Dwarfs are hats, Elves are moods

[OgreBattle]

I saw some thingy about Dwarves declining in popularity in D&D5e, and a general decline across western fantasy RPG stuff. One argument was that D&D has a lot more variety in playable races so of course there's a decline, but it did seem like dwarfs were hit harder. I don't know how gnomes and halflings fare.

Pondering why, I looked at current dwarf art, what comes up for dwarf art and they looked like short D&D humans. It's like they were 'purposefully avoiding stereotype' of being mining hats with arms and legs. But that's the only reason I ever play dwarf characters!

The appeal of Dwarfs to me at least was they're an occupation and that's that. You play as a miner, you play as a brewer, you play as an engineer or architect. The stoutness makes their job hat stick out more. Warhammer Fantasy's Slayer is a dwarf without a normal job in society, so they run around hatless, their mohawk is their hat of shame and redemption. A good dwarf name like "Jobhat Workbeard"

Elves are still chugging along, so I was thinking about their appeal and figure it's "mood". Sorrowful not-Elric, Conflicted Drizzt, Haughty High Elf, Smiling Spite Dark Elf, Watchful Wood Elf. Their names then focus around evoking a mood, something not 'in reality' like 'Daynight Sorrowjoy'

I also figure the "the character is their occupation" role got eaten by space marines, and people who want that go play a space marine game instead of D&D. 40k doesn't have a place for dwarfs because all of the job hats are worn by different space marine chapters and roles like techmarine priestmarine grudgemarine big gunmarine vikingmarine and more.

By the way do D&D dwarfs have much of a gold lust nowadays? It was part of their Tolkien characterization.

[Thaluikhain]

40k doesn't have a place for dwarfs because all of the job hats are worn by different space marine chapters and roles like techmarine priestmarine grudgemarine big gunmarine vikingmarine and more.

Is that not true of most people, though? Any theme you can think of, most likely you can make a marine chapter to fit if there isn't one already, and marines haven't quite removed everyone else yet.

Night Lords are marine Dark Eldar, Iron Hands or Iron Warriors are marine ad-mech. Thousand sons is treading on Necron themepark Egyptology. There's at least 2 or 3 flavours of marine knights not a million miles away from Sisters of Battle.

Also, IG storm troopers...er...Astra Militarum Tempestus Scions are still a thing, despite being space marines, if not Space Marines.

Why has this hit dwarfs harder than those? Though it does strike me that those are mostly marines competing with normal humans, not some other not quite human group which is what the dwarves are.

[OgreBattle]

Why has this hit dwarfs harder than those? Though it does strike me that those are mostly marines competing with normal humans, not some other not quite human group which is what the dwarves are.

At least to me there's a 'sexlessness' with dorfs in Tolkien and Warhammer and most of D&D. They're hyper masculine but in a way where you don't think about reproduction with them but what job they do. Spess Marines are eunuchs so the insignia on their pauldron is all they do.

Looking at 80's dwarf art from GW, they're closer in proportion to Kirby than a human, their beards actually help blend their head/hat into one round form with their body!





Eldar still reproduce sexually, have boyfriends and girlfriends and hold hands so they got a niche that can't be filled without reaaaally changing the lore.

[Thaluikhain]

Hmmm, had not considered that, but female dwarves are quite the rarity, unlike female elves, yeah. Would the nature of dwarfness change with female dwarfs? Personally, I'm not sure.

[Zaranthan]

My favorite was a fan theory from the Dwarf Fortress community. Their dorfs had a long, intricate courtship ritual, the primary purpose to tactfully determine your prospective spouse's gender. Because dorfs reproduce via spores, so simply getting handsy was taboo.

[nockermensch]

Their dorfs had a long, intricate courtship ritual, the primary purpose to tactfully determine your prospective spouse's gender.

This part comes from Pratchett, tho.

[deaddmwalking]

Elves are better than you (registered trademark). There is no end to the people who want to play a character who is better than themselves, and more importantly, better than everyone else at the table.

In 3rd edition, there were smart wizard elves (who were better than you), Agile elves who are lithe, beautiful and ageless (who were better than you), and it goes on and on. They really do hype up this in the official racial description.

Dwarves play to the people who like to put on a Scottish accent and wield axes and hammers. There's a role for that, and it's the same people who play dwarves over and over (just like there's a person who likes to play Halflings). But for new players, elf is an easy sell for just about anyone.

[Insomniac]

Elves have the beauty of elves specifically and their societies in general pushed heavily in WOTC literature on elves as well as they are so beautiful they are like divinely beautiful so they don't even fit in, they are like little angel-creatures or Godlings. They are "of the world but not in it."

"magical people of otherworldly grace...live in places of ethereal beauty...unearthly grace...fine features...hauntingly beautiful..."

I know that might come from the mythology of it and more folkloric grounding of source material of the game like Tolkien, but why should this be considered the case in baseline assumption Dungeons and Dragons?

[Foxwarrior]

A starting elf has more life experiences than a super old human wizard, might as well imply that they spent all those extra dozens of years on learning about skin care and attractive postures.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

Choose my response:

1. Feminism is destroying dwarves, who represent toxic masculinity.

2. Femboy craze: Feminine men are in and elves are very feminine.

3. Playing short ugly dudes is something most tabletop players already do in real life. Why should they want to do it in fantasy time?

If you respond to me please pick a number so I know which position I'm defending.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I will contest that dwarven masculinity is toxic simply because there are too many different kinds of dwarven cultures to make such a sweeping statement. For every uber-patriarch asshole there's a humble blacksmith who plies his trade simply and to the best of his ability in order to provide for his wife and little beardlings.

I think you're onto something, though. The stereotypical depiction of dwarves is rather masculine while elves lean more towards stereotypical femininity. Most people probably want to be hot and badass instead of a just badass manlet. They probably want to be an impeccably groomed, hot dwarf anyway. One with a sexy hair tousle after a long night of drinking. But that's not what people usually think of when they think "dwarf", while everyone always associates elves with being hot and extremely desirable and like Dead said... better than you. Dwarves aren't necessarily better than you, they just probably are at some things rather than everything.

So really, elves are better at fulfilling one's power fantasies since physical attractiveness and inherent superiority are character aspects people go bananas for.

[Dean]

Dwarves are played by people who don't have physical attractiveness as a part of their power fantasy. It's why dwarves are played by fat people. Women play halflings, chubby people play dwarves, gothkids play tieflings. These are things.

Dwarves benefit is that they are a complete roleplaying package in a race.
Every dwarf is Gimli and while us snobby rpg connoisseurs might upturn our noses at it, that's actually hugely valuable. If I played D&D with my mother tomorrow I could make her play a dwarf and she would know she's supposed to like beer and mountains and say "Aye" and might even know she doesn't like elves. That's an invaluable level of cultural penetration. Every dwarf is basically the same person and it's not important for them to be hot, no one's playing a dwarf to be hot, people playing dwarves are doing so because they don't accept hotness as a requirement for someone to be valued by society.

Dwarves complete roleplaying package, along with them having a stereotypical honorable warrior value system mean they're an incredibly approachable and appealing thing for new players, and especially appealing for new players who possess a certain rooseveltian robustness.

[Thaluikhain]

A quibble, but surely the Scottish thing came after Tolkien's semitic dwarfs, but was so prevalent it was attached to them later at some point?

[OgreBattle]

I think scottish dwarves were a Blizzard thing? Was rereading a Gotrek & Felix book, Gotrek is arrogant in his dwarven supremacy and slurs anything not 1000+ year old fine Dwarf carved architecture, but isn't Scottish.

WC3's Scottish accent dwarfs have repeated dialog millions of times to millions of people. Oh yeah there was the Saturday Night Live skit where they just go "if it's not scottish it's crap!" at everything and that's how dwarf protagonists get written.

[Whipstitch]

From my North American perspective I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it just comes down to Scottish and Irish being some of the most exotic and easily identifiable accents a non-American can have while still hailing from primarily English speaking countries. E.g., I sometimes have a surprisingly hard time telling between various Germanic accents when they're speaking solely about technical matters in English but the UK crew tends to stick out because they don't have to start speaking pidgin to drop some local slang.


I also think that dwarves are often portrayed in ways that could be interpreted as very cartoon Scandinavian but that the "dwarves=short miners with beards and wacky helmets" and "vikings=big sailors with wacky helmets" delineation makes it feel like there's some big obvious difference going on even if Blizzard's Lost Vikings basically look like Blizzard dwarves.

[OgreBattle]

Man just found out the Legend of Mana artist Shinichi Kameoka turned Dwarves into "Kirby beards"
https://magicalvacation.fandom.com/wiki/Dwarves
From the DS game "Magical Vacation". Their legends say they all woke up with beards, used to be smooth balls.

[OgreBattle]

Touhou is filled with characters defined by the hat they wear and do, with long hair instead of beards. https://touhou.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Characters

Depicted as monogender, community where each has a hat-based role.

[crasskris]

Dwarves offer a couple of compelling 'moods' too: being loud, being grumpy, chewing the scenery, enjoying debaucheries like drinking, being stubborn, being aggressive while talking about stuff like honor and meaning it.

So if anything I would guess that other races are encroaching on that territory, if they truly have lost player favor. Looking at you, half-orcs.

[GâtFromKI]

Dwarves represent the working classes : they are strong, dirty, they drink beer, and they work. As a working character, they are defined by their occupation : no one care if his plumber likes pizzas or burritos, what's important is that he's a plumber.

Elves represent aristocracy. As such, no one cares about what they do: what's important is their mood and passions and how their tastes defines the world. The fact an elf likes pizzas and not burritos is enough to decide pizzas are gastronomy while burritos aren't. And, of course, they are better than you in every possible way, because aristocrats are better than you in every possible way.

Dwarves have no place in 40k because there are already several over-industrialized and over-crowded human worlds : this is where the working classes are. There's no need to add some Dwarves on top of that - and when they tried, they quickly discovered the squats were nothing special in this universe. In the other hand, since Humans in 40k are about Fascism and not about decadent aristocrats or ploutocrats, there's a lot of place for Elves.

I don't remember if there are dwarves in Shadowrun... but once again, they serve no purpose because the humans, orcs and trolls are the working classes - with the racial discrimination and stereotypes on top of that for orcs and trolls. Orcs and trolls have a purpose that can't be filled by humans (... more accurately, it's very hard to use humans in your fiction to fill that purpose without being offensive for some real people), dwarves don't.

[Blade]

There are dwarves in Shadowrun and tp me they serve the purpose of the "well-integrated race":

"Why can't they all be like the dwarves? Dwarves are fun, they drink beer and make jokes (and even when they don't, you can make a lot of funny jokes about them) and they don't take up much space. They will sometimes live in closed communities, but it's in places too small and cramped for normal people, so it's okay. They don't think they're better than you like those elves and they aren't violents like orks and trolls."

[GâtFromKI]

There are dwarves in Shadowrun and tp me they serve the purpose of the "well-integrated race":

[...]

I stand corrected, that is a very valid purpose.

[OgreBattle]

What if in a setting, there were honorable goblins who grew beards and they fight against the regular kind of goblin. Would people who want to be a short miner viking honor grumbling brewer be OK with them even if they were green

[deaddmwalking]

Would people who want to be a short miner viking honor grumbling brewer be OK with them even if they were green

Not generally. Lots of people like the idea of hirsute Viking, not as many with the idea of a green Viking. You could probably get a lot of these same players to agree to play a Klingon in a Star Trek game, so it isn't entirely about a specific visualization, but a lot of players do care about having an image in mind - and a tough honorable warrior is pretty good.

Without established source material, it's a bit of a lift to get players invested in your idea. When your pitch is 'everything you want, but also green', I'd expect a lot of players to say 'or how about just everything I want and we leave Kermit the frog out of this'.

[Foxwarrior]

Lots of people like the idea of hirsute Viking, not as many with the idea of a green Viking.

What if... the game used unmodified photographs of renfair people and called them elves and dwarves? Delightfully devilish, Foxwarrior.