So Long, Mountain Dwarves

I maintain that players should reject racism in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. By that I mean growing so attached to one race, such as Mountain Dwarves, that they lose sight of the overall picture, which is that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is the best game on earth.

 I have played every race and like them all with five exceptions. To only play one race or to think one race is absolutely required would strike me as ludicrous. My favorite race is Spriggan, but I haven't played a Spriggan in months, and why? Because I'm tired of them. My detested races are Ghoul (too much bother carrying rotting corpse chunks around, and yuck! by the way), Human (Zzz...), Demigod (I'm atheist in life but don't want to be in Crawl), Half-Orc (I'm a Tolkien fan and can't stomach the uglies), and Felid (too weak, and the lives don't matter to me with my handy dandy regen.bat).

I never did take a liking to dwarves, for purely aesthetic reasons (memories of Gimli), although they are an excellent choice for fighters and among the easiest races to play, if not the easiest. But if I were a dwarfist, I'd make the transition to Half-Orc, Demigod, Demonspawn, Ogre, Troll, or Minotaur. Any of these make excellent fighters, and the half-divine also excel at spellcasting.

Ogres are an underplayed race. I prefer transitioning to giant spiked club and going shieldless. A giant spiked club has the highest damage potential of any weapon in the game, so it makes an interesting choice. Imagine vanquishing a Hill Giant with one pop on the head. Another nice thing about Ogres is that they learn Maces and Flails and Fighting very easily, more so than any other race, and consequently it is not uncommon for a high-level Ogre to acquire 300+ hit points. Since they also excel at the Spellcasting ability, they have no problem with low-level spells such as Blink, which helps to escape bad situations.

Trolls are limited, but if one must play one, then I would suggest being either a Hunter (five large rocks!) or even a Death Knight in order to diversify the attack portfolio. Ogre Death Knights are actually the ideal Death Knights, much superior to Trolls due to their higher hit points (due to Ogres being better at Fighting). Under no circumstances would I want to play any spellcaster as a Troll.