if we settle on that kind of system? Please don't tell me you have at least one of those for each race, or that nuances are expressed by something that would require to check the name and the sex of every ancestor.
You can just as easily signify illegitmacy by not giving a child the name it's supposed to have in it's culture. As in: it's a stigma or an honour or whatever, to not carry the familyname of your mom/dad as everybody else does around you. In fact, if you just pick the name of any ancestor by the same naming convention (patriarchal civ's, matriarchal civ's), it doesn't even matter if they're married; but you'd still have the possibility to simply pick a new familyname to signify more nuances (such as bastard).
If you're just bothered by the unoriginality of this father, mothername thing we could also add closest relative (like a caretaker), designated master (slaves, students), particular constellations combining 2 out of the 4 strings of the parents familynames etc. But I just don't see why it would be more practical to not put that kind of information into titles, and leave familynames be. In fact. I can't imagine how drowning the player with that kind of information allows to bypass the help of third party tools, or a glance at legends mode, in a practical and intuitive way... at all.
Also if the supposed merit of the system is to be less arbitrary and or more reliable, interesting, relevant (whatever; you name it) than our real world inspirations, why did we discuss historical accuracy? Because I can't see how that would solve the whole fake ID thing, which is the only reason I can come up with.
Atm we create completly fake personas, I think vampires and other NPC do the same tough I'm not sure. It would be cool to impersonate someone specific, but just... it wouldn't matter how both names, real and fake, "sound". Only which one it "shows" would matter. And as a sidenote flavor could be added by differenciating which parts of a name creatures use to refer to eachother.
Is that 12 strings I'm counting? Dude. why?
Yeah, it's GC. He chooses words very well, but what he argues for is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. :P
I meant by "bullshit" anything that does not make sense to most people.
Many people disagreed with your ideas, not just me. Stop trying to dodge (deserved) criticism.I meant by "bullshit" anything that does not make sense to most people.
I had no idea that you were most people. I thought you were a mere individual much like myself.
Many people disagreed with your ideas, not just me. Stop trying to dodge (deserved) criticism.
You literally tried to do so 3 posts ago. That sounds like something that GoblinCookie, the master of derp philosophy would do. Fine, you may continue to argue with dragdeler. I won't stop you. Just remember that you're not the only normal person in a forum full of "crypto-fascists".Many people disagreed with your ideas, not just me. Stop trying to dodge (deserved) criticism.
Is this some other GoblinCookie you are referring too? Since when did I dodge criticism? It sounds like something that KittyTac, the master of the one-liner would do. Also, when did the topic of the thread come to be all about me?
I shriek at the tought of adding even more not family related strings.Well, I agree with you on the "more" part, I think one of the most important qualities of a name is that it be short. But one type of non-family name that we've overlooked in this thread is physical appearance, especially when it's unusual: "Urist Sevenfinger" or "Momoz Halfsee" (who's blind in one eye), or "Ingish Darkhair".
And guys not even considering the suffix/prefix thing, is a missed opportunity to take an actual step in the direction of making dwarvish a (more) functional language.Take heart. In the next few days, you WILL get your wish . . . or at least the very strong beginnings of it. Your name prefixes/suffixes won't be in it, yet, as I'm questioning whether names should have their own system (as opposed to an integrated one).
This thread can live on. Who wants to talk about the economy?We can't even begin talking about the economy before we discuss the historical reasons behind it. Hunter-gatherer societies used a form of primitive communism.
You literally tried to do so 3 posts ago. That sounds like something that GoblinCookie, the master of derp philosophy would do. Fine, you may continue to argue with dragdeler. I won't stop you. Just remember that you're not the only normal person in a forum full of "crypto-fascists".
If we cull shit in a smart way then my only remaining criticism is that I'd find it hm... stale. As I understand it, the system only considers family links and no other historical link. I shriek at the tought of adding even more not family related strings. And it would feel like a database anchor, rather than some arcane language the things on my screen actually use. Maybe you're underestimating how much the fact that, everybody has trained reflexes in accordance to conventional "real life" (short!) naming conventions, plays in favor of the latter. And from the moment some name actually pokes my interest and I take time to check the links, I'm allready in some other window. Not to mention it might actually cull the name that interests me. (Or I simply don't notice it because I sure as shit don't read everything, I mean I got a whole announcement window with conversations going on... next to my browser)
Also I'd like to take the opportunity to point out two things:
1. Concerning defining actual preferences that will define entities (so lore building), I consider Threetoe the highest authority.
2. And guys not even considering the suffix/prefix thing, is a missed opportunity to take an actual step in the direction of making dwarvish a (more) functional language. Heck if we get some verbs after that we could allready say a lot of stuff. And maybe, just maybe the game could start making use of meaning. And be it only to lock some endgame stuff behind a random string (so a password/riddles from the gamers perspective), tough I'm sure we can come up with better.
Okay, well last night I sent GoblinCookie a long PM, politely explaining why I thought the thread (and the larger forum in general) seemed to have turned against him, and why I felt justified in flat-out ignoring certain of his arguments without rebuttal. I reminded him of several times over the past year where he has posted and/or defended ideas that either lack historical basis, would be unworkable in DF, would likely be unpopular among players, or were just plain wrong. I urged him to take these lessons to heart, to learn from his mistakes, to remember what I'd said about his powers of judgement. I told him that I knew his argumentative nature would urge him to fight me on this matter, to insist that he'd been right all along. I cautioned him not to do so, this was not the right time to follow that particular path. I reminded him that his upcoming mod release would go a long way towards restoring his standing among the forum.
Unfortunately, he did not respond as I'd hoped, debating every point, voicing pleasure in having driven people away, and calling people names. And then I log on to the forum, and see this. Ah, well. I think we might as well declare this thread officially over.
I guess we can keep talking now that we have dogpiled GoblinCookie. ;)
Should we just ignore him and carry on discussing? Because it leads to nothing productive. At all.
Most of that was pointlessly exchanging passive-aggressive arguments, mind.Should we just ignore him and carry on discussing? Because it leads to nothing productive. At all.
I doubt this thread would have reached it's 7th page without my help.
This latest whispering campaign of "everyone hates GoblinCookie" goes back to this thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=167633.150), on which you posted. I spent a number of pages criticising certain folks sociobiological delusions and said folks immediately went about slandering me to everybody . . .While we're on the subject, I'd like to mention another thread, just a couple of weeks later, on which you posted this little nugget:
. . . You [Manveru Taurënér] have a group of people, it is never one person and it is seldom more than three, but let's call them the trio for the sake of argument. The trio see things in more or less exactly the same way and as a result there is exists a 'cosy consensus', which to everyone else is effectively a form of censorship. The thread is quite harmonious and on-track, in the sense that the train goes round and around to nowhere. Because people do not want to upset the cosy consensus and dislike conflict, most people carefully keep things within the 'brackets' that the trio have initially set by their own internal consensus and intellectual blind-spots; this is how the trio effectively censor the discussion. But if someone who is fundamentally unalike the trio in their thinking comes along then they have to crack down, because they like how the thread is defined entirely by their limitations of their own thinking.You see, GoblinCookie, when you spend "a number of pages" publicly criticizing people's "delusions," you can be sure that those people are going to have, well, opinions about you, and you shouldn't be surprised when they voice those opinions. And yet, when they inevitably did, you managed to draw the conclusion that there must be a covert conspiracy organized specifically against you. Gee, I wonder what could have polarized them to make them behave in such a fashion.
So you did respond afterall SixOfSpades, even though you said you wouldn't?If you think my message said that I wan't going to reply to you at all, GoblinCookie, then maybe you should go back and read it more clearly. Perhaps then you might notice that in your reply, you actually argued against one of your own quotes.
Flat out ignoring arguments without rebuttal does not make you look smart, it just it look like you were just blustering and have nothing actually to say to back anything up.In most circumstances, yes. But for you? You're a special case, deserving of special treatment. You see, when I read something that is patently ridiculous, I can either
. . . you simply declare stuff wrong/unpopular/unworkable and expect me to simply capitulate simply because you loudly declared it to be so.Actually, I'd hardly even care if you capitulated or not. You have shown yourself to have poor judgement, bad manners, and a lousy attitude. As a direct result of these character flaws, I now feel your opinions, and indeed even your presence, to be all but irrelevant.
Also, there is nothing at all constructive about lecturing a person who already pissed off with you as though you are some kind of all-wise teacher and they the ignorant student.My message repeatedly and explicitly stated that it was written without malice, which it actually was. I knew full well you were angry, I expressed my sympathy for your position, and tried to help you deal with it. I mentioned your vocabulary mod as both an excellent outlet for your emotions, and a way to restore your reputation. I exhorted you to accept my message in the spirit of good faith. I extended a hand to try to heal the breach, and you slapped it away. Very well--you've made your choice.
The vast majority of people would dig in their heels in response to such pretentiousness, so it is not exactly notable that I did so.The vast majority of people would steal a $5 bill if they were sure they could get away with it. Does that make it morally okay to do so? Aristotle once said, "We are what we do repeatedly." What do you do here, GoblinCookie? What is it that you are known for?
Most of that was pointlessly exchanging passive-aggressive arguments, mind.
Quote from: myself on February 22. . . You [Manveru Taurënér] have a group of people, it is never one person and it is seldom more than three, but let's call them the trio for the sake of argument. The trio see things in more or less exactly the same way and as a result there is exists a 'cosy consensus', which to everyone else is effectively a form of censorship. The thread is quite harmonious and on-track, in the sense that the train goes round and around to nowhere. Because people do not want to upset the cosy consensus and dislike conflict, most people carefully keep things within the 'brackets' that the trio have initially set by their own internal consensus and intellectual blind-spots; this is how the trio effectively censor the discussion. But if someone who is fundamentally unalike the trio in their thinking comes along then they have to crack down, because they like how the thread is defined entirely by their limitations of their own thinking.You see, GoblinCookie, when you spend "a number of pages" publicly criticizing people's "delusions," you can be sure that those people are going to have, well, opinions about you, and you shouldn't be surprised when they voice those opinions. And yet, when they inevitably did, you managed to draw the conclusion that there must be a covert conspiracy organized specifically against you. Gee, I wonder what could have polarized them to make them behave in such a fashion.
I'm sure you've noted that I have repeatedly called you intelligent. What I believe you've missed, however, is that I never once said you were more intelligent than myself--nor do I expect to ever have reason to. From your response to my most recent PM and your remarks on the forum in general, you seem VERY assured that your own intellectual superiority is a foregone conclusion . . . let me assure you that it is anything but.
Also: Disagreement is not censorship, not even "effectively". If you can't deal with the fact that other people commonly have views differing from yours, maybe an Internet forum isn't the best place for you to hang out.
If you think my message said that I wan't going to reply to you at all, GoblinCookie, then maybe you should go back and read it more clearly. Perhaps then you might notice that in your reply, you actually argued against one of your own quotes.
I know that you want to argue with me on some, or even all, of these points. I know that you most likely WILL argue them--that's your nature. And I also know that it doesn't matter at all, because I simply won't respond. Yes, you're right to think that that sounds both arrogant and cowardly of me, but I'm right to do it and I'll tell you why. You have made a common practice of finding new threads started by less experienced forum members, and shooting down their suggestions with non-constructive criticism . . . sometimes followed up with an idea of your own that is actually far worse than the original. Strip away the veneer of intelligentsia, and that behavior is only a step or two removed from outright trolling. And what do we do with trolls? We don't feed them.
In most circumstances, yes. But for you? You're a special case, deserving of special treatment. You see, when I read something that is patently ridiculous, I can either
a) Respond to the person who wrote it, and try to help them realize their error,
b) Ridicule it, or
c) Ignore it.
Naturally, I tried the most proactive option first. Many times. At length. And it clearly had next to no effect. So as that path has proved to be a dead end, I refuse to accept blame for choosing the nicer of my two remaining options. As I said, if / when I choose to negate your points without bothering to rebut them, it will be because I have judged them to not merit rebuttal.
Actually, I'd hardly even care if you capitulated or not. You have shown yourself to have poor judgement, bad manners, and a lousy attitude. As a direct result of these character flaws, I now feel your opinions, and indeed even your presence, to be all but irrelevant.
My message repeatedly and explicitly stated that it was written without malice, which it actually was. I knew full well you were angry, I expressed my sympathy for your position, and tried to help you deal with it. I mentioned your vocabulary mod as both an excellent outlet for your emotions, and a way to restore your reputation. I exhorted you to accept my message in the spirit of good faith. I extended a hand to try to heal the breach, and you slapped it away. Very well--you've made your choice.
The vast majority of people would steal a $5 bill if they were sure they could get away with it. Does that make it morally okay to do so? Aristotle once said, "We are what we do repeatedly." What do you do here, GoblinCookie? What is it that you are known for?
There are experiences that change who you are. And there are experiences that reveal who you are. I gave you an experience, hoping to help you change. But I now consider you revealed.
Geez, I see now why your reputation is thin on the ground. And yet you are complaining about it being bad. You are, in effect, a troll.Most of that was pointlessly exchanging passive-aggressive arguments, mind.
All of which still counts for keeping the thread high up on the list. The thing about internet forums is that numbers matter and crap still counts as numbers! I suppose it is the internet forum corollary to "all publicity is good publicity" ;D.
Speaking of which, once we're arguing about how we're arguing, it probably puts the cherry on the top of the circular arguments that aren't going to help anybody, least of all the main characters in the Toady And ThreeToe Show who might well be discouraged from implementing any version of this whole idea, on the basis that there's plenty of vocal opinion that would consider any direction they went as being utterly wrong.
Can I suggest that there's not many more arguments/counter-arguments/counter-counter-arguments left that haven't yet been said, at least in passing. Even the meta-arguments are getting stale, IMO, but whether you take the same view or not I leave up to you.
Geez, I see now why your reputation is thin on the ground. And yet you are complaining about it being bad. You are, in effect, a troll.
The second part of you quoting me, wasn't specifically adressed at you GoblinCookie; maybe that's what throwing you off... lol :P ;).
I was basing that reply on this.Spoiler (click to show/hide)
If the name is inherited, I consider it not related to the location it designates. To change that we'd have to solve all possible cases concerning the frequent namechanges. Loads of workhours, arbitrary decisions to take, computation power to dedicate, all for what? Names that are way too long, to not make any "normal" person loose interest immediatly. You suggested to cull unnecessary information, if we do that there is no way to ensure the player allways receives the information he's most interested by. I add that we leave the game no room to instill some sort of personality that might attract interest, into the names; it's immersion breaking. And from a search function view point it's not so cool either in worlds where people have many descendants, these strings will be spammed all over the place forcing you to type more words. It's too hard to know which strings are most relevant. At least with family names as we know them you can tell at once glance: "oh I bet these are related" and choose to dedicate your interest accordingly. Also the system wastes a lot of strings and screen space to indicate only familylinks (that are vaguely related to their origin, I'll give you that). I tried to demonstrate that with less strings you can show familyinformation and add other infos in a way that paints how we perceive the creatures on our screens.
If the point was just to conciliate this overflowing name system with the general idea of clans, I can witness for my self that it was not the impression that it gave. Anyway I don't consider the idea of clans nearly as important, and easily subsumable into a less rigid system with additional means of expression at it's disposal.
Now to the witchhunt: I find you more stimulating than the predictably consensual. So usually I'll give it a try, even tough you like to act like I don't make any sense when I presumably annoy you. What I don't understand is why people grant so much attention to the parts that are honestly not worth it. When it's much more effective and easy to get bored and overfly them with a diminished attention span.
That's VERY, VERY bad netiquette. Really. And it might cause Toady to not implement the proposal, seeing it as divisive.Geez, I see now why your reputation is thin on the ground. And yet you are complaining about it being bad. You are, in effect, a troll.
I didn't realise I was advocating having pointless off-topic mud-slinging matches, I was just pointing out that ironically such a pointless mud-slinging match may well actually cause a proposal to rise up the lists faster than a constructive, civil and on-topic debates. If you are OP make sure to promote mayhem on your thread, as long as it does not actually get your thread locked.
That's VERY, VERY bad netiquette. Really. And it might cause Toady to not implement the proposal, seeing it as divisive.
So you are intentionally trying to make suggestions not get implemented?That's VERY, VERY bad netiquette. Really. And it might cause Toady to not implement the proposal, seeing it as divisive.
Obviously.
So you are intentionally trying to make suggestions not get implemented?
Well, then you're not just a troll, you're a proud troll. :P
You are the one who tried to derail the thread first, actually. This one dialogue was me retaliating. Let's end this, shall we?Well, then you're not just a troll, you're a proud troll. :P
Take a look at yourself KittyTac, what are you doing with this pointless dialogue we are having?
Hey look! A dead duck!https://youtu.be/PdydtDuj3VU?t=49s
/me theatrically points towards the sky
"Our surnames are Wortsman and Waite — I use Vashti, my middle name, as a pen name — and we have given both our kids the last name of Waitsman," she said.
...Like I want to get invested in my world, but when the human liaison comes and gives me news of the world that consists of pages and pages of text -- that mainly seem to consist of some place being conquered and dozens and dozens of refugees naming themselves something like the undulating sponges -- my eyes just glaze over and I skip it after reading a couple lines.
And then all my dwarves have their own likes and dislikes and relations and dreams and everything, but I've got like 150 of the little buggers, I can't even remember their names let alone that Bomrek Eribbasen is married to Deler Othdukingish has 3 kids, a bunch of various family members, is BFFs with Athel Eliseshtan...[snip]
My suggestion:
Instead of having children inherit the last name of just one parent (be it father or mother), I'd really like to see them inherit a last name that is conjugated or blended - e.g., a portmanteau or combination of the last names of both the father and the mother. One possibility is the Double-barrelled name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-barrelled_name), of which there exists some different variations and cultural traditions in different parts of the world. One way is to combine the surnames of each parent - or part of each surname - with a hyphen. But there are other traditions, such as the Hispanic-American naming custom. (See the Compound surnames (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname#Compound_surnames) section of the Wikipedia article on Surnames for details.)
I thought yours worked on some kind of hidden, random marriage name?My suggestion:
Instead of having children inherit the last name of just one parent (be it father or mother), I'd really like to see them inherit a last name that is conjugated or blended - e.g., a portmanteau or combination of the last names of both the father and the mother. One possibility is the Double-barrelled name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-barrelled_name), of which there exists some different variations and cultural traditions in different parts of the world. One way is to combine the surnames of each parent - or part of each surname - with a hyphen. But there are other traditions, such as the Hispanic-American naming custom. (See the Compound surnames (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname#Compound_surnames) section of the Wikipedia article on Surnames for details.)
Isn't that basically my proposal really?
GoblinCookie's convention wasn't random, it was one name per ancestor, arranged in a strict order. But that itself is very different from what Thundercraft mentioned, which is essentially each dwarf carrying two lineage names: One the same as (one of) their father's, and the other the same as (one of) their mother's.I thought yours worked on some kind of hidden, random marriage name?. . . I'd really like to see them inherit a last name that is conjugated or blended - e.g., a portmanteau or combination of the last names of both the father and the mother.Isn't that basically my proposal really?
GoblinCookie's convention wasn't random, it was one name per ancestor, arranged in a strict order. But that itself is very different from what Thundercraft mentioned, which is essentially each dwarf carrying two lineage names: One the same as (one of) their father's, and the other the same as (one of) their mother's.I thought yours worked on some kind of hidden, random marriage name?. . . I'd really like to see them inherit a last name that is conjugated or blended - e.g., a portmanteau or combination of the last names of both the father and the mother.Isn't that basically my proposal really?
Actually, no, you had one name per ancestor. "Melbildatan" is two name elements; whether or not there's a space between them is irrelevant.GoblinCookie's convention wasn't random, it was one name per ancestor, arranged in a strict order.It was one name per ancestral couple, not ancestor.
That is why they are similar, my system works in a similar way but it uses half the names that Thundercraft's would use . . .
I say they're very much alike in that you try to have everybody "everything" . . .As Thundercraft didn't give any specifics, I can't speak as to what his actual plan was, but the examples he cited were quite short, far shorter than GoblinCookie's convention. If I were to guess what precisely Thundercraft was suggesting, I'd say it would look something like this:
Isn't that basically my proposal really?
I thought yours worked on some kind of hidden, random marriage name?
GoblinCookie's convention wasn't random, it was one name per ancestor, arranged in a strict order...
It was one name per ancestral couple, not ancestor...
I say they're very much alike in that you try to have everybody "everything" eleminating the chance to implement more cultural identity and lore.
Because which of the lastnames have been chosen is barely indcative if you don't know the parents or the naming conventions. But if we keep it to allways 3 strings (firstname familynameA+B) I can live with it.
...And giggle at those odd case that might appear to indicate circular linearity if the strings and circumstances fit. We could have nice variations of recurring names tough to spice it up.
It was one name per ancestral couple, not ancestor. That is why they are similar, my system works in a similar way but it uses half the names that Thundercraft's would use, since it is one name per ancestral couple rather than one name per individual ancestor.
. . . I could not manage to read through all 9 pages of this topic.And I don't think anyone blames you. Personally I'd be okay with this thread dying, as inherited names is one of those ideas that always comes back in new threads. But at least this one is back on topic (for now?).
Using naming conventions to simulate greater cultural variety would require having more than one naming system used for different cultures - i.e., potentially different systems for dwarves, elves, humans, etc. However, that would require more work for Toady. More than two or three different naming conventions for DF seems excessive.I think most users are in disagreement with you there--from what I've seen, a lot of people want to see a lot more variety in dwarf (and human, elf, etc.,) societies: Procedurally randomized foods, styles of dress, marriage laws, social hierarchy, religious ceremonies, music and entertainment, standards of ethical behavior, what have you--and names would be part of that. The trick, for Toady, is coding a name-convention writer, and telling it what types of names best reflect certain societal values.
Perhaps elves should have their surname(s) listed first, followed by their given name, like the Japanese do? Or, would this tradition make more sense for dwarves?Speaking of societal values, a surname-first setup would imply that the culture places more emphasis on the reputation of the family as a whole, rather than the deeds of an individual.
If one parent is unknown, the child could inherit the surname of the known parent.The problem of bastard and foundling children has come up earlier in this thread, and as you say, it can be quite a tricky issue. I have to say, the bastard inheriting both surnames from the known parent is the most concise solution we've seen yet, and a strong argument for double surnames.
From what I've read, GoblinCookie's proposal sounds good to me. I could definitely see myself supporting it, so long as it's not deemed too complex for the average player or difficult for Toady to implement.See Page 5 of this thread, halfway down the page. It's listed there.
I've mostly read all pages but I'll admit it was not in much detail so forgive me if I state something already said.
I came to this thread because being able to know how my dwarves are related is important to me but I also would be very interested in being able to know of their family line without having to spend hours in legends and having family based last names is how we do it in real life so it seemed logical to use the same in DF.
However from what I read I understand hos it wouldn't work very well having too many duplicates for one and also too few last names from the worldgen and as such very few generations removed we would have only a couple last names remaining defeating the purpose of having them inn the first place.
So I would like to add my vote to these two ideas I picked in the previous pages :
1-Having a clerck that keeps track of lineage and being able to check it on a specific screen in fortress mode. If it was also added to legends it would be great of course but the point is being able to see it by staying in fortress mode.
Ideally you would have a way to know if a dwarf in said lineage is alive or dead or undead (if it's known) but also his or her actual location (if ti's known).
2- Having some kind of lastname convention found that prevents having only very few of them still alive after a couple of generations.
Being part Latin American and part Spanish my vote goes to Double-barrelled surnames like described below
At worldgen each dwarf gets Firstname Lastname at random just like it's already done.
Say Urist1 A and Urist2 B marry , they become Urist1 A and Urist2 B of A (short for spouse of A). When they have kids they'll be LittleUrist A B
If you go 1 more generation LittleUrist A B marries OtherUrist C D and they become LittleUrist A B and OtherUrist C of A and their kids will be AnotherUrist A C and so on and so forth.
Whose last name is predominant in real life is of course the father's but in DF it could be chosen on the following criteria in order :
-One is noble and not the other, noble takes precedence.
-Both are nobles then the highest rank is chosen
-Same rank (nobles or not) then the highest family prestige (will elaborate further down)
-Same rank (nobles or not) and same prestige : does one care about lineage more than the other. OF course that implies a new trait for dwarves regarding lineage.
-Lastly if no factor can be determined, at random.
Prestige : it could be a weight attached to every lastname that would be increased or decreased every time something significant happens to someone wearing it.
Adding points in increasing order when :
Creating mastercrafts
Being grandmaster in a skill
Being a Noble the higher the rank the more points
Writing a book
Creating an artifact (books excluded)
Defeating ennemies , a tiny bonus for killing a giant bat , bigger if said bat has a name and then in order named ennemies during raids/sieges, megabeasts (the more famous the more points), forgotten beasts (the more famous the more points), demons
Any other idea welcome
Removing points in increasing order when
punished in the justice system for minor crimes (brawls, vandalims etc), the bigger the crime/punishment the more points removed
Killing a pet
Killing a civilian
Killing a noble to usurp a lawfully given title
Being cursed
Becoming a necromancer
Any other idea welcome
Based on prestige only in my naming convention examples A would have more prestige than B at the time of the marriage and same with C having more than D. It may happen than by the time AB and CD marry B or D have become way more prestigious that wouldn't be taken into consideration as it's only A and C that will be passed on to the progeny as such it's the "primary" lastname that should get the prestige increase or decrease as it's the one that will be propagated.
So say AB does something grand A will get a bonus but if BA is the one doing the deed it's B that is impacted.
Hope this was not too convoluted and that I manged to explain it clearly. It's not always easy as English is not my first language (or even the second :p )