Is Dwarf something to keep, and good alternative names for Dwarves

[Witty Username]

So,
A thing that has been rattling in my brain and won't go away.

RPGs as a whole, and D&D specifically, have been moving to be more inclusive and are taking off the sharp edges of there language usage and mechanics. Races are now Species, Ability scores are not tied to them, some of the game in the OSR crowd have been moving away from gendered terminology.

Should this mean changes to Dwarves in a stronger sense? I don't have more than a couple anecdotes on the subject but I have heard this one causing discomfort for people.

Also, if we would want to go this route, what are some good alternative names for Dwarves:
Duardin is probably out, because Games Workshop calls dibs. Khazad for similar reasons
I have been playing with Duergar in my head as a primary name instead of the Deep version


Any one have any good names for the light side of this topic?
Comments on the larger concern, either to calm my brain rattle or give their two cents?

[Vahnavoi]

There was a longer topic on this not too long ago. The joke is that dwarves have become a highly specific, stereotyped thing in genre fantasy. This leads to sort of a Catch-22: if you play to the type, calling them something else is pointless, as everyone will recognize them as and call them a dwarf. Don't play to the type, and no-one will recognize them.

Fundamentally, though, trying to avoid the word makes no sense in context. This is like some people wanting to drop the word "barbarian". It's not an insult and not in any way exclusive or harmful. You might as well be trying to avoid using "pig", "dog", "chicken" or "ass" as species names because someone somewhere has used them as insults.

[Pauly]

Any word can be used a pejorative. If you take for example 'moron' it originally had a specific medical meaning (an adult with the mental reasoning of an 8-12 year old child). Historically new euphemisms keep on getting invented to describe things when enough people find the old word offensive. The trouble is that if enough people use the new word as a pejorative eventually another new euphemism gets invented and then that new word gets used pejoratively leading to more euphemisms.

Specifically referring to dwarf.
- the irl word has irl meanings that I don't think I can safely discuss here without breaching forum rules.
- it has a clear meaning in fantasy literature which is related to but separate from its irl uses.

Given the clarity of its fantasy literature meaning I don't think there is much point in trying to change the name. In fact it is probably much more tightly defined than other commonly used fantasy names such as 'dragon', 'giant', 'ogre', or elf all of which are much more varied in size, colour and features.

[AMFV]

Any one have any good names for the light side of this topic?

Khazad would probably be the normal one, but it won't work because they'll just get called Dwarves



Comments on the larger concern, either to calm my brain rattle or give their two cents?

Generally Little People are not mentally challenged and are able to advocate for themselves. If I have one of them in my games I would ask them if they find the name troubling... I would certainly not act to shelter them if they hadn't asked me to. The same way I wouldn't want people to remove issues with things that had bothered me in a game without asking me. If somebody was like "let's not have anything that could be related to PTSD in a game because that might bother AMFV" that would be really irritating to me, because I didn't ask for that. It's one of those things that you can ask folks about.

Basically if somebody asks me for something to be treated a certain way, that's different than me presuming that they aren't able to handle it and then acting to shield them from something. That's actually kind of not cool.

[Kardwill]

Any one have any good names for the light side of this topic?


I like the Elder Scroll's "Dwemer", even if they look more like dark elves in those games. That sounds both "dwarvish", and like Dwarf, so it's easy to use.

As to "should you call them dwarves?" It doesn't concern me much because I'm used to it, but if it makes you unconfortable, that's a perfectly good reason to find an alternative.

[KorvinStarmast]

Fundamentally, though, trying to avoid the word makes no sense in context. This is like some people wanting to drop the word "barbarian". It's not an insult and not in any way exclusive or harmful. You might as well be trying to avoid using "pig", "dog", "chicken" or "ass" as species names because someone somewhere has used them as insults. This is the way.

[MonochromeTiger]

Far as I'm aware the mythological use and implications of the name as well as the words it was derived from predates its use as a term directed at people. It really doesn't make much sense to treat a word as poisonous because people later twisted or misused it, that doesn't solve the issue it just directs it at the word and lets the people misusing it continue to do so; if anything it tells them "yeah we give up, you get to define it now."

It's an issue of language and it has come up several times in the past when something gets used in a derogatory manner. You change the commonly used word and the insult doesn't go away, it just becomes more bitter because there's no longer a competing context for that word. Even worse the things that caused it to get misused as an insult don't go away and if the new word you use catches on the people using the insult may just start using that word for it as well. Terms referring to mental health run into that issue pretty often because the word itself really doesn't matter to the people using it as an insult, the things implied by the word do and so they just move on to something newer that occupies the same space if recognition of the original falls out of favor, or in some cases the original just becomes normalized for the insult and the context gets largely forgotten.


I like the Elder Scroll's "Dwemer", even if they look more like dark elves in those games. That sounds both "dwarvish", and like Dwarf, so it's easy to use.

As to "should you call them dwarves?" It doesn't concern me much because I'm used to it, but if it makes you unconfortable, that's a perfectly good reason to find an alternative.

Elder scrolls is an interesting case for naming them because only the first half of "Dwemer" actually marks them as Dwarves, the setting uses "Mer" as a catch all for Elves and it's worked into identifiers for pretty much all of them even when they have an "Imperial" name that actually says what fantasy race/species/whatever they're actually supposed to represent. So "Dwemer" was just "Elves who live inside the mountains" but also Dwarves, "Orsimer" are just Elves who worshipped a corrupted deity and were changed when he was but they're also Orcs.

So in essence the Elder Scrolls answer to why their Dwarves and Orcs are different and why they're called something different is "they're just types of Elves" and that's literally worked into their names.

[Xervous]

In all the multi page sagas that end up getting locked, across all the screeching on reddit, I don’t recall any striking examples of people being offended by dwarves. The only good reasons I see for changing the name tie to IP and setting. I say dwarf and it could be any game, I say squat and it’s definitely 40k. If you need your dwarves to be extra distinct and/or you’re highly litigious, then you have a reason to spin up another name.

I just don’t see the value add, there’s only the looming specter of confused players and loss of the immediate mythological and cultural tie ins that games have relied on.

Edit: there’s also the risk of the name change being received as an out of touch ESG-washing attempt.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

I think renaming 'dwarf' does very little for inclusion and causes significant problems to achieve that limited-to-no gain.

Dwarf is a word with a long history used in a ton of fields. It's not just fantasy and folklore, where it stretches back into Old English, Old Norse and High German; it's used in astronomy, biology and computer science as well. Dwarves, under that name, show up in Tolkien and all Tolkien derivatives, of course, but they're also in Pratchett, Marvel Comics, Warhammer and Warcraft and bunches of others. Dwarf Fortress just sold 800,000 copies, and Deep Rock Galactic -- a game about space dwarf miners -- is one of the most widely beloved and played indie games of the last decade.

Dwarf evokes a certain image, including vocal, visual and social characteristics. Renaming that image isn't going to happen overnight. People are just gonna say 'dwarf', not 'khazad' or whatever the thing is, and you can see that in Warhammer. I'm not, like, deep in that scene (or even involved with it at all), but I've literally never heard Duardin prior to this thread. My exposure to Warhammer is through the Total War games, where everything is a dwarf. The cities are dwarfholds, there's a guy called Grombrindal the White Dwarf, there's an antagonist faction with a whole DLC built around it called 'chaos dwarfs'. If GW is doing a dwarf rebrand, they missed including it in one of their most mainstream products.

Renaming something as baked-in to classic fantasy as dwarves without some other reason isn't going to work. If WotC wants to either do a big setting refresh (in this new edition, the resurrected King Karl unites the dwarf clans of Faerun and renames them! Huzzah! Now all dwarves are Knollens!) or create a new setting where dwarves have a different name that's got some support for it, a la The Elder Scrolls, then OK! But just drawing a line and saying 'this word, which has been used in various forms since the 5th century, is bad now' isn't actually going to stop people from using it, because people, not just players, know what it means. Communication is about conveying information, and it's difficult to pack more information about what the characteristics of a character are into a single word than by saying they're a dwarf.

[Amnestic]

As a long-standing crusader against the name "Halfling" I'm on board with retiring Dwarf for a similar reason. Wikipedia informs me that "According to Tolkien, the "real 'historical' plural" of "dwarf" is "dwarrows" or "dwerrows."

Dwarrow or Dwerrow (I prefer dwerrow) feels like a fine alternative to me.


In Dungeon Meshi, dwarves, halflings, and 'humans' all fall under the blanket 'human' race, are are called dwarves, half-foots, and tallmen (sometimes 'long-legs').

It makes a little more sense here, since their height is specifically the differentiating physical feature to the other humans.

[Vahnavoi]

Another problem is that many alternative names that would make mythological sense have suffered from D&D-ism and now refer to other weirdly specific creatures. Go ahead, try to call them gnomes, elves, trolls, kobolds or goblins and watch heads explode.

Another example of the same phenomenom:

Non-D&D player: "Gandalf is a Wizard."

D&D player: "Ackshually, Gandalf doesn't memorize spells or learn them from books and is an ancient spirit, so he's really more like a Solar. Oh and he also rides a horse and fights with a sword and heals people, so really he's more like a Paladin."

Non-D&D player: "WTF are you talking about?"

Or, to paraphrase a Marvel movie:

Dude one (probably Falcon), talking about Dr. Strange: "Wait, Earth has wizards now?"

Dude two (probably Bucky), being a pedantic nerd: "Sorcerers."

Dude one, annoyed: "The only difference is that a wizard has a hat."

[Eldan]

Dvergar is the same word as dwarf, just a few centuries of language evolution.

Honestly, if we're talking D&D, they have watered down races so much (and are doing so even more in Next) that we may as well just call them Mountainfolk and the elves Forestfolk.


Another problem is that many alternative names that would make mythological sense have suffered from D&D-ism and now refer to other weirdly specific creatures. Go ahead, try to call them gnomes, elves, trolls, kobolds or goblins and watch heads explode.


I have long considered to use gnome stats for dwarves in my German-language games. After all, the significant features of dwarves, other than being tiny old men, is their ability with illusion magic, invisibility and magical crafting. Just like gnomes.


Any word can be used a pejorative. If you take for example 'moron' it originally had a specific medical meaning (an adult with the mental reasoning of an 8-12 year old child). Historically new euphemisms keep on getting invented to describe things when enough people find the old word offensive. The trouble is that if enough people use the new word as a pejorative eventually another new euphemism gets invented and then that new word gets used pejoratively leading to more euphemisms.

Also a good point. The most popular insult among kids I deal with is now "victim". Used about in the same way that "gay" used to be, i.e. "Man up and don't be such a victim".

[Vahnavoi]

Honestly, if we're talking D&D, they have watered down races so much (and are doing so even more in Next) that we may as well just call them Mountainfolk and the elves Forestfolk.

That's not watering down. That's just normal way to name things, in multiple different languages across space and time. A lot of common mythological names follow this pattern, it just isn't always obvious to contemporary English speaker.

[Morgaln]

Far as I'm aware the mythological use and implications of the name as well as the words it was derived from predates its use as a term directed at people. It really doesn't make much sense to treat a word as poisonous because people later twisted or misused it, that doesn't solve the issue it just directs it at the word and lets the people misusing it continue to do so; if anything it tells them "yeah we give up, you get to define it now."

It's an issue of language and it has come up several times in the past when something gets used in a derogatory manner. You change the commonly used word and the insult doesn't go away, it just becomes more bitter because there's no longer a competing context for that word. Even worse the things that caused it to get misused as an insult don't go away and if the new word you use catches on the people using the insult may just start using that word for it as well. Terms referring to mental health run into that issue pretty often because the word itself really doesn't matter to the people using it as an insult, the things implied by the word do and so they just move on to something newer that occupies the same space if recognition of the original falls out of favor, or in some cases the original just becomes normalized for the insult and the context gets largely forgotten.



Elder scrolls is an interesting case for naming them because only the first half of "Dwemer" actually marks them as Dwarves, the setting uses "Mer" as a catch all for Elves and it's worked into identifiers for pretty much all of them even when they have an "Imperial" name that actually says what fantasy race/species/whatever they're actually supposed to represent. So "Dwemer" was just "Elves who live inside the mountains" but also Dwarves, "Orsimer" are just Elves who worshipped a corrupted deity and were changed when he was but they're also Orcs.

So in essence the Elder Scrolls answer to why their Dwarves and Orcs are different and why they're called something different is "they're just types of Elves" and that's literally worked into their names.

This somewhat aligns with nordic mythology, where dwarves are the inhabitants of svartalfheim ("home of the black elves").

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

That's not watering down. That's just normal way to name things, in multiple different languages across space and time. A lot of common mythological names follow this pattern, it just isn't always obvious to contemporary English speaker.

I think part of Eldan's point -- and I hope he corrects me if I'm wrong -- is that names like 'hill dwarf' or 'moon elf' or 'Karsite' convey more information about the being in question than just their habitat. Through the 5E and 5.5E development cycle, a lot of that information has either been stripped away or flattened out, and much of what remains is either habitat or height and attitude towards facial hair. So in a generic sense they might as well just group them by the traits that are imposed by where they live.

5E is kind of bad about this in particular because it frequently reaches back to older lore to fill in its gaps, while also picking and choosing which bits it wants to keep.

[KorvinStarmast]

Dvergar is the same word as dwarf, Guessing that is related to the German word zwerg or Zwerge.
(I only learned the nominative case (https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/zwerg)...)

[Anonymouswizard]

Honestly I think White Wolf had the right idea back in the 90s: give the race's official name and then a section that lists other terms used. Onyx Path has even gone one better in their CofD books: noting not only alternative names, but also noting specific ones as offensive. It's not the only place I've seen it (UA does it for Adept schools), but it seems like a decent solution. E.g.

Elfs
Also known as: Eldar, Forest folk, Fairies (offensive), bloody child stealing gits (very offensive)

Using elves as I'm a bit stuck on dwarves.

[KorvinStarmast]

Honestly I think White Wolf had the right idea back in the 90s: give the race's official name and then a section that lists other terms used. Onyx Path has even gone one better in their CofD books: noting not only alternative names, but also noting specific ones as offensive. It's not the only place I've seen it (UA does it for Adept schools), but it seems like a decent solution. E.g.

Elfs
Also known as: Eldar, Forest folk, Fairies (offensive), bloody child stealing gits (very offensive)

Using elves as I'm a bit stuck on dwarves.
Why is fairies or faeries offensive? Spenser's The Faerie Queene was a standard of fantastic lit for a long time.

[Anonymouswizard]

Why is fairies or faeries offensive? Spenser's The Faerie Queene was a standard of fantastic lit for a long time.

I don't know, I just remember that according to some folklore it is. Although tbf that folklore is not really the stuff Tolkien was using when he created modern elves (although his still have a bit of a fair folk vibe).

I just needed an offensive term and it was right there.

[AMFV]

I think renaming 'dwarf' does very little for inclusion and causes significant problems to achieve that limited-to-no gain.

Dwarf is a word with a long history used in a ton of fields. It's not just fantasy and folklore, where it stretches back into Old English, Old Norse and High German; it's used in astronomy, biology and computer science as well. Dwarves, under that name, show up in Tolkien and all Tolkien derivatives, of course, but they're also in Pratchett, Marvel Comics, Warhammer and Warcraft and bunches of others. Dwarf Fortress just sold 800,000 copies, and Deep Rock Galactic -- a game about space dwarf miners -- is one of the most widely beloved and played indie games of the last decade.

Dwarf evokes a certain image, including vocal, visual and social characteristics. Renaming that image isn't going to happen overnight. People are just gonna say 'dwarf', not 'khazad' or whatever the thing is, and you can see that in Warhammer. I'm not, like, deep in that scene (or even involved with it at all), but I've literally never heard Duardin prior to this thread. My exposure to Warhammer is through the Total War games, where everything is a dwarf. The cities are dwarfholds, there's a guy called Grombrindal the White Dwarf, there's an antagonist faction with a whole DLC built around it called 'chaos dwarfs'. If GW is doing a dwarf rebrand, they missed including it in one of their most mainstream products.

Renaming something as baked-in to classic fantasy as dwarves without some other reason isn't going to work. If WotC wants to either do a big setting refresh (in this new edition, the resurrected King Karl unites the dwarf clans of Faerun and renames them! Huzzah! Now all dwarves are Knollens!) or create a new setting where dwarves have a different name that's got some support for it, a la The Elder Scrolls, then OK! But just drawing a line and saying 'this word, which has been used in various forms since the 5th century, is bad now' isn't actually going to stop people from using it, because people, not just players, know what it means. Communication is about conveying information, and it's difficult to pack more information about what the characteristics of a character are into a single word than by saying they're a dwarf.

The problem is the same as with Astra Militarum sure you can call them "Knollens" in every book but everybody is still going to call them Dwarves.

[KorvinStarmast]

The problem is the same as with Astra Militarum sure you can call them "Knollens" in every book but everybody is still going to call them Dwarves. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I am trying to discern the offense in that.
Well this was fun
Variants and parallels to other tales
This tale type is widespread in Europe, in America, in Africa[29] and "in some Turkic traditions,"[30] the Middle East, in China, in India and in the Americas.[31] Jörg Bäcker draws a parallel to Turkic tales, as well as other tales with a separate origin but overlapping themes, such as those in Central Asia and Eastern Siberia, among the Mongolians and Tungusian peoples.[32] Due to Portuguese colonization, Sigrid Schmidt posits the presence of the tale in modern times in former Portuguese colonies, and contrasts it with other distinct African tales.[33]

Europe
A primary analysis by Celtic folklorist Alfred Nutt, in the 19th century, established the tale type, in Europe, was distributed "from the Balkan peninsula to Iceland, and from Russia to Catalonia", with the highest number of variants being found in Germany and Italy.[34]

This geographical distribution seemed to be confirmed by scholarly studies of the 20th century. A 1957 article by Italian philologist Gianfranco D'Aronco (it) studied the most diffused Tales of Magic in Italian territory, among which Biancaneve.[35] A scholarly inquiry by Italian Istituto centrale per i beni sonori ed audiovisivi ("Central Institute of Sound and Audiovisual Heritage"), produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, found thirty-seven variants of the tale across Italian sources.[36] A similar assessment was made by scholar Sigrid Schmidt, who claimed that the tale type was "particularly popular" in Southern Europe, "specially" in Italy, Greece and Iberian Peninsula.[33] In addition, Swedish scholar Waldemar Liungman [sv] suggested Italy as center of diffusion of the story, since he considered Italy as the source of tale ("Ursprung"), and it holds the highest number of variants not derived from the Grimm's tale.[37][38]

Another study, by researcher Theo Meder, points to a wide distribution in Western Europe, specially in Ireland, Iceland and Scandinavia.[31]

Germany
The Brothers Grimm's "Snow White" was predated by several other German versions of the tale, with the earliest being Johann Karl August Musäus's "Richilde" (1782), a satirical novella told from the wicked stepmother's point of view. Albert Ludwig Grimm (no relation to the Brothers Grimm) published a play version, Schneewittchen, in 1809.[39] The Grimms collected at least eight other distinct variants of the tale, which they considered one of the most famous German folktales.[40]
Interestingly, there's a Russian variation from Pushkin, about the Seven Knights and the Dead Princess ...

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

The problem is the same as with Astra Militarum sure you can call them "Knollens" in every book but everybody is still going to call them Dwarves.

And if you've drawn a line and said that you're no longer using 'dwarf' for reasons of sensitivity, everyone on the other side of the line not using the updated term is bad, even if they're using it in their pre-Knollen campaign or because their buddies know what a dwarf is but don't read novels or whatever. It's a moral judgement. And while Wizards won't issue a statement saying that, some designer will give an interview or do a tweet saying that 'dwarf' is and always was problematic and they changed it because people who say 'dwarf' are doing harm. And it'll unfold like every other terminology battle in the social media era. I cannot imagine wanting to poke that hornets' nest without absolutely needing to.

[Prime32]

Far as I'm aware the mythological use and implications of the name as well as the words it was derived from predates its use as a term directed at people. It really doesn't make much sense to treat a word as poisonous because people later twisted or misused it, that doesn't solve the issue it just directs it at the word and lets the people misusing it continue to do so; if anything it tells them "yeah we give up, you get to define it now."

It's an issue of language and it has come up several times in the past when something gets used in a derogatory manner. You change the commonly used word and the insult doesn't go away, it just becomes more bitter because there's no longer a competing context for that word. Even worse the things that caused it to get misused as an insult don't go away and if the new word you use catches on the people using the insult may just start using that word for it as well. Terms referring to mental health run into that issue pretty often because the word itself really doesn't matter to the people using it as an insult, the things implied by the word do and so they just move on to something newer that occupies the same space if recognition of the original falls out of favor, or in some cases the original just becomes normalized for the insult and the context gets largely forgotten.
Related case here:

Years ago there was a campaign to get the Irish word for "dwarf" changed from the native word abhac to the English-style duine beag (a direct calque of "little person"). Not because the campaigner had ever been called abhac as a slur, nor had she ever seen it used that way by anyone else. Rather, it was because she'd looked up "dwarf" in an English-to-Irish dictionary one day and saw abhac, then looked up "midget" in the same dictionary and also saw abhac.

Well the campaign was successful (even if the idea that English phrasings are morally superior to Irish ones is... controversial, duine beag is more easily-understood than abhac and rolls well off the tongue). And the result is that now dictionaries list both abhac and duine beag as translations of dwarf... and they also list both abhac and duine beag as translations of midget. Because that's how translation works.

As an aside, when I heard the story I initially thought someone had called her a duinín ("personling"), and thought yeah that does sound like a rude thing to call someone... until I realised she was talking about Pádraig Ua Duinnín, the writer of the dictionary. :smalltongue:

[Spriteless]

Many fantasy world's dwarves have a name for themselves that isn't dwarf. Fateforge has Dvaerg, and if you can't pronounce it correctly you had better not try in front of them.

Stardew Valley has dwarves who call themselves Smolnew, or maybe only the wizard calls them that. They're about as close to typical fantasy dwarves as the dwarves are in Elfquest though.

I think it's a nice way to have a diagetic reason to stop using the name, if someone is uncomfortable.

[Berenger]

I don't have more than a couple anecdotes on the subject but I have heard this one causing discomfort for people.

Basically everything causes discomfort "for people".

The terms dwarf, elf, fairy, ogre, orc and many more either have or had widespread use as slurs for various groups.

The experience of living in slavery, in prison, in a theocratic autocracy, in a slum, under subjugation by foreign soldiery, martial law or any other circumstances restricting basic human rights can be highly traumatic. The same is true for the experience of torture, hunger, sickness, poverty, drug abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, exposure to the elements, wild animal attacks, being the victim of even "mild" crime such as burglary or being in combat.

The mere concepts of magic and fictuous gods being real within a setting are offensive in the extreme to many.

So is the concept of chopping creatures up with blades or burning them alive with fireballs as a go-to solution for problems of all kind.

All these things and many more cause discomfort "for people". The discomfort of these people is real and valid. You can not entirely avoid content that is potentially discomforting to at least some people, not in a meaningful work of art and not in RPG that needs some kind of conflict or drama to function.

What you can and probably should try to do is to avoid terms and topics that are likely to cause a) great discomfort for a few people, b) some degree of discomfort to many people, and most importantly c) any amount of discomfort to your core target audience - unless you are publishing, that's only the people present at your gaming table. If those are not long-time friends with well-known preferences, I recommend a Session 0 to ask about sensitive topics instead of trying to avoid every potentially discomforting element in advance.

[Errorname]

Another problem is that many alternative names that would make mythological sense have suffered from D&D-ism and now refer to other weirdly specific creatures. Go ahead, try to call them gnomes, elves, trolls, kobolds or goblins and watch heads explode

Yeah, D&D enforcing a really strict taxonomy to extremely fluid folkloric concepts with a lot of overlap can be a little frustrating. It's certainly very tempting from a worldbuilding perspective to go in and start lumping taxa together. I certainly think if you were working from scratch you'd want to prioritize creating a handful of taxa that are distinct and versatile over hundreds that are very similar to each other with only minor distinctions, but there's enough history and fan attachment to D&D's current set-up that it'd be pretty difficult to start merging things.

[MonochromeTiger]

Yeah, D&D enforcing a really strict taxonomy to extremely fluid folkloric concepts with a lot of overlap can be a little frustrating. It's certainly very tempting from a worldbuilding perspective to go in and start lumping taxa together. I certainly think if you were working from scratch you'd want to prioritize creating a handful of taxa that are distinct and versatile over hundreds that are very similar to each other with only minor distinctions, but there's enough history and fan attachment to D&D's current set-up that it'd be pretty difficult to start merging things.

Dragons are a pretty good example of this I think. Can't go more than a week without seeing someone post that overused "a Drake has X limbs and Y wing structure, a Dragon has Y limbs and X wing structure, know the difference" somewhere on the internet when the difference they're trying to teach is very much a D&Dism that caught on like lizard-Kobolds and people just didn't bother to acknowledge how weird and varied something could be and still be "a Dragon" before the specific labels got popularized.

[KorvinStarmast]

The mere concepts of magic and fictuous gods being real within a setting are offensive in the extreme to many.
To include my wife, which informs why she still does not, after all these years, care to play D&D.

[Unoriginal]

Guessing that is related to the German word zwerg or Zwerge.


I have to say that if The Giant had published an OotS book called Utterly Zwerged, it would likely have been moved to the erotic literature section of any bookstore it reached, on the name alone.

[Maryring]

I actually remember a letter written to a local news station about this very subject, about someone who wanted to remove dwarf from the modern vocabulary and go entirely over to the term "little persons", because of all the negative stereotypes surrounding the word. So I ended up having this very discussion, and funnily enough, one of the responses I heard that stuck with me was that yes, "Dwarf" does have certain stereotypes associated with it. But to them, being a "Dwarf" meant being industrious and hardworking and generally badass, so they actually did NOT want the wording to change, because they had such a strong, positive association with it.

So to answer your question OP, I think that the best thing you can do is to be flexible at your own table. There are people who find the term negatively charged. There are also people who find it positively charged. So the best way to be inclusive is to be mindful of the needs at your table. That should do plenty to make your gaming sphere approachable and safe.

[Darth Credence]

I know a couple of people who identify as a dwarf. Not a little person, although they don't object to that one. The word starting with an M is the one that is truly offensive to them. FWIW, here is Warwick Davis (Willow, Wicket, et al) on the subject: https://twitter.com/WarwickADavis/status/791023283550519296

[Psyren]

So,
A thing that has been rattling in my brain and won't go away.

RPGs as a whole, and D&D specifically, have been moving to be more inclusive and are taking off the sharp edges of there language usage and mechanics. Races are now Species, Ability scores are not tied to them, some of the game in the OSR crowd have been moving away from gendered terminology.

Should this mean changes to Dwarves in a stronger sense? I don't have more than a couple anecdotes on the subject but I have heard this one causing discomfort for people.

The answer is no, it shouldn't:

1) "Dwarf" is already one of the commonly accepted/politically correct terms (https://www.lpaonline.org/faq-) for IRL people of short stature, so the word itself does not carry any of the ableist or problematic connotations you seem to worry it might. I don't know whether it was used pejoratively in the past before being reclaimed (similar to how the word "queer" was), but it doesn't carry any issues or baggage currently.

2) Dwarves in a purely fantasy context are also fine, because dwarves have historically been portrayed as broadly capable, heroic and forthright. Their biggest historical problem is a perception of rigidity or uniformity (elaborated on at considerable length in the previous Dwarf thread), rather than having any problematic labels or portrayals.

[Anonymouswizard]

]2) Dwarves in a purely fantasy context are also fine, because dwarves have historically been portrayed as broadly capable, heroic and forthright. Their biggest historical problem is a perception of rigidity or uniformity (elaborated on at considerable length in the previous Dwarf thread), rather than having any problematic labels or portrayals.

Arguably the biggest issue with fantasy dwarves is that they contribute to unintentional erasure of dwarfs in fantasy. Which probably isn't that big an issue in practice, I'm sure most GMs would okay characters of any fantasy race with dwarfism or gigantism*, but is something to think about.

Heck, Shadowrun could probably get a bit of lore out of the relationship between (metahuman) dwarves and dwarfs.

* and I know both terms refer to a number of conditions.

[KorvinStarmast]

The answer is no, it shouldn't:

1) "Dwarf" is already one of the commonly accepted/politically correct terms (https://www.lpaonline.org/faq-) for IRL people of short stature, so the word itself does not carry any of the ableist or problematic connotations you seem to worry it might. I don't know whether it was used pejoratively in the past before being reclaimed (similar to how the word "queer" was), but it doesn't carry any issues or baggage currently.

2) Dwarves in a purely fantasy context are also fine, because dwarves have historically been portrayed as broadly capable, heroic and forthright. Their biggest historical problem is a perception of rigidity or uniformity (elaborated on at considerable length in the previous Dwarf thread), rather than having any problematic labels or portrayals. Well said, +1. :smallcool:

[Witty Username]

1) "Dwarf" is already one of the commonly accepted/politically correct terms (https://www.lpaonline.org/faq-) for IRL people of short stature, so the word itself does not carry any of the ableist or problematic connotations you seem to worry it might. I don't know whether it was used pejoratively in the past before being reclaimed (similar to how the word "queer" was), but it doesn't carry any issues or baggage currently.


Eh, I feel that is a bit depending on who you ask and in what context,
For example there is some discourse I am familiar with on whether it is the LGBT or the LGBTQ community, I tend to be the latter chuck. And even then it gets complex, on what is, or should be common parlance.

At least when I it has been brought up, Dwarf when applied to fantasy creature is usually benign, Dwarf when applied to real person debatable (I have usually seen it discussed as neutral to mildly negative, it depends on who you ask and why).

That being said, part of the reason I ask is because I have a small sample size, this is something that I have heard brought up maybe once or twice. But that puts it ahead of the Tasha's changes which Racial ASIs which I heard actually zero complaints about until after the book came out.

It sounds like the consensus is that I have noticed a non-problem which has at least calmed the brain rattle. I has just been on the mind due to how many things have come up as minor changes recently ( or in the last few years as the case may be, dear christ covid was long)

[Vahnavoi]

It's worth noting that while "dwarf" can be used as pejorative, it is by no means restricted to people with dwarfism, and can be applied to mock anyone for their short stature.

The same can be said of "elf" and "hobbit" and their equivalents in several languages. Notably, "hobbit" was not a common word before success of Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Equally notably, hobbits are almost entirely positively portrayed in those movies. So why would anyone use "hobbit" as insult? Simply because some hobbits are short and plump, so you can use that to insult someone who is sensitive about being short and plump. It isn't any deeper than that. It is entirely based on being rude about superficial similarity.

[MonochromeTiger]

Eh, I feel that is a bit depending on who you ask and in what context,
For example there is some discourse I am familiar with on whether it is the LGBT or the LGBTQ community, I tend to be the latter chuck. And even then it gets complex, on what is, or should be common parlance.

That's kind of an inevitable issue in any community, especially one where the key factor for membership is something that doesn't really guarantee a similar mindset between all its members. To focus purely on the part relevant to the thread, what terms are offensive is something that's going to vary between different people in any given community; it's not that those terms don't offend some or that they're wrong for being offended by them, it's simply that everyone draws the line in a different place. I've known multiple people who self identified by terms that I was told by others were offensive slurs (and for that reason I won't be repeating here), a few times I thought to ask why and the responses ranged from confusion over how those terms were a slur to offense over my unintended appearance of telling them what to call themselves or at the people who told me those terms were slurs to begin with for "trying to be an authority over people they don't even know." Suffice it to say that my two take aways from those experiences were to stop asking and to understand that on matters of personal identity one person's grave insult can be another person's point of pride and that people in general are way too confusing for me to do anything but take it on a case by case basis.


It sounds like the consensus is that I have noticed a non-problem which has at least calmed the brain rattle. I has just been on the mind due to how many things have come up as minor changes recently ( or in the last few years as the case may be, dear christ covid was long)

For the most part, you've noticed something that might only really be relevant to a set group of people within a set group of people. The ones it's relevant for it may be very relevant for but there's no way of getting an accurate number for how many they are short of lining up the entire world population and going person to person asking "does the word Dwarf offend you when referring to a fantasy race in fictional works?"

And yes, I am saying that's the question to ask because not only are the words important for determining offense, the context those words are used in is absolutely vital. Even someone who doesn't consider the word an insult can still get a bit worked up if someone clearly intending it to be such yells it at them but that's encountering it in an entirely different environment from in a game. It's important to take into account the feelings of those who are offended by or uncomfortable with something even if no one else present is, that shouldn't be dismissed, but it's also important to not make sweeping decisions expecting everyone to share their discomfort based off a very limited sample size.

[Psyren]

Eh, I feel that is a bit depending on who you ask and in what context,
For example there is some discourse I am familiar with on whether it is the LGBT or the LGBTQ community, I tend to be the latter chuck. And even then it gets complex, on what is, or should be common parlance.

At least when I it has been brought up, Dwarf when applied to fantasy creature is usually benign, Dwarf when applied to real person debatable (I have usually seen it discussed as neutral to mildly negative, it depends on who you ask and why).

In all cases you should know your audience, I'm not saying otherwise. Obviously if you're around LGBT+ people who dislike "queer" or little people who dislike "dwarf," you shouldn't use those terms. But there's a difference between "this subset of {group} doesn't like {term}" and "{term} is widely considered a slur."


But that puts it ahead of the Tasha's changes which Racial ASIs which I heard actually zero complaints about until after the book came out.

Can we not go here yet again? Please? The change was made. It's not being reverted. You can implement static racial ASIs at your table if you like, and third-party publishers like Humblewood are even doing so themselves on the official storefront. Let's all move on.

[oxybe]

Guessing that is related to the German word zwerg or Zwerge.
(I only learned the nominative case (https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/zwerg)...)

And now instead of horrific hivemind bug monsters, i'm imagining a horde of tiny bearded children running out of school at the mention of a "Zwergling Rush".

[Errorname]

In the absence of a strong pushback against the name, I could still see myself being in favour of changing the name if there was a clear superior alternative. Like for example I don't think the name Barbarian is particularly offensive, but "Berserker" is just the obviously more correct name for the class and is a name change I would generally be in favour of. I just don't really think there is one in this instance.

[Rynjin]

I like the Elder Scroll's "Dwemer", even if they look more like dark elves in those games. That sounds both "dwarvish", and like Dwarf, so it's easy to use.

As to "should you call them dwarves?" It doesn't concern me much because I'm used to it, but if it makes you unconfortable, that's a perfectly good reason to find an alternative.


Elder scrolls is an interesting case for naming them because only the first half of "Dwemer" actually marks them as Dwarves, the setting uses "Mer" as a catch all for Elves and it's worked into identifiers for pretty much all of them even when they have an "Imperial" name that actually says what fantasy race/species/whatever they're actually supposed to represent. So "Dwemer" was just "Elves who live inside the mountains" but also Dwarves, "Orsimer" are just Elves who worshipped a corrupted deity and were changed when he was but they're also Orcs.

So in essence the Elder Scrolls answer to why their Dwarves and Orcs are different and why they're called something different is "they're just types of Elves" and that's literally worked into their names.

It also does not help that Dwemer are...not Dwarves, in any sense of the word. They do not fit the general Tolkienesque trappings of the race (being largely a race of agnostic artificers most well known for building robots and other wildly incongruous technology, so more similar to Dragonlance's Gnomes if anything), known mostly for their contributions to academia and philosophy (their name translating as "Deep Elf" is meant to refer to "deep thoughts" like "Wow that's deep bro" not that they lived underground), are in fact a subtype of elf, and maybe most importantly: are not short. Dwemer stand about the average height for a human, making them somewhat tall compared to some other types of elf (eg. Bosmer). They were given the moniker "Dwarves" by a race of GIANTS which stood about 20 feet tall.

Dwemer brings a very specific image to mind, being very much an extraordinarily rare case of "Our Dwarves are Different (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame)".

Also I'm pretty sure it's copyrighted.

[Satinavian]

I'm not, like, deep in that scene (or even involved with it at all), but I've literally never heard Duardin prior to this thread. My exposure to Warhammer is through the Total War games, where everything is a dwarf. The cities are dwarfholds, there's a guy called Grombrindal the White Dwarf, there's an antagonist faction with a whole DLC built around it called 'chaos dwarfs'. If GW is doing a dwarf rebrand, they missed including it in one of their most mainstream products.
That is because for Warhammer Fantasy they used Dawi, not Duardin and only on ingame texts while calling army books, units etc. by dwarf and derived words which players then used as well. And even in TW:Warhammer they follow through on it with "Dawi" being exclusively used in any voiced lines of the dwarven characters while everything game element is called dwarf. True to the sourcce.

Duardin is from Age of Sigmar and part of a rather obnoxious attempt to rename all species to get exclusive trademark rights : orcs became Orruks, elfs became Aelfs, ogres became Ogors... The fantasy fanbase (that was already unhappy about the end of fantasy) mostly found this silly and ignored it.

But considering "Duardin" was primarily introduced to make it easier to sue other people for infringement, i would strongly recommend against using it for your dwarves.

[Anonymouswizard]

In the absence of a strong pushback against the name, I could still see myself being in favour of changing the name if there was a clear superior alternative. Like for example I don't think the name Barbarian is particularly offensive, but "Berserker" is just the obviously more correct name for the class and is a name change I would generally be in favour of. I just don't really think there is one in this instance.

Honestly at this point I'd rather just rename 'Rage' into something like 'battle focus'.


The fantasy fanbase (that was already unhappy about the end of fantasy) mostly found this silly and ignored it.

To be fair that's still our primary response to anything Age of Sigmar related, especially the Ground Marines.

We also find it noticeable that WFRP4e was released before the Age of Sigmar game.

[MonochromeTiger]

To be fair that's still our primary response to anything Age of Sigmar related, especially the Ground Marines.

We also find it noticeable that WFRP4e was released before the Age of Sigmar game.

It's a bit of a shame to be honest. Well the first part not the second. If Games Workshop hadn't nuked the Warhammer Fantasy setting and then made a point of holding up Age of Sigmar as its successor it probably wouldn't have gotten nearly the backlash it did. If Games Workshop hadn't made it very obvious that they were throwing elements from the more popular Warhammer 40k setting to try making it sell better it probably wouldn't have gotten nearly the backlash it did. Instead it did both, threw out a ton of fan favorite characters, still hasn't really elaborated on some armies like Lizardmen as much as they could've, and during all of that the elements from the new things that they held up as different and interesting are de-emphasized because they aren't important to selling minis.

Looping that into something somewhat relevant to the topic, if you do try to replace something established understand that it will be met with resistance. Even in cases where it actually is objectively causing issues or failing there are going to be many who either really like it or are so used to it that just the idea of it changing is taken personally; I have on many occasions seen people talked into feeling outrage over changes that would make their lives easier simply because it's much easier to defend a status quo than to affect significant changes to it.

Change is scary, people can talk all they like about how they're fine with it and how they're looking forward to it but in the end we (and just about every other living thing) are creatures of habit and seemingly minor and insignificant changes can be enough to make everything feel strange and uncomfortable. Change done badly just intensifies that, and change for the sake of change without significant thought and consideration put into it is possibly even worse because not only are the people upset about it being told "yours was bad, this is better" whether they agree or not but they're being told it was being done for reasons that may not even be relevant to them. There may be some circumstances that the people pushing for the change are looking at that they feel are important, the potential for offense in fantasy race names here or the gradual decline in sales for Warhammer Fantasy in Games Workshop's case, but even if that's brought up and shown to people you're still changing what people know and regardless of the circumstances it will likely be an uphill battle even after you find an audience willing to back the decision.

Whatever the change being made the very first thing that should be done is to show it was worth it. If the change is done and then it just sits there that doesn't do anything but upset people who were against it by giving them an opportunity to ask "well what was the point then if you're just flipping a word around/ throwing our setting out?" In other words if you're making a big sweeping change to the status quo, even if it seems minor to you, have a plan for it beyond just changing things and calling it a day.

[Cluedrew]

Dwarrow or Dwerrow (I prefer dwerrow) feels like a fine alternative to me.That's cool, and a great place to go to get an alternate name. It would be a nice to have a word that just referred to the fantasy race, even though it is usually pretty clear it is being used to refer to them.

That being said I do use the name "dwarf" in my own work because I do want all the connotations (and this sort of includes the negative ones) the word has to set the stage for all the stuff I want to do with the race. I got other fantasy races of my own creation and they have names of my own creation, but I also want some things to be clear from the beginning so I do use some standard fantasy elements to build a base and I give them standard fantasy names, that is how commutation works.

[KorvinStarmast]

And now instead of horrific hivemind bug monsters, i'm imagining a horde of tiny bearded children running out of school at the mention of a "Zwergling Rush". But at least they can cry out "Go Go Go" as they do so. :smallbiggrin:

[JusticeZero]

I'll be honest, I wanted out of the long shadow of Gygax's friends who pressured him into adding more Tolkien stuff than he'd started out intending.

My Session Zero tomorrow has three species, none of which are human, and the only remotely traditional species is a nonstandard gnome variant that channels their ancestors.

There are so many other sources of heritages than Tolkien, always was, and I'm tired of feeling that I have to rubber stamp Gygax's friends' preferences. There's nothing wrong with Tolkien, I just want out of that long, long shadow. Dwarves got the yeet. Elves? Yeet. Halflings? Yeet. Goblins? Yeet. Orcs? Yeet. Time to start from a fresh slate and populate my world from the sources I like.

You can even use them as a base to start your design work from. Quebel are blue and small-ish and wiry and have scales instead of hair; they can naturally soften stone, but they're not dedicated to mining or metalwork; they live in towns dug into cliff faces, ferment spicy food like kimchi, raise mushrooms and insects, and celebrate their ancestral escape from a natural disaster that slowly consumed their homeland in a toxic disaster. That's... somewhat Dwarf-like, enough that I can use their stat block, but clearly not. I am free from Tolkien.

[KorvinStarmast]

My Session Zero tomorrow has three species, none of which are human, and the only remotely traditional species is a nonstandard gnome variant that channels their ancestors. What's your problem with humans? :smallconfused: All of your players are human.

[Anonymouswizard]

What's your problem with humans? :smallconfused: All of your players are human.

Hey now, don't assume, they could be running for dogs. Or Otherkin.

Honestly I'm much more likely to go 'humans only' than 'no humans'.

[MonochromeTiger]

I'll be honest, I wanted out of the long shadow of Gygax's friends who pressured him into adding more Tolkien stuff than he'd started out intending.

My Session Zero tomorrow has three species, none of which are human, and the only remotely traditional species is a nonstandard gnome variant that channels their ancestors.

There are so many other sources of heritages than Tolkien, always was, and I'm tired of feeling that I have to rubber stamp Gygax's friends' preferences. There's nothing wrong with Tolkien, I just want out of that long, long shadow. Dwarves got the yeet. Elves? Yeet. Halflings? Yeet. Goblins? Yeet. Orcs? Yeet. Time to start from a fresh slate and populate my world from the sources I like.

You can even use them as a base to start your design work from. Quebel are blue and small-ish and wiry and have scales instead of hair; they can naturally soften stone, but they're not dedicated to mining or metalwork; they live in towns dug into cliff faces, ferment spicy food like kimchi, raise mushrooms and insects, and celebrate their ancestral escape from a natural disaster that slowly consumed their homeland in a toxic disaster. That's... somewhat Dwarf-like, enough that I can use their stat block, but clearly not. I am free from Tolkien.

Nothing wrong with that, if it works for your group then obviously it's working fine. There's just a difference between "I don't like the conclusions they reached and want something different" and "we should, as a whole, toss this stuff out and unilaterally change it." And no, I'm not saying you do this it's just the post felt like an easy enough springboard to talk about it.

The style of game Gygax and his friends made is originally very focused on the combat with the rest kind of tacked on and a fairly heavy "player suffering is entertaining" atmosphere, my groups generally prefer a larger mix of roleplaying in their Tabletop Roleplaying Game and would prefer if everything spontaneously going wrong at least tried to make sense instead of just Tomb of Horrors style "you touch this and half your character's details change" or "you stayed here too long with no way of knowing it would be dangerous, you immediately die with no save." As such I avoid it, and when they DM/GM they avoid it, but we also accept that another group may find that fun and we don't pitch our way as the "right" way or the things we dislike as what "should" be removed.

Alignment is a similar point. I hate it, despise it even, alignment comes up and inevitably you're going to have a table full of people who all disagree on dozens of minor points unless they know each other very very well; to us it's more of a straitjacket waiting for someone to come along and go "well that's not how that alignment is meant to be played" and recite their personal interpretation as some sort of law set in the very stone of the game than it is an interesting system. So we don't use it, we take the time to work out how we can switch mechanics to not be reliant on it and we cut any excess that we don't think is worth the trouble, every single one of us still participates in games with other groups that keep it and in some cases with DMs who use the excessively strict and inflexible views on alignment we specifically avoid.

The point of this entire rant is that what is too restrictive and needs to be cut or what is a flawed relic to avoid is very much up to the preferences of the players and DM/GM at the table. For everyone who is careful to avoid adversarial DMing or alignment disputes or cut out the "traditional" options for what to play there's going to be someone who is in it to overcome an intentionally unfair challenge or who needs an uncompromising "these are the good guys and these are the bad guys" narrative or who refuses to make a character that doesn't have Dwarf clearly written up next to Race/Species/Ancestry/ whatever the system is using. Part of the game evolving from its origins is that we have other options, we have the ability to say our take on it is completely different and we don't want to use the elements we dislike about the original, but at the same time those origins are still there and they're still valid and for any number of people they remain the way they enjoy playing.


Hey now, don't assume, they could be running for dogs. Or Otherkin.

Honestly I'm much more likely to go 'humans only' than 'no humans'.

I've had a few games where, without any consultation between anyone involved, we just unanimously decided not to play or even consider Human characters. Sometimes it was as simple as "Humans are so boring and standard and we want something different for this fantasy world" or just finding other options more mechanically interesting, sometimes it was more complicated like a specific narrative people had in mind or wanting their characters to fit in with specific places in the setting. Ironically in a handful of cases the fact no one went Human made their plans fall apart because everyone was so focused on the idea of playing something distinctly not Human that the lack of an "average person" divided things into either everybody overacting their own special thing with little to no overlap or somebody getting stuck playing "Human but with a single stand out trait like wings they can fly with or stone skin" just to establish some common ground.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but I've had far more games where the people playing Humans were just bored out of their minds wishing they could do something special without needing spells or magic items for it or roleplayers wishing they could explore what kind of culture would form for a group that has some fundamentally different and fantastical biological difference from us than games where people felt a Human being in the group was a problem in any way.

[Satinavian]

What's your problem with humans? :smallconfused: All of your players are human.If they exclude standard races to highligth the new and unique races of the setting, there is certainly no race more standard than the human. What is worse, not only are humans so often included, humans are usually the most populous and the default race making the vast majority of settings humans centric and thus extremely similar.

Excluding humans is generally a very good step.


Unfortunately there are some players who prefer to play humans and always want them. But then there are also players preferring elves and always want those.

[JusticeZero]

What's your problem with humans? :smallconfused: All of your players are human.
The original thought was to include them as the rare race that's substantially bigger than the default race and so unable to use most equipment and such they find, but it was cutting close to fantasy racism that I made a separate commitment to purge, so I removed it.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've had a few games where, without any consultation between anyone involved, we just unanimously decided not to play or even consider Human characters.

So have I, I was talking from more of a setting design perspective. There's very few things you can't do with humans, and kicking out elves, orcs, catgirls, and sentient blobs of slime helps bring focus that supports variety.

But as an adventuring party? Eh, I'll probably be playing a human variant like Tieflings or Aasimar, but I have no issue with nobody deciding to pick human. Actually I'd love to do an all-martians Rocket Age game.

[Satinavian]

So have I, I was talking from more of a setting design perspectiveThe answers are also more from a setting design perspective.

What most fantasy and especially D&D settings have in common is humans as the norm. Which means removing humans is the easiest way to make settings unique and memorable.

[MonochromeTiger]

So have I, I was talking from more of a setting design perspective. There's very few things you can't do with humans, and kicking out elves, orcs, catgirls, and sentient blobs of slime helps bring focus that supports variety.

But as an adventuring party? Eh, I'll probably be playing a human variant like Tieflings or Aasimar, but I have no issue with nobody deciding to pick human. Actually I'd love to do an all-martians Rocket Age game.

I can kind of understand that but then the idea of being able to do just about anything with humans but not something else is always odd to me. If we're talking strictly setting or narrative design humanity having the dominant spot as the most powerful and populous of the "big" races of a setting so they can fit just about any role just doesn't make sense, and the explanations of "oh they're generalists so they can fill any niche better than the specialized races/species around them" or "oh well they're just more diplomatic than the other fast breeding groups so they can avoid fights while their population grows" are weak handwaves more than anything.

It has the same bad taste as those "HFY" stories that circulate around the internet, they rely heavily on suspension of disbelief turning on as soon as a trait gets called unique to humanity out of the entire universe when it's not even unique to our species on earth and even more so when the "unique and special" trait that gets emphasized is something the other species in the story are clearly capable of. I could easily see Dwarves being the experts on trade and technology that gives them an early advantage over their rivals and puts them in a position of power compared to all their neighbors in the setting or Elven mysticism and magic giving them so many workarounds that they just get a crushing advantage in any conflict or dispute that keeps them on top indefinitely; what I can't see without forcing myself to just accept it is "well Humans are kind of okay at everything so we just hang out until these arbitrary disasters happen that reduce Dwarves to miners and blacksmiths and Elves to bowmen and teachers of magic all living in our cities that are somehow doing great."

The only explanation I've seen in a setting that makes sense for it to my mind is that there's divine backing, the Gods of the setting taking a personal interest in humanity and tossing advantage to their favorite toys. Even that falls flat however when just about every race in the setting has their own Gods that also have every reason to ensure their personal favorites come out on top of the competition. Attempts to fix this just end up in the same space of "well yes they also have those advantages available but they also don't because reasons" where someone has to force the idea that the Gods of the Orcs are somehow threatened by their worshipers being the strongest and most powerful despite that being what the Orc Gods are actively portrayed as trying to encourage or how the Gods of the Dwarves are just so passive that they sit back and let their worshipers fall into a swift decline despite their entire thing being supporting Dwarven society and keeping them strong and safe.


The answers are also more from a setting design perspective.

What most fantasy and especially D&D settings have in common is humans as the norm. Which means removing humans is the easiest way to make settings unique and memorable.

Had a few settings where humanity just wasn't there, either they died out offscreen or they were never there to begin with. Funny thing, unless the players involved were really focused on exploring that specific aspect of the setting it didn't really change too much. Might have been because of how my groups usually handle portraying humanity in our games though, we avoid the standard approach of "this big area is medieval-stasis England, over here is not-China and not-Japan, here's not-Africa, and over here is the anachronistic Wild-West America if somebody wants to run around with guns." Having differences in how things are done because humanity isn't around to have cultural dominance over everything isn't as strange and unique when the humanity people are used to seeing in their game isn't just 4-5 mono-cultures based on an extremely narrow view of history crammed onto the map.

Then again part of it could be as simple as managing player expectations. You're going to have a very different experience with your players wandering through a tundra dominated by Catfolk/Tabaxi if they understand that they're there and able to thrive for a reason instead of just going in expecting them to just be there on the map for no reason and an opportunity to make a bunch of bad cat jokes. If a local culture is fleshed out, especially if it has its own subcultures fleshed out, it's just easier to accept that it's there without really spending ages questioning how or why.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

The answers are also more from a setting design perspective.

What most fantasy and especially D&D settings have in common is humans as the norm. Which means removing humans is the easiest way to make settings unique and memorable.

It might be easy and it might be memorable but I'm not sure that means it's good. My immediate reaction, when I hear that someone has banned humans and elves and doesn't want their species to be humans-with-bumpy-foreheads and all that jazz is to think 'god, that must be such an annoying table.' Either there's a ton of lore that the player is expected to know and care about that inevitably they don't (at least not as much as the guy who came up with all of it), or the players are so focused on being different that they stop being able to interact with each other and the whole thing collapses under its own weight, or the players ignore all of it and play their characters as basically recognizable human archetypes because some level of commonality is required for the table to function.

Characters have to be able to communicate with each other and in ways that the players can understand and explain. Human-with-bumpy-forehead is a pejorative for 'the species present in this setting are capable of diplomacy', and as such I've never found it convincing. Attempts to get away from it towards more alien archetypes generally don't work great for collaborative tabletop games. Fiction -- fine, sure, absolutely. But that's not what we're doing here.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean at the end of the day your sentient ball of slime is just going to end up as a funny looking human anyway, might as well embrace it. It's why I like Tieflings, Aasimar, Genasi, and all that lot: they're pretty honest that you're just a cool looking human with a couple of weird bits glued on.

There's nothing wrong with Vulcans, just make sure you use them well. Or these weird 'foresr vulcans' that D&D seems to have.

[Satinavian]

Characters have to be able to communicate with each other and in ways that the players can understand and explain. The non-human races are able to communicate in properly interact with each other in the traditional settings. Why should they lose the ability just because humans are absent ? They won't.

[Anonymouswizard]

The non-human races are able to communicate in properly interact with each other in the traditional settings. Why should they lose the ability just because humans are absent ? They won't.

I suspect these are the kinds of players who'd actually use the rules for languages. A d forgo an established 'common tongue' (which I tend to call Imperial, after those ancient empires In every setting).

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

The non-human races are able to communicate in properly interact with each other in the traditional settings. Why should they lose the ability just because humans are absent ? They won't.

In the traditional settings, non-human races are always derided as humans with bumpy foreheads. What's the point of removing humans and keeping standard-dwarves, standard-elves and standard-halflings? You're just leaning into what makes those races basically just humans even more; you've emptied the "this is what you are used to, it's neither exotic nor strange" narrative space.

If you actually want to move towards more alien nonhumans, you're going to be adding friction to the experience of playing them and interacting with people who play them. If you make a kenkku PC and you play it out of the book, straight -- born with an innate, desperate desire to fly, communicates only with mimicked phrases and sounds, completely without any creativity, imprint onto a companion to follow and mimic -- you're going to annoy the hell out of everyone at the table, and the book even suggests that you play less literally. Playing a by-the-rules kenkku at the table is annoying enough, and they can speak, in a way, are bipedal and can make recognizable gestures, can hear the normal range of sound and so on. Imagine what it'd be like encountering myconids without the dodge of telepathy-enabling spores.

I think in a lot of ways people trying to make settings more exotic are trying to address something that's caused by player behavior and group dynamics. Players interact with each other as human beings and, as a result, their characters behave like humans towards each other and to the world. DMs need that common ground.

[Witty Username]

In the traditional settings, non-human races are always derided as humans with bumpy foreheads. What's the point of removing humans and keeping standard-dwarves, standard-elves and standard-halflings?

It does radically shift astetics, take say a setting like Lorwyn from mtg. It doesn't have humans but has several approximate human creature types, however the differences catch in weird ways.
The closest to how humans are portrayed in magic are the giants (all five colors, tend to play into other tribes as opossed to strictly their own) but the spot they occupy in art and game state feels wrong for want of a better word. It ends with both similarity and differences emphasized depending on the context.

And it is an easy source of whimsy. If the closest you have to humans are humanoid wolves or green treefolk people, it is easier to loosen the grip on reality.

[Satinavian]

In the traditional settings, non-human races are always derided as humans with bumpy foreheads. What's the point of removing humans and keeping standard-dwarves, standard-elves and standard-halflings? You're just leaning into what makes those races basically just humans even more; you've emptied the "this is what you are used to, it's neither exotic nor strange" narrative space.
It will

a) lead to standard dwarfs, standard elves and standard halflings to not only pop up when their stereotypical niche is asked for and naturally get more diverse and flavorful
b) it also naturally leads to standard dwarfs, standard elves and standard halflings to get fleshed out cultures that are actually explored in some depth because you can't hang around in human settlements and realms all the time.

I mean, if your players actually live in a stereotypical dwarven mountain hold, the group will natually ask and answer questions like "what do they even eat here without extensive overland farms" or maybe even "what do they do for recreation ? Are there things like dwarven operas ? Is there possibly art that plays to the dwarven stone senses ?". In the traditional game, you have your dwarven smith in the human town and the hold is only relevant for foreign policy.

[Darth Credence]

I mean, if your players actually live in a stereotypical dwarven mountain hold, the group will natually ask and answer questions like "what do they even eat here without extensive overland farms" or maybe even "what do they do for recreation ? Are there things like dwarven operas ? Is there possibly art that plays to the dwarven stone senses ?". In the traditional game, you have your dwarven smith in the human town and the hold is only relevant for foreign policy.

Unless, of course, the DM has actually fleshed out their world and answered questions like what dwarves do for recreation - in my world, there are indeed dwarvish operas, most related to wars and fighting and more specifically related to the last great war of the Holds that led to the extinction of a particular subrace. My players know nothing about this because in all the time we've been playing, they have never gone to a dwarvish hold - the game has never flowed in that direction. Doesn't change that if they ever do, that's already created.

That some DMs do not do this does not mean that eliminating humans will cause it to happen. A DM who is willing to flesh out the culture of the dwarves will do so whether there are humans or not. A DM who is not will simply have all of the dwarves in the dwarven village be the same as the blacksmith in the human village, or everyone will be a human with a Scottish accent.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

It will

a) lead to standard dwarfs, standard elves and standard halflings to not only pop up when their stereotypical niche is asked for and naturally get more diverse and flavorful
b) it also naturally leads to standard dwarfs, standard elves and standard halflings to get fleshed out cultures that are actually explored in some depth because you can't hang around in human settlements and realms all the time.

I mean, if your players actually live in a stereotypical dwarven mountain hold, the group will natually ask and answer questions like "what do they even eat here without extensive overland farms" or maybe even "what do they do for recreation ? Are there things like dwarven operas ? Is there possibly art that plays to the dwarven stone senses ?". In the traditional game, you have your dwarven smith in the human town and the hold is only relevant for foreign policy.

I'll be honest: A strikes me as just the result of unimaginative GMing, and B as a combination of unimaginative GMing plus not actually something that matters very much. Whether halfling culture is fleshed out or not matters only in the context of the game happening at the table. If you're running Broadchurch but set in the Shire, then yeah, it matters a lot, and you as the GM should be delving into the nuances of that culture whether there are humans or not. If it doesn't actually matter in context, then it's up to your players whether they're interested, and it's okay if they're not. Players asking questions like 'what do they eat here without farms' is the kind of thing that makes more sense if their characters aren't dwarves; if they are they should know those answers in-character. Those questions are more likely to come up when the characters are fish out of water, which is more likely if they're four bog-standard humans on an adventure to Dwarfland or Elvenville. And maybe you can say 'well, it'd come up if they're elves in Dwarfland too', and that's true, but it also doesn't fundamentally change anything. The setting is 0% more interesting or believable because you've removed humans; the interest and investment comes from having interesting answers to the questions the players want to ask.

Edit:

Unless, of course, the DM has actually fleshed out their world and answered questions like what dwarves do for recreation - in my world, there are indeed dwarvish operas, most related to wars and fighting and more specifically related to the last great war of the Holds that led to the extinction of a particular subrace. My players know nothing about this because in all the time we've been playing, they have never gone to a dwarvish hold - the game has never flowed in that direction. Doesn't change that if they ever do, that's already created.

That some DMs do not do this does not mean that eliminating humans will cause it to happen. A DM who is willing to flesh out the culture of the dwarves will do so whether there are humans or not. A DM who is not will simply have all of the dwarves in the dwarven village be the same as the blacksmith in the human village, or everyone will be a human with a Scottish accent.

Earlier and shorter than my post, and also completely correct.

[Satinavian]

Unless, of course, the DM has actually fleshed out their world and answered questions like what dwarves do for recreation DMs tend to flesh out what is more likely to show up and what the players ask about. The rest gets very broad strokes.
And in the standard human dominated setting where most countries are human majority, the PCs start out in a human majority settlement and other races mostly show up as small minorities. enemies or at best places for a short visit, that means human cultures and habits get fleshed out and little else.

If the group starts out in a non-human community and only interacts with/stays in nonhuman countries and various nonhumans are always in the spotlight, that leads to a whole other level of detail.

[Darth Credence]

DMs tend to flesh out what is more likely to show up and what the players ask about. The rest gets very broad strokes.
And in the standard human dominated setting where most countries are human majority, the PCs start out in a human majority settlement and other races mostly show up as small minorities. enemies or at best places for a short visit, that means human cultures and habits get fleshed out and little else.

If the group starts out in a non-human community and only interacts with/stays in nonhuman countries and various nonhumans are always in the spotlight, that leads to a whole other level of detail.

I disagree. That does not reflect the games I run or the games I've played in. That it represents the games you are familiar with is fine, but it cannot be said about the game in general.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

DMs tend to flesh out what is more likely to show up and what the players ask about. The rest gets very broad strokes.
And in the standard human dominated setting where most countries are human majority, the PCs start out in a human majority settlement and other races mostly show up as small minorities. enemies or at best places for a short visit, that means human cultures and habits get fleshed out and little else.

If the group starts out in a non-human community and only interacts with/stays in nonhuman countries and various nonhumans are always in the spotlight, that leads to a whole other level of detail.

I mean, maybe, but that seems tautological. If humans are the only characters the players encounter, only humans will be fleshed out, fine. The level of detail isn't changing, just who it's being applied to. If the DM only uses humans, only humans will get detail. If the DM only uses nonhumans, only nonhumans will get detail. Ideally, the DM uses whatever beings fit the scenario, and detail is applied to give the players whatever feeling of verisimilitude they need. Corellia and Chandrilla should feel different, even though both are human-majority planets. Bothans from Bothuwai and Bothans from colonies should have differences in their attitudes. If they don't, that's indicative of limits to the GM's ability or performance.

Ultimately, a DM who can't generate interesting non-human NPCs has a problem with generating interesting NPCs of whatever species, in my opinion. Exoticism is not a substitute for interest. A guy who creates boring humans is going to create boring elves too, even if actually those elves hate trees and only eat yogurt on Wizentaday (which is their version of Wednesday because they have nine days in their week!) and their primary form of art is smell-based. That's all just... stuff. I don't think you can make individual NPCs, which are what players care about, interesting by piling on quirks and traits at the species level. A good GM can get players invested in an elf who likes trees, has a bow, is tall and slender and has a little bit of magic (but not too much!) and sings sad songs by starlight just as easily as they can an elf who lives in a city, throws his garbage in the canal, and wears moleskin trousers to his job in the coal mine every day. Players aren't at the table to read setting documents and sourcebooks; they're there to interact with the world. Detail is not a substitute for engagement.

And, again, none of this makes the case that removing humans makes the game more interesting. If anything, it makes the opposite case -- that the most interesting games are like Out of the Abyss, where a group of surfacers are thrown into the Underdark, or Descent into Avernus, where a group of Primes travel to the First Hell. In both cases, the party are strangers in a land they're not equipped to survive, they need to learn strange customs, they need to find ways to communicate and cooperate with beings of more-or-less alien morality and values. Arguably the best party for a game like that would be four humans, because it maximizes the strangeness the characters are encountering and minimizes the tools they can use to cope.

[Kyovastra]

It also does not help that Dwemer are...not Dwarves, in any sense of the word. They do not fit the general Tolkienesque trappings of the race (being largely a race of agnostic artificers most well known for building robots and other wildly incongruous technology, so more similar to Dragonlance's Gnomes if anything), known mostly for their contributions to academia and philosophy (their name translating as "Deep Elf" is meant to refer to "deep thoughts" like "Wow that's deep bro" not that they lived underground), are in fact a subtype of elf, and maybe most importantly: are not short. Dwemer stand about the average height for a human, making them somewhat tall compared to some other types of elf (eg. Bosmer). They were given the moniker "Dwarves" by a race of GIANTS which stood about 20 feet tall.

Dwemer brings a very specific image to mind, being very much an extraordinarily rare case of "Our Dwarves are Different (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame)".

Also I'm pretty sure it's copyrighted.
I'm not sure that word can be copyrighted, at least not any more than any other ordinary English word. Dwemer is just a more phonetic spelling of dweomer (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dweomer), which is a variant spelling of dwimmer and dwimer from Middle and Old English, respectively. "Dwimmer" is the native Germanic cognate to the Latinate "illusion" that displaced the word in modern English, with the same meaning of apparition, phantom, or trickery, and also referring to magic, not only of the illusory sort but all other kinds too (e.g divination, including necromancy, originally meaning literally death divination).

Tolkien used the word referring to magic, and Gygax used it too in D&D, specifically to refer to the auras of magic items, but I'm guessing that's not well known anymore, since I haven't seen anyone use it since I started playing D&D sometime in 5e years ago. It used to be common enough it was in the pronunciation guide on WotC's website found in the DnD Archives FAQ (https://web.archive.org/web/20010620124130/http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnDArchives_FAQ.asp) ('Dweomer: DWEH-mer (rhymes with "hem her"), or DWIH-mer; sometimes DWEE-mer').

I imagine it was a play on words from whichever Morrowind writer came up with it, since Elder Scrolls dwarves went too far with their magical trickery and disappeared, except for some ghosts you can find in their ruins. I have to disagree that they aren't dwarves in any sense of the word; dwemer are, like the dwarves in Norse literature and in Tolkien, renowned artificers that dwell underground ("artificer" is identical in meaning to "crafter").

The dwemer's mysterious phantom nature as a people who vanished, and who were seen as wicked by their enemies, is also in line with dwarves, gnomes, goblins and the like (same thing really, if not in D&D) of folklore, which are found in almost every language and culture on every continent, dwelling in caves, hills or mountains; sometimes forests, the sea, or air; usually described as hairy, often capricious, frequently malevolent, and preferring the darkness of dusk to dawn. Some of the possible etymologies (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/dwergaz) of "dwarf" mean spirit or demon, and dwarves and gnomes in mythology can often make themselves become invisible or disappear, like the dwemer did (and like duergar can in D&D, as well as change their size and form like na Daoine Maithe).

I think dwarves have become uninteresting in fantasy since authors and DMs used to have deeper wells to draw from than now, and were more interested in mythology, folklore, and history, where there's a ton of variety and inspiration. Now, most fantasy is self-referential drawing only from other fantasy, and not many people read books anymore. People have one image of dwarf and stick to it. It shows that everyone thinks of them as European and from Tolkien, which the modern idea of them is, but you can find supernatural "dwarves" with the above listed traits and generally small and hairy (if varying in size, and neither define them very much) everywhere. E.g., in Shona, they are called tokalosh; in Sierra Popoluca, chaneques; in Nahuatl, yeyecatl; in isiZulu, amatongo; in Tzeltal, ?ihk'als; etc.

[Rynjin]

I'm not sure that word can be copyrighted, at least not any more than any other ordinary English word. Dwemer is just a more phonetic spelling of dweomer (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dweomer), which is a variant spelling of dwimmer and dwimer from Middle and Old English, respectively. "Dwimmer" is the native Germanic cognate to the Latinate "illusion" that displaced the word in modern English, with the same meaning of apparition, phantom, or trickery, and also referring to magic, not only of the illusory sort but all other kinds too (e.g divination, including necromancy, originally meaning literally death divination).

Context matters for copyright. Specifically the word wouldn't be copyrighted, but the concept of the very specific type of Dwarf in question combined with the name Dwemer would be. While it is etymologically similar to those words it is transformatively different, and used for something very specific that is not implied by the actual word.

Use of the word in general would likely not be an issue, especially if you were using it, as you say, in the context of the older meaning, but I imagine you'd be getting sternly worded C&D's from Zenimax's and/or Bethesda's lawyers if you tried naming your dwarves that, especially if it could be argued that they're too similar to the actual unique elements of them.


I think dwarves have become uninteresting in fantasy since authors and DMs used to have deeper wells to draw from than now, and were more interested in mythology, folklore, and history, where there's a ton of variety and inspiration. Now, most fantasy is self-referential drawing only from other fantasy, and not many people read books anymore. People have one image of dwarf and stick to it. It shows that everyone thinks of them as European and from Tolkien, which the modern idea of them is, but you can find supernatural "dwarves" with the above listed traits and generally small and hairy (if varying in size, and neither define them very much) everywhere. E.g., in Shona, they are called tokalosh; in Sierra Popoluca, chaneques; in Nahuatl, yeyecatl; in isiZulu, amatongo; in Tzeltal, ?ihk'als; etc.

I disagree that Dwarves are necessarily uninteresting, though do agree that a lot of fantasy writers seem to just include them in their default capacity for no particular reason. The archetypal Dwarf can often be very interesting and entertaining when they have a focus put on them, but often they're just kind of a lazy background element. The Dwarves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dwarves_(novel))is a very good fantasy series focused on very archetypal Tolkienesque Dwarves for example.

[Satinavian]

The level of detail isn't changing, just who it's being applied to. And that is the whole point. Fantasy humans have been done to death with all the human centric settings. The other races usually only get cameos and most of those still life among humans. So they rarely get a proper treatment.


And, again, none of this makes the case that removing humans makes the game more interesting. If anything, it makes the opposite case -- that the most interesting games are like Out of the Abyss, where a group of surfacers are thrown into the Underdark, or Descent into Avernus, where a group of Primes travel to the First Hell. In both cases, the party are strangers in a land they're not equipped to survive, they need to learn strange customs, they need to find ways to communicate and cooperate with beings of more-or-less alien morality and values. Arguably the best party for a game like that would be four humans, because it maximizes the strangeness the characters are encountering and minimizes the tools they can use to cope.So it is suddenly interesting when the adventure is in exclusively nonhuman lands ? Because those and their inhabitants are now focus of the game not just a rarely touched bakcground element ? And that is supposed to be an argument against getting rid of humans ?
Sure, there is also the explorer angle with "PCs are not from here and discover everything only in game". But that also does not require humans.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

And that is the whole point. Fantasy humans have been done to death with all the human centric settings. The other races usually only get cameos and most of those still life among humans. So they rarely get a proper treatment.

This is a you and your group problem, not a setting problem.


So it is suddenly interesting when the adventure is in exclusively nonhuman lands ? Because those and their inhabitants are now focus of the game not just a rarely touched bakcground element ? And that is supposed to be an argument against getting rid of humans ?
Sure, there is also the explorer angle with "PCs are not from here and discover everything only in game". But that also does not require humans.

No. Those adventures are interesting (assuming they are; I don't actually agree that DiA is) because they immerse the players in strange and alien places. A GM could hit the same themes and feelings of challenge and confusion with a party of tinker gnomes from Mount Nevermind traveling to the human city of Palanthas or a party of lightfoot halflings visiting the uthgardt barbarians of the north in the Forgotten Realms; Peter Jackson speeds through this in about 30 seconds in the Bree sequence of Fellowship of the Ring. Whether humans are involved or not is not related.

I think you're continuing to operate under two mistaken assumptions. The first is that your experience at the table is universal. You seem to think that all games take place in human-dominated areas and that all NPCs are humans unless otherwise specified. That certainly isn't true at tables I run or tables I've played at. Where it may be more true is in 5E published adventures, which tend to rely on lots of GMing skills that 5E doesn't bother to teach. But that's not a problem that can be fixed by removing humans from the setting.

The second is that players really care about background information. In my experience, they basically don't, except how it informs how their characters fit into the world and can interact with it. Your experience seems to be that players will walk into Kelethin, City in the Treetops, and start asking questions about how they can have forges if everything's made of wood and built in a tree. My experience is that those questions come up for two reasons: one, the players think the answer is relevant to their goals (the bloody dagger at the crime scene was stamped Made In Kelethin but wood elves don't have forges; they trade for all their metal goods, so it must be a forgery! But is it an attempted misdirection?) or if I as the GM have left a massive gaping hole in my design or presentation (wait, there's a forge with a roaring fire and it's all wood? Why isn't it burning down? Is it magic wood? Will I get fire resistance if I make armor out of this stuff?). Players will absolutely ask questions if I design a settlement or civilization that doesn't pass the smell test and shove it in their faces. They're reacting to a lack of plausibility. But that's a problem with me, my worldbuilding and GMing, and not evidence of some genuine interest in the Deep Lore. Reading details from your setting document isn't a substitute for providing an interesting or engaging playing experience.

[t209]

Part of me had a thought and maybe the general source of this forum topic. Like when did Fantasy Dwarves are called “dwarf/dwarves” instead of Germanic mythological words (it’s like calling Medusa as snake hair woman equivalent).
Definitely not Snow White, which was made before Tolkien published Hobbit.

[Satinavian]

Part of me had a thought and maybe the general source of this forum topic. Like when did Fantasy Dwarves are called “dwarf/dwarves” instead of Germanic mythological words (it’s like calling Medusa as snake hair woman equivalent).
Definitely not Snow White, which was made before Tolkien published Hobbit.
1) probably since either the Normans or the Anglo-Saxons

2) looking at dwarf, Old English dweorgh and e.g. German Zwerg, it is obviously the same word with some added language evolution.

[Anonymouswizard]

Part of me had a thought and maybe the general source of this forum topic. Like when did Fantasy Dwarves are called “dwarf/dwarves” instead of Germanic mythological words (it’s like calling Medusa as snake hair woman equivalent).
Definitely not Snow White, which was made before Tolkien published Hobbit.

Part of me is still very annoyed that D&D uses the word Gorgon for a different monster. Although honestly I don't know Greek myth well enough to know if the other gorgons were also like that, my attempts at reading actual mythology have focused on Norse and Irish stuff.

Honestly if I have a problem with D&D's races it's that there's so many of them and sometimes an assumption that they all appear in any particular setting.its not that I dislike having both elves and catfolk as an option, it's that I rarely see a need for both in a setting (and honestly I'd rather have the catfolk, I know so many catgirls).

Dwarves have a few extra issues due to the name, but they are perfectly fine. My own dwarves tend to break stereotypes somewhat to the point where they could come off as worse, being incredibly vain and putting a lot of effort into their appearance. Also short hair and cropped beards, long ones are too impractical for the vast majority.