Why do dwarfs always carry axes? What trees are they chopping down underground exactly?

Wouldn't they be so far down into the earth by now that they wouldn't meet Roots?

A mattock would work for that then. Good for clearing ground and prospecting, honestly. With a pick instead of a small axe on one side like mine, I could easily go mine. It'd be easier to use if I were shorter too. I mean, I'm not that tall but I have to get on my haunches.

What? They carry hammers.

Dwarf axes aren't for chopping, they're for grinding

because they originate from norse mythology and the norse were known for using war axes.

>Dwarven lumberjacks encountered
>0

Lets be honest dwarves are manley vikings who hide in caves to not get caught crying.

>translated into the common tongue, the runes inscribed on the chamber walls say "And when I kill myself, Susie will realize I was the only one who ever really understood her, and boy would she be sorry, but it'd already be too late, you just wait and see"

Not axes, Mattocks.
Shortsword sidearm.

Because. despite what every moron here saying "Muh short ranged tunnel fighting" says, Dwarves don't live in super tight confined spaces.

They mine and live in great halls under the mountain.

If you have enough room to swing a mattock or a Pick axe, you have enough room to swing an axe.

Man, this is an ancient fucking question.
How fucking new are you that you haven't heard it asked and answered on here already?

>Shadversity
You mean the porn guy?

Yeah whenever I hear 'Shad' I think of Shadbase too
youtube.com/watch?v=cDt_tIcca-k

Old questions are best questions

You'd rather have the new questions?

>Should my pc fuck a tranny treant in the knothole/anus if i'm playing a vengeance pally?

>Guys, why are loli elf so cute?

>Hay! Stat this guy!

They still use lumber to support their mines and other constructions, and they're naturally more likely to be in a fight when they're above ground, so the axes become handy that way. If we assume they're spending most of their time swinging pickaxes in cramped tunnels, then it really doesn't follow that they'd need a "more practical" weapon than their axes/hammers, or bother with less practical piercing attacks with their picks.

Fuck this elf propaganda.

Race war now.

you haven't played dwarf fortress have you
I mean I did stop chopping trees when the elves asked to (and instead I imported wood from humans in exchange for minerals, jewellery and metalcraft) but until then I was sending some dorfs to gather wood from time to time

Stone pillars won't support mines? And last longer?

Sorry, I just don't think there's much of a call for wooden support beams in a dwarven city, deep underground

Hmm......if you'd have said some kind of mushroom stalk instead of 'tree's', I'd agree with you.

>Pike
>Halberd
>Good in a FUCKING TUNNEL

Here is the issue with this stupidity; Tunnels can be pretty tall, but almost ALWAYS they confine peoples movement horizontally.

Why is that photo so aesthetic?

Damn, I like this one.
>Dwarf Chocolate
>Dwarf Clocks
>Dwarf Cheese
>Dwarf Banking Guild Interests Threatening the Royal Family
>Dwarf Yodeling

>Obeying the elves

They're shitters who pose no threat to anyone. They don't bring goblinite with them, but their sieges are pitiful and even the most basic armors will let you cut them down without a scratch since all they use is wood.

Beds can only be made of wood, user.

Fuckin' surface dwellers no nothing.

The dwarf ax is really just a pickax modified for slashing. Most dwarfs prefer to use short polearms, short swords or improvised mining tools.

They almost exclusively use stone or metal for crafting. When they do need wood, the dwarfs trade for it with humans.

Dwarfs sleep on futons, user.

They don't. In the Hobbit they used swords too.

>a Dwarf would be much better suited to using something like a Pike
That is the most retarded thing I have ever heard. How the fuck do you carry a pike in a tunnel when you're not using it?

Dwarves sleep on stone beds with blankets made of stone, and pillows of rock.

In my Homebrew setting Dwarves live in forests and on the coasts. They're still master blacksmiths but they aren't the ones who dig for ore.

The ones who dig for ore are a race of giant sentient cave-spiders. They have no blacksmithing (as they don't have hands) and they create ore essentially as a byproduct of their own tunneling using a weak acid they secrete. So they trade the ore with the Dwarves for finished and exotic items.

A more interesting question is: where do dwarfs get textiles? It's not like they have cotton, wool or hides down there.

Dwarf lederhosen.

>no hides

You find some crazy shit in those tunnels, user.

Rothe hide?
Mushroom stalks braided into a wool/cotton like product

>The dwarfs are wearing giant beetle carapaces, goblin leather and quaggoth fur.

Pig tail fiber, digging in the dirt layer and then waiting for mystery grass to form to feed the sheep, surface walled farms, or trading three stone toy boats for all of the fabric/thread.

Okay, but so what?

Stick your Pike down the tunnel and thrust at anything that gets in your way. Add more pikes for a better effect. Manuveurability would be an issue but once youve fixed the enemy in place your golden.
I don't know if he explicitly says in a tunnel either, just in general combat a Dwarf would have better luck with a Halberd or pike since a Halberd is just an Axe with more versatility.
Since Dwarves are smaller, they could fit more Pikemen into a fixed area, thus more pikes and stabby deadly bits pointing at the enemy.

Dwarf yodeling is used to great effect when they find the entrance to a cave and they can't tell how big it is.

A dwarf stands at the open cave mouth, yodels and depending on the echos, they can determine the size.

Always prefered hammer Dwarves, myself.

Well obviously they don't go mining alone if its so dangerous they have to carry weapons incase fighting breaks out. Have one guy on guard carrying a Pike lengthways you dip.
But thats beside the point considering I mean in general combat not just tunnel fighting.

mine use war hammers, pickaxes, mattocks and urgoshes primarily.

purely out of hatred of elves

I thought why fight when I can avoid it, and besides I was importing fruits and vegetables (and a tiger, once) from elves because I felt sorry for my dwarfs for only eating PLUMP HELMET STEW or MASTERWORK PLUMP HELMET ROAST made from PLUMP HELMETS, PLUMP HELMETS and PLUMP HELMET WINE

Falchion.

>a Halberd is just an Axe with more versatility.

This is the most retarded shit I've read today, and I even visited /v/.
A halberd is 2m long at least, and it's primarily a thrusting polearm, used with 2 hands in tight formation on open battlefield.
Axes are more diverse, but they're mostly short, onehanded weapons designed for chopping and frequently paired with a shield. Some exceptional axes are twohanded, but they rarely surpass the 1,2m length.

How are the even similar? Are you confusing halberds with poleaxes? A poleaxe would be a terrible weapon in enclosed spaces, it's mostly a brawling, swingy weapon designed for fighting heavily armored opponents.

>Calls someone stupid then posts this:
>but they're mostly short, onehanded weapons designed for chopping

Hatchets aren't exactly axes. Hatchets are what you're describing there, not axes, since you like to be accurate on what's posted here, mr. saltfuckwad.

This, elves deliver a free variety pack of weird plants and animals yearly, and once I have enough beds I don't need to chop down any more trees anyway.

>Wood floors, wood furniture, axe handles

There's plenty of room for woodworking in Dwarven cities, as a luxury if nothing else.

A single Halberd has more combat versality then a single axe. You can stab with the point, hack with the blade or pierce through armor with the hooked spike
I dont see how you can not understand this. Axes may have a greater diversity of designs, but thats not what im talking about.
A single axe has one option, to swing it and hack.
I don't understand how you can be that thick. Do you need help?

Fool, a hatchet is a tool, and I specifically said weapon.
Most axes across history were onehanded, you can look at any culture you want. What historical axes beside the dane axe don't perfectly comply to what I described there?

Jesus, look at his eyes. This dwarf's high as a kite. He's currently contemplating raiding his rommate's fridge because he just finished all his Doritos after pissing on the couch.

>Dorf echolocation

Sheeeeit

How exactly do you chop down a gay ass elf tree when you don't have an axe

It doesn't have more versatility because it's more cumbersome to use, can't be used in conjunction with a shield, and you don't have as many angles of attack due to its length. You also can't use it up close.
It's a different weapon, with different pros and cons, and different ways of usage.

A hatchet is a combat tool you fucking homo.

Sure, if you intend to fight against trunks.

Mushrooms, duh. It's like you haven't played Dwarf Fortress.

Im imagining a dusky skinned dwarf shouting "sheeeeiiit" into a cave now

Can Pierce, Hack and Stab = More versality.
A dwarf that has more body strength wouldn't really find it to cumbersome.

You have plenty of attack angles because of the reach of the weapon, you can keep the enemy at bay and switch the length of the head to your need. You could maybe strap a special made shield to your foreward facing arm for some extra protection.
Their smaller stature is mitigated by the weapons reach.
A Halberd would be comparatively small considering the ludicrous size of the weapons we commonly see Fantasy Dwarves wielding.

Some Asian warriors used a kind of short, one-handed halberd around 200 AD. Itself an improvement on the "dagger-axe" of earlier times, it was an impact weapon that afforded both piercing and chopping, yet was more nimble. It would work well in a dark tunnel where you couldn't parry it fast enough.

In real life, manufactured weapons were designed to address specific combat situations, not as commonly done in RPGs. People are importing the specific combat situation of fighting in a twisting tunnel soley for a strawman with which to knock down the guy's idea, purely out of jealousy. It would work in a lot of other scenarios, which is why you constantly see pikes in the Wikipedia records of historical battles. Don't read them or you'll double your intelligence in an afternoon.

You can't really do upward chops with a halberd, or at least not in any practical manner. Also, I thought we were entertaining the idea of weapon for enclosed spaces. I have no doubt that in open battlefield or even big underground areas, dwarves would use halberds or pikes or whatever. I didn't mean small or cumbersome related to weight and size, but mostly due to long weapons being hard to maneuver with and having a tendency to get in the way in close quarters. There's a reason soldiers in WWI resorted to shovels and picks instead of bayonets.

fpbp

Notice that practically all of those are also tools. As are axes.
Hammer. Axe. Pick. Mallet. They all double as tools.

Which I think is the point with them.

Haha 420 weed XD

That video only talked about fights above ground

Huh?

Yes chopping in an upwards angle could be more difficult, but you have so many other options in any given moment.
The video I linked to originally was talking about Dwarves in general and I was talking about how generally the Halberd is just better then an axe.
I posted above somewhere about how Dwarves would really use smaller makeshift weapons, like the ones we see in WW1 trenches.

In close quarters you'd need multiple halberds to be effective, point them all down one tunnel and stab anything that moves, if it blocks or parries one then it has three others to deal with. Of course being a stationary porcupine in a WW1 trench wouldn't be good simply because of guns.
But you'd essentially be making a phalanx to plug the hole the enemy are coming from.

Aside from Tolkein how many sources in early fantasy didn't have some friction between dwarves and elves? The axe as an iconic dwarf weapon may have something to do with the fact that a multitude of early fantasy depicted dwarves and elves as having been at war at some point in their histories. How do you remove forest where elves live? You burn it, chop it down, or both.

>point them all down one tunnel and stab anything that moves, if it blocks or parries one then it has three others to deal with
you know this was the principle for using spears/pike formation in actual historic battles. minus the tunnel part but the concept is the same.
one way to counter this was so send in fuckers, often withouth shields or just some tiny ass fist shield that would could get through the deadly part of the pike wall and start whacking the pikes.

and besides, having long ass weapons would ONLY be somewhat useful in situations where you can clog a tunnel with a shitload of men, otherwise they would be pretty hard to handle, as the other user pointed out.

Aw gee, It's almost like war axes aren't for chopping down trees, you dumbass.

And then the tunnel bends and your entire formation falls apart trying to move past it.

Actually Pikes would be arranged in a series of layers. If you blocked one then you'd be vulnerable to all the others. Ofcourse if you somehow got past all the layers of pikes without being stabbed then you could do some damage and maybe even break the formation.
If what your saying was true, then battles like Marathon and Thermopylae would have been washes and pike formations would be almost useless since they can be beaten by guys with no armor.
The unarmoured guys could have fun hitting the pikes away until the next pikes got them. Actually good luck getting your men to attack a line of brandished spears with little to no armor on. I sure as hell wouldn't.

No.
What actually happened was in the middle ages, you'd get the strongest man you could and put him in full plate and have him a Greatsword. He would then march into the Pike formation swinging his Greatsword in a massive figure of 8. This would catch all the pikes and move them with the blade, until he could stomp his way into the formation and just break it. Then he'd drop his greatsword for something more practical.

Then this tactic was countered by dotting your pike formation with some guys with Crossbows. When the enemy line breaker walked up then they would shoot them point blank range.

A friend of mine is from Old german nobility and relative of his owns a castle, they have a display cabinet with this massive suit of armor in it with small wounds where the wearer had been killed by Crossbow bolts.

Well since Dwarves are smaller then men and Halberds shafts are thin, you would only need like three or four, maybe six men working together, stabbing the enemy, supporting the pikes in front of them and adjusting their reach to deal with incoming threats.
The main weakness of a Pike formation is that it can be flanked and once that happens it just breaks down since your men are stick together facing one direction. In a tunnel you don't have that issue.

Why does no one ever remember that Tolkien had dwarves fighting with mattocks when literally every other detail about them are ripped from his work?

Yeah tunnel bends would be an issue. These would be defensive formations, so you wouldn't be moving to much, just retreat to a defenable straight and try to hold there until reinforcements arrive or hold the enemy there until your mates make it out and then ditch and run.

Dude Trunks would just blow you up, no weapon on Earth right now can beat a trained half Saiyan except maybe a bioweapon or chemical one.

Every thread you have some guy like this touting his super duper unique homebrew ideas or two dozen made up fantasy races based on feudal china.

War axes aren't for chopping down trees.
I like Shad but I disagree with his outcome. Dwarves could easily pull Roman tactics, where the reach advantage of pikes and spears were negated by solid formations and shields. Dwarves are sturdy and can handle wearing heavy armor for a long time. They'd be a massive blob of moving metal that can't be harmed, gets close and quickly shanks the enemy behind their shields.

>tool
>not a weapon

Are pretending to be retarded?

This is correct

You know, romans beat macedonian phalanx in a battle only because they fought on an uneven terrain.
There's also little reason to have a shield if you're wearing full-plate armour.

I always sort of thought the best weapon for a dwarf fighting in the tunnels would be something like a gladius.

A short, strong blade you don't need a ton of room to use effectively, so you can still shank goblins when you're a mile underground in cramped quarters with a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs all under four feet tall, some of whom are your battle-brothers.

It's far better they use something that's readily available & usable in a tunnel

>except maybe a bioweapon

Dwarves are LITERALLY troglodytes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troglodyte

Labris ain't either of those things.

You know, actually, I generally envision dwarves as "not that much subterrenean".
They're not drows: most of the kingdoms actually extend up to the surface, or at least have a good deal of lands for woods, some cattle, vegetables and shit (as most of the caves naturally exit the earth in moutains or at least hills). A dwarf is perfectly fine under the sun (or the moon, whatever): he is a creature of both worlds, or at least he knows how to use both of them, maybe not that much personally (a miner is a miner) but I can see even the most under-dwellers enjoying a tour outside relatively often, and viceversa.
A generic dwarf kingdom, with most outside territory on higher terrain, probably features a good percentage of dwarves working on the surface in the hotter seasons. When it's winter, those village and even towns are "closed for business" and everyone is relocated (cattle as well possibly) under the earth.

Greater kingdoms wouldn't have problems with plains and even -gasp!- coasts and sea. I still think the average dwarf prefers trekking on the moutains than boating for fun, but I can even envision that.
Perhaps the dwarf mentality prefers... hrm, relatively enclosed environments (a valley more than a plateau) but it's kinda a second tought.

Bretty gud.

Of course halberds are for the outside of the smaller caves, anyway. As says for caves a short sword makes more sense.

They don't generally, humans just mainly meet the lumberjacks, and assume all dwarves are like that.

hammers make the most sense, followed by picks

orcs are the axe guys

Or you do what the English did. Equip everyone who could have a pike with a billhook. When the pikes come up, all the billmen break the pikes, then move in with their weapons.