The Greatest Dwarf/Stump

I remember that Murdle thing, I think he attacked the High Templar outside the Sanctuary (NPC). I might have actually been there when he died, will have to check logs later tonight. The most famous dwarf during my stint was Meso and the super dwarf/breed duo in the north. I forget their name at the moment. They were a husband wife (ooc) duo and were like the unofficial mage hunters of the north. I think? I'd need to poke my logs.

Yes, but that's about all that they're usually memorable for.

Kurac of recent years has been far, far worse for sparring and skill/stat obsessive players than the T'zai Byn ever was, at least in my opinion. What makes a dwarf interesting isn't their combat stats, it's the focus and the mindset. There have been a countless number of highly skilled and monstrously statted dwarves in the last five or ten years, but that doesn't make them memorable. Just like muls, dwarves have always drawn too many people for the wrong reasons.

Gold was engaging because he was a dwarf through and through, but in a way that enabled everyone around him to join in on a lot of what he had going on. Murdle was great because he had so many facets to his personality and always opted in for the big adventure and the hard confrontations, rather than spending his entire time in the sparring halls to max out. Shade was amazing because he was a character with no filters or concept of shame, so you could hang around with him no matter what kind of character you were and have a lot of fun.

I don't remember them fondly because they could two shot a mek, I remember them because of how the hours rolled past while interacting with them and never being bored.

Tusk dwarf, Ish, Bjern, Armali and especially Ruke, were all astoundingly boring to interact with and none of them were particularly good at the game, as far as combat savvy goes. They had a high tolerance for grinding the hours of their lives away and only going out in big groups to minimize risk.

Reliable and strong versus NPCs, but not very interesting to be around.

Hah. Strength is so overpowered that it almost ends up being the main thing that determines your combat potential. Skill matters a lot but will plateau, so unless you take two characters with wildly different skill, they're likely to hit eachother a roughly similar number of times. But if one has above average strength and the other has exceptional, the latter will do at least twice as much damage. This also means that a considerably less skilled character with max strength will beat a better opponent with middling strength. If I hit you five times for 20 damage and you hit me twelve times for 8 damage, I've done more damage despite being way worse at fighting.

Something's fishy with the damage calculations, too. Looking at the strength table in the code, 18 strength is supposed to give only +3 damage. We all know it's more like +10 or something. When a fresh human warrior with exceptional strength can routinely do grievous hits with a storebought weapon, the +3 is a lie. Or, more specifically, it probably counts the strength bonus before location multipliers instead of after, which would be more reasonable. The result is this broken situation where someone with middling strength will hit in the 1-15 range while someone with high strength does like 5-40 using the same weapon. And the margin is even wider with bludgeoning weapons.

There's a reason twinks mostly roll dwarves and half-giants. There's a reason the game remembers so few powerful elven fighters. Strength is just such a gigantic factor in combat, even though agility technically counts toward many more checks. Max human agility gives a +5 bonus to combat checks that invoke agility, and max elf is +10. That's nothing compared to the general "double damage" modifier of max vs. medium strength. And then comes the fact that strength determines your ability to wear the best armor, carry spare weapons, etc. Someone with 'good' strength isn't going to be wearing full silt-horror shell and carrying three different weapon types for strategic use.

This game is perpetually plagued by terrible dwarf and half-giant characters because the worst players are the ones who pine the most after extreme coded power, since being the strongest dude in the room is the only way a shit roleplayer gets to be relevant. Conversely, the whole elven race, which is supposed to be the second most numerous in the world, is woefully underplayed because almost nobody with an interest in combat can bring themselves to roll an elf. And this means the c-elf sphere is chronically deficient in agency, leaving them stuck in this situation. This is how one poorly conceived line of code can have a serious debilitating effect on the roleplaying environment for twenty years.

I don't really have a hard number because I tend to roll with a new account each and every time I play the game, but I think when I abandoned that one, it'd been about two or three months with the clan? Give or take.

Disappointed, am I, to not find Butcher Brons on this list.