Why are dwarfs always the same?

Those are just minor physiognomic differences. They still dig, are greedy, live underground and forge things.

Not OP, but if you want change... Make them insectoid.
Ants are quite dwarfy: dig holes, build, dig more holes, drink mead. I don't see why they wouldn't craft and mine if they were sentient. Dorfs in pop culture tend to stick to their clans - antmen stick to their hives.
I guess we should keep the beard. Beard will be... a traditional ornament, that can tell social status, achievements, which clan this "dwarf" is from, etc.

And orcs still raid, are ugly, and no one likes them, while elves are pretty, long-lived, and like forests.

Dwarves have changed subtly, but they have been changing, with some of their features diminishing (their shortness is understated now) while others are more pronounced (the beard business has almost gotten out of hand).

Orcs are often misunderstood noble warriors now and the physical difference is more extreme. From the weak goblins to huge mountains of muscles. Elves lost a lot of their connection and closeness to the divine and often fall into the distinctive high-, wood- and dark-elf subraces, which are never so extreme with Tolkiens elves.

Dwarfs are just a bit less obvious jewish and sometimes better at technologies. They are basically the same in every other regard.

Same reason why dwarves do anything.

TRADITION!

>sometimes better at technologies.

You mean full-blown steampunk and guns?

There's also "evil dwarves" like the duergar, and Faerun has a number of distinct dwarf subraces. Beyond that, dwarves went from originally being distinctly magical in the original Norse, to hating magic and basically being anti-magic, to now being a bit more relaxed but still being against most forms of magic.

Dwarves have changed. Perhaps not as much as Orcs and Elves in some media, but it would still be quite a scene to see a "modern" dwarf appear in Middle Earth.

Ants with beards.
Well alright then.

>Perhaps not as much as Orcs and Elves in some media
I can live with that.

Well,I think is quite hard to find another cultural niche in which dwarves can fit. The mining,forging and warring stuff has extended to engineering and rune magic in fantasy settings, and into electronics and general techonology in cyberpunk and futuristic. I think it's their association with earth and tunneling what makes it hard to radically change them.

Why paladins are always the same?

Why are neckbeards always the same?

Original Norse sources don't distinguish between dwarves and svartalfar, and them being short seems to have been a later folkloric addition.

Also, they pull double duty as the settings elves and dwarves depending on caste, but I actually like Mountain Folk from Exalted as a way of doing the classic fantasy races in a recognizable but new way. Magitech stone people who live underground and fight the endless hordes of things that have been banished from the light of day while worshipping their absent Primordial artificer/machine god.

Go the dwarf fortress route and make them more prone to random violence and workplace accidents than ever thought possible for such a stout race of builders

I like dwarves like these

>blocky fists
>thick ankless
>copious body hair

If only shoulders and waist weren't that thin

Two main ways Dwarves can be changed.
First way is simple: make them gnomes. Focus more on their tinkering and creation of odd contraptions rather than their smithing, drinking, and axe-weilding. Do not establish dwarves as tough, stout humanoids, but rather small and weedy; they avoid and are bad at melee combat.

Second way is to focus almost entirely on terrestrial dwarves. Push the angle of traveling caravans of dwarves trading between the various dwarf fortresses and/or human lands. Go back to Tolkien's original inspiration and make them like traveling Jews, peddling their wares in foreign lands and struggling to survive in unfriendly human kingdoms.

I think you mean why are dwarves always the same since Tolkien, just like the first reply said, Tolkien established a set of tropes that people follow, but before that they were different, just look up mythological dwarves.

Because most dwarves are caricatures of Gygax's dwarves, who were caricatures of Gimli. We basically have a race extrapolated from one individual who's traits have been writ large over time. They all seem like the same person because they essentially are

And they are no longer dwarves.

Who decides what is and isn't a dwarf? Or an elf? As far as I'm concerned, so long as they hit some of the main points of dwarfness, they're dwarves

Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be dwarves.

I feel like too few people actually make their own races, and the ones who do tend to make shit ones.

>copy conquest of Elysium
Okay then

That's not a dwarf that's a beastman of some fashion

You knew non-alcoholic vikings?

If I take wood ants and call them dwarves I can talk like this "Did you know that Dwarves can carry up to 200times their body weight"

Now nobody will fucking know what I'm talking about. Because that's not how language works you dumbshit.

A lot of people don't make their own races because some people (especially here on Veeky Forums) whinge and complain if anyone has anything original in their setting, and try their damndest to convince people that no one is interested in their dumb special snowflake bullshit, and to just use the cliche races/classes/cultures

Its a made up race , you dip. Use your imagination

I think you're taking the idea of "like ants" further than the poster meant it to be taken.

My dwarves are purple three-headed fungoid centaurs that stand 300 feet tall and worship fire. They also can't drink because they have no mouths and can't grow body hair because they are fungus.

See, there's a reason someone uses the word 'dwarf', and it's to give people an immediate understanding of a recognized race without having to explain as much. Deviating too far from the norm invalidates giving them the recognizable name and you may as well call them something else.

Pretty sure as long as they're short creatures fond of drink and industry, and follow a few other key things like tending towards beards and underground homes and not being bubbly fucking gnome/kender shits, you can do backdrop details like social structure however the fuck you like.

>a collection of tropes
>Tolkien Dwarves use magic, swords, spears, bows, some don't even have beards

It's no wonder people complain they can't find games to play/run when someone can seriously argue that a race of ant-people should be called dwarves.

Are all the wheels in your setting not actual wheels but icosahedrons instead?

Play Conquest of Elysium. That has ant-dwarves and they're plenty dwarfy.

See, now you're just being obtuse. What people are saying is that so long as you keep the major dwarven tropes/feel, you can change things up quite a bit. For instance, tall but squat looking fungal centaurs with bushy sensitive mycelium on their 'faces' and a knack for making powerful fungal intoxicants would probably work

See again

>Why are dwarfs always the same?

They're not. Japan turned female dwarves into lolis instead of thick women with beards.

>Make them insectoid.
>Ants are quite dwarfy:

Sorry but Insectoid dwarves can no longer be recognized by people as dwarves, give them a different name and bring up the similarites between your "super original homebrew race" and dwarves.

If you don't like classic fantasy there's no reason you have to play in it, but making up things that are vastly different in almost all regards from its base materials and pretending that it can be called and understood as the same thing is completely inane, and just shows how desperate a hipster is to be original.

We can make SKY DWARVES. They cultivate rain water and have big wings. They're also best friends with all the races and are not prone to violence.

That a big enough change for ya?

Another reason to bomb it again.

Space ships.

So Squats?

Reminds me of an exchange in the Inheritance Cycle. So strange that scenes from such a forgettable series keeps cropping up in my memory.

The conversation went (roughly) as such:
Protagonist: Wait, you Dwarves have cities ABOVE ground?
Dwarf: Uh...yea? Why wouldn't we want to live in the sun? We gotta get our food, trade, and vitamin D somewhere!
Protagonist: I just assumed you were an entire race of mole-people.
Dwarf: No, that would be incredibly claustrophobic. Now stop being racist so we can go back to drinking shittons of bear and obsessing over our traditions and honor.

Yes. Lamassu-dwarves who live on mountaintops and craft weather. They're well liked due to the usefulness of their craft, and prefer to concentrate on religion and crafts over martial skill

There's almost nothing else to add to them. At their core, they are craftsmen and have always been described as squat and 'ugly' although we all know that most-all of Veeky Forums instantly gets erect when they gaze upon a stoic dwarven visage, from mythology and folklore to Tolkien's glorious birthing of modern fantasy.

The form they have assumed now is just the pinnacle of their development next to other fantasy races: They have a very clear-cut role that they fulfill that doesn't intrude into other territories, while leaving them with the potential of individual characters when handled by a competent writer.

In a sense, they have become the perfect fantasy trope that doesn't need reinvention, anymore, because they've become everything they need to be. Whatever difference there exists in various settings is just subtle variations of emphasis on all the things that make up dwarves.

>Man
I see somebody is new to the fetish.

Don't worry young'un, you'll learn.

I would definitely play that race in a game.

Is there anything Japan hasn't cutiefied into oblivion?

Truly they are ahead of us in every aspect of life.

Cockroaches.
Eldritch Horrors.
Goblins.
Car parts.
Battleships.

The same reason all human campaigns will always have better character interaction and development than a hodge podge of midgets and animal people.

Only because of autists who insist on substituting race for personality, if which fittingly dwarffags are the most guilty. 9/10 times when someone wants to play a dwarf, what they mean is that they want to be Gimli 2, and base all possible actions on what would stereotyped gimli do

I like this post.

You see it seems at the first glance to be yet another HFY shitpost, but then you realise that what he's actualy saying, is that "they aren't" becasue just like how "all human games" are almost universally shity exercises in masterbaiting to "muh realism", dwarves do indeed have their subtle differences from setting to setting.

>Cockroaches

Eldritch Horros

>battleships
user...

Battleships and eldritch horrors they already have. I just found about the cockroaches. As for car parts...

I guess they prefer their orcs porcine and ugly for the most part, but I've seen a few cute orkoid girls.

Because only autists and /pol/fags play them

youtube.com/watch?v=sWSoYCetG6A

My American of African descent, please.

Is this an actual thing or are you just trying to rustle our jimmies,user?

Are they?

They're not always the same, just because they're all short and usually bearded doesn't mean they always act the same. Many settings have subtle differences in their Dwarfs.

You know how people sometimes complain about modern geeks not bothering to actually read the fucking source material?
That's not a modern thing; that's always been true. So, the tropes we think of as 'tropes established by Tolkien' (or Howard or whoever) were actually, much of the time, cargo cult-ed together by people who never did the reading.
Through geek history, geeks talk out of their ass about 75% of the time.

>goblins
youtu.be/Tc8iu0XFUQc

And for the whole shebang:

en.rocketnews24.com/2016/01/19/toyota-goes-full-otaku-makes-40-kawaii-mascots-for-every-part-of-the-car/

No! Don't mention squ

The thing about orcs is that they're almost always a stand-in for humans that the author doesn't like.

While tolkein's orcs physically resembled debased caricatures of Mongols, culturally they were compared to post-industrialization Europe ("we were all orcs in the Great War") in that they were callous, honourless despoilers of the natural world with minds fixated on machines and industry, to the point that they could forge better steel than any of the humans save the men of gondor.

tolkein was unique in his dislike of industrialized people, but his notion of "orcs as a stand-in for my least favourite race" persisted when other authors would start using the creature.

It's just that most of them have no beef with industry, and instead their least favourite human is THE SAVAGE DARK RACES, and so all of a sudden you have orcs who far surpass humans in physical strength, are of a nearly bestial intelligence, are "closer to nature" or shamanistic, never surrender or run from battle, wear animal skins and loinclothes, and have a conspicuous desire to purloin and breed with human women.

You can call your stupid ants "dwarves" if you want of course, it's just that everyone will think you're retarded and trying too hard to be unique.

The same as people will think you're an autistic, joyless faggot if you insist on jamming the cliche gimli clones into every setting

>all of this dwarf hate

>Implying dwarfs need to change.

Dwarfs are perfect as they are , they don't need to be insectoid, fungal or fucking anime lolis.

One question i always find myself asking:

What do dwarves eat?
Mountains are usually terrible for agriculture, and there's nothing to eat underground.
Until very recently in human history, most of the human population had to be dedicated to agriculture to allow us to survive. Yet i have never seen a dwarf farmer.

>if you insist on jamming the cliche gimli clones into every setting
I don't though, me criticizing your dumb idea doesn't automatically put me on the far opposite end of the spectrum.

Well one obvious possibility is that not all of Dwarven civilisation lies underground, and that they have several agricultural institutions nestled in valleys. It's the perfect spot where "feral" Dwarves come from that are more influenced by pictish Highlanders than subterranean jews. Considering that dwarves are often depicted as having a great beer culture, they simply must have some sort of access to wheats.

The other possibility is that dwarves have a maingly fungal diet, where they have whole chasms dedicated to cultivating an edible mushroom colony, and that they hunt mountaingoats for supplements, or they eat subterranean bugs.

>Because Tolkien

You mean Gygax.

>DUDE WHAT IF DWARVES WERE BUGS SO ORIGINAL

You're just as bad as the people who want all Dwarves everywhere to be drunken, axe-wielding Scotsmen.

Its not so much hate of dwarves (at least for me) as it is a hate for how narrow the stereotype is. Fantasy dwarves have a very rigid archetype in most people's minds, and that makes them kind of hard to build around. It also makes for lazy role playing, because a lot of people just Falk back to the stereotype and won't change it up at all

I kind of solved that by rolling dwarves, gnomes, and halflings together. They're really good farmers, so the land on and around their mountains gets turned into farmland and shit. They have a knack for the land and things that grow in it, plus really rugged plants and underground irrigation, so the shitty, rocky land no one else wants becomes their parks, farms, and gardens

>there's nothing to eat underground.
>fungi, worms, burrowing mammals, and weird fantasy shit don't exist

cave moss, mushrooms, tunnel rodents, goat cheese, and whatever they can grow without too much effort like cabbages, turnips , and peas.

Everything else would get imported through trade like wheat and red meat,since the whole purpose of building a mining city underground would be to extract it's mineral wealth.

It's double contrarianism. The truth of the matter is there is nothing wrong with dwarves and elves, but having them in every setting is a bit silly.

My interpretation was that they do some light farming - mushrooms,animal rearing, etc. Hills and low mountains offer some opportunity for pastures, and dwarves were never supposed to be all that numerous.

However, they do import various foodstuffs, and most citadels have surface outposts or vassal settlements. These settlements needn't even be dwarven - a large fortress means security, and a city with master artisans means a market, so humans, halflings or the like have an innate incentive to settle nearby.

Plump Helmets, for sure

>its a cuck complex! thats all orcs are!

Scoped this meme but didn't care for it, subtle though.

Plump helmets.

satan trying again to deceive us

>>copious body hair
Now I wonder, is underground hot or cold?
As far I know about mines, underground is pretty damn hot, fur would be troublesome.

The more rich and well off Dwarves, such as urban artisans and nobles, can live in the cooler caverns where their cities are bit.

Lower class dwarves such as miners must shave themselves to safely work in the mines, and as such their nakedness is an extremely visible status symbol.

>to the point that they could forge better steel than any of the humans save the men of gondor.
Were men of Gondor some sort of Mary Sues or something?

Mah dorfs!

Quite neat idea.

Ever been in a natural cave? They tend to settle to the year-round average of the area they are in. You have to go really far under the surface for the temperature to start rising due to internal heat from the planet.

Most people have shitty imagination.

/aco/ and /d/ get shortstack threads and yet there are so few good images of dwarven women that don't try to change their traditional physiology. Give me short, wide, strong bitches that aren't fat.

>there's nothing to eat underground.
What about all those fucked up monsters that inevitably infest every underground structure and cave system? And/or whatever it is those things are eating, besides dwarves, obviously.