The Tavern

Right now, the only playable dwarf race is the deep dwarf.

The game currently doesn't display many dwarves as opponents. I can only think of the uniques Wiglaf and Jorgrun. Jorgrun is a Dwarf, Wiglaf a Mountain Dwarf. I pretty much never met any other dwarves in 0.18.

Deep Dwarves respect the standard view of Dwarves as a hardy race (damage shaving) of artisans (high evo) with a decent aptitude with axes. They are unusual dwarves because they are good sneakers and not-too-good fighters, but they also have strong earth magic aptitude, which is a typical dwarf thing. The special relationship with the dungeon environment is similar to the "stonecunning" in D&D 3.5, which was common to all dwarves; and dwarves are very often subterranean creatures, and therefore "deep".

My suggestion is that of renaming the player race into Dwarf; the typical character of the Dwarf race would be lack of natural regeneration. Wiglaf and Jorgrun could be remade into e.g. Half Dwarves, preserving their regeneration.

This would be too confusing for players with an RPG or fantasy lore background, which is most players.

Rename deep dwarf to red dwarf, because reasons.

remane deep dwarf to dip dorf

rename deep dwarf to mountain dwarf, then remove them (again)

common dwarfs:
dwarf
dark dwarf
deep dwarf
hill dwarf
mountain dwarf
beard dwarf
dwarf dwarf

uncommon dwarfs:
tree dwarf
red dwarf
butt dwarf
elf dwarf
brown dwarf

I agree with OP, as long as we also remove their device recharging and no HP regen.

I agree with the OP. I'd also change High Elf and Deep Elf to Half-Elf and Elf personally but that's just me.

I'd remove High Elf (they are the MD to Tengu's Mi) and rename Deep Elf to Elf.

Plus then you get a better excuse for why DE blademasters and such exist despite DE PCs being rather bad at melee.

FR: make orcish mines spawn Elven Halls with 1/2 chance, otherwise spawn DWARF FORTRESS!

FR replace pan lords with forgotten beasts.

@ Shtopit:

I don't feel strongly either way, and the renaming you suggest would be easy enough to implement, but why do you think this would be a good idea to do so? It does also seem like the name "Dwarf" could confuse newer players, who are used to a particular gaming archetype that does not include "non-regenerative." The adjective "deep" at least tips off that something is "different" about the dwarves in this game.

Note also that there isn't a vanilla "Elf" species, either (though there used to be, iirc, along with a few other flavors of elf).

elf, grey elf, high elf, deep elf, sludge elf

i'm not a fan of renaming anything to Elf, since that creates horrible category/element confusion. compare e.g. trying to say "i'm using a shield, but not a buckler or a large shield". "i killed an elf, but not a deep elf or..."

technically there's already an 'elf' genus/species monster that causes this problem, but it only really exists for derived undead, where there isn't ambiguity.

actually the relevant chemistry is the same for all the elf species, any variance in taste is due to individual diet/hygiene differences