The Tavern

One of the issues brought up in the delete everything thread is that there's significant overlap between Minotaur and Hill Orc. A HO built for heavy melee is almost indistinguishable from a similarly built Mi, and Mi will almost always build for heavy armour as they have abysmal intelligence and magic aptitudes. The suggested fix was to merge the two races similar to how Mountain Dwarf was rolled into Hill Orc. Adding HO's offensive spell aptitudes to Mi wouldn't hugely affect balance as unlike hybrid builds melee combat and big damage spells tend to be an exclusive choice.

Someone misinterpreted "merge HO and Mi like MD was merged into HO" as "merge HO and Mi into MD" and it turns out this solves may of the problems that would result from the merge.

- A new player doesn't need a guide to know how to win as a dwarf (armour up and hit things)
- A new player knows they know how to play a dwarf, because dwarves are the c=299,792,458m/s of fantasy races
- Minotaur is almost like this, but the connection to heavy armour has to be derived by understanding the mechanics (str + armour skill -> wear heavy armour). In addition, while the horns/headbutt mutation is flavorful and simple for experienced players, it introduces a species-unique mechanic at character creation.
- Using Hill Orc as a newbie caster is counter-intuitive. The fire/earth/conj focus of dwarves is obvious from a lore perspective (magma!) and is conveniently the most direct, easy-to-learn form of spellcasting.
- Dwarf's mythological roots are thousands of years older than Tolkien. It's fitting for them to run a gold mine and sell crafted items to heroes. Modern orcs are solely a creation of Tolkien with little mythological root and it's unclear why they're running a gold mine and a floor full of shops.
- Dwarves await their messiah (all species welcome) who will lead them to glory and death in the deepest reaches of the world.

Mountain Dwarf
+10% HP (same as Mi and HO)
10str/7int/7dex, +str/5 (this works out to +2int/-1dex vs Mi and -1int/+1dex vs HO)
+3 MR/level (same as Mi and HO)
Mutations and Abilities: None

Melee (MD = old mountain dwarf aptitudes, ND = new mountain dwarf aptitudes)

- Fighting merge is obvious
- Short blades and UC are low because they're not straightforward and don't fit the lore but aren't low enough to discourage unorthodox play
- Axes and maces are typically associated with dwarves, evening the aptitudes is obvious as axes are a no-brainer for HO
- I'm less certain about Staves and to a lesser extent Long Blades but I don't want to remove Mi's weapon versatility, especially when the character concept is equipment based melee

Ranged

- I erred on the side of flavor here but I could also see it as anything between 0/0/-1/0 and 0/1/1/1

Defenses

- HO gets a decent buff to defenses (armour+1, dodging+1,shields+1) which more than makes up for axes-1
- Mi gets a -2 nerf to dodging, but it's not as relevant as it seems because players treating MD like Mi will have plenty of extra XP due to only focusing on a few skills

Magic

- The good skills are straightforward (Fire/Earth/Conj)
- Can play around with necromancy, hexes, summoning, poison, and ice (dwarves were a little more sinister before Tolkien and the Dwarven Sorcerers in the Dwarven Mine reflect this)
- Hexes, charms, and summoning slightly harder to shift attention from complicated hybrid playstyles (not as certain about this)

Misc

- I'm a bit torn on evo because it fits the lore but complicates both melee and casting gameplay

MDFi vs MiFi
-horns, -headbutt, -1 dex, -2 dodging
+helmet, +2 invo

MDFE vs HoFE
-1 int, -1 XP
+1 dex, +1 earth, +1 dodging, minor effect from +1 shields

This is the GDD equivalent of Solomon saying to cut the baby in half.

What about Beogh? It would make more sense to merge Minotaurs into Orcs to keep Beogh.

In this proposal everything that used to be Orcish is now Dwarven. So you watch out for dwarven priests on D:3, take gold from the dwarven mine, and can recruit a dwarven adventuring party by worshipping Beogh, god of the dwarves, who is no longer species restricted.

"The Brigand" title would probably need to be changed, but it's yet another piece of Orc lore that doesn't make sense. Elyvilon the Healer heals, Gozag the Greedy is charges money, and Sif the Loreminder has a huge library but Beogh doesn't do anything resembling brigandry. New Beogh would also likely be Neutral instead of Evil, but that's only relevant in the very rare case of switching from Ely/TSO/Zin.

Maybe also grant lavawalking?

I would be more in favour of keeping minotaur, as orcs and dwarves are really default fantasy races. But that's more about flavour than anything.

I always thought the removal of MD was a huge mistake from a flavor standpoint. As the OP says, dwarfs' mythological roots go back way beyond Tolkien, while minotaurs being a generic fantasy monster is pretty much straight out of D&D - at best you can date it to CS Lewis. The creature from Greek mythology was just that, a creature. Put it this way: my spellchecker is currently telling me that "minotaurs" isn't a word. And that singular creature most certainly didn't wield weapons and wear armor, either. The horns and vague association with labyrinths are about the only things it has in common with its mythological roots.

I personally like this proposal: history and flavor aside, there's really no particular reason for Beogh to be restricted to one species, and that more or less *is* the only distinction between HO and Mi: the post removing MD pretty much said that. Removing HO makes sense to me, and as I said above, the 'mythology' behind Crawl's minotaurs is far worse than MD's ever was. Keep minotaurs as Lab opponents, of course, but scrub the species. Or maybe revamp them into something like a combination Felid and Troll (e.g. basically no equipment, but huge HP/poor EV, no extra lives but extra melee damage, etc - the ultimate glass cannon).

I don't have much to add, just wanted to say that I would support this change and enjoy playing some mountain dwarves!

FR: Have all three of them (Minotaur, Hill Orc, and Mountain Dwarf) as playable races, but make them mechanically identical.

Do that, but also randomize the flavor components per game:
Mountain Orc, Minodwarf, and Hillataur
Minoorc, Hilll Dwarf, Mountainitaur

Then we can start throwing in new stuff like "Plains" and "Forest" and "Ocean" just like that we can have like 30 new races!

Make them one all race, but at level 7 you randomly evolve into either an orc, a dwarf, or a cow. Like draconians.

I realize this has like a 0% chance but I honestly love the idea of turning everything orc into dwarves, and merging the races as well. I'd probably let dwarves keep the headbutt though - they're just a stubborn and hard-headed race of people! Why not? Not having horns 2 would really lower the damage. If I'm right, I think minotaur headbutt is basically an 11 damage attack; 5 base + (3 x horns level), so without horns, it's 5. You could just give them "hard head level 2" which is horns 2 but lets them wear helmets. MORE BUFFS!

orcs and dwarves are not as cool as big angry bull guys with horns so I am extremely against this change.

A change I saw talked about a while ago which I would honestly be in favor of is removing hill orc, letting anyone worship beogh, and then transforming anyone who worships beogh into an orc(perhaps with just "Your appearance becomes rugged and orclike!", and then maybe also affect apts)

And at level 14 you randomly evolve into the "Plains", "Forest" or "Ocean" variant.

I agree with you but I also like the merge. Mechanically Minotaurs don't have much going for them besides horns and being 'easy to play'. MD seem a tad too strong to me at first glance but then again, new players need all the help they can get. If this goes through I would at least like to see Minotaurs renamed/ reworked so we can keep the brutes. Maybe now that they aren't the 'easy to play' race they could have more draw backs. Would be cool if they had more bull themed stuff going for them than just being the best melee fighters hands-down.

Any change that removes minotaurs should definitely contain a new unrandart hat, The +2 horns {Horns 2, Headbutt}.

Dwarves, elves and orcs are exploited way too much, people start to be sick of them.
Minotaurs aren't very original either, but at least they're not part of the usual cliche trio.

I am not sure. When I try a new game and want to play good fighters with ok intelligence, fragile mages with high intelligence or good fighters with low intelligence, having those races named "dwarves, elves and orcs" saves me much time.

Perhaps an easy solution would be to keep HO as it is, but change Minataur into a radically different character, with more limitation and flavour, and therefore turn it into a medium-skill character (i.e. not for newbies). For example:
1- minotaur may not use armour but they'd compensate with making a shitload of damage (more than normal, say through better weapon skills, stronger horn mutation, and/or some new abilities)
2- may have berserkitis as an innate characteristic, and/or berserker as an innate skill. In addition if the berserkitis route is chosen, perhaps there could be a "ring/amulet of calmness" that turns berserkitis into berserker skill (i.e. make it on-demand).
3- a charge skill along the lines of what the new god WJ Coucil does, perhaps stackable with the god (for even extra damage).

In all cases we would be making minotaur a more complex character to play, and therefore distinguish it from the straightforward HO.