How do you avoid making humans in your settings just the "jack of all trades" group of normies with a large population?

You sound like a special kind of idiot who wants to redefine humanity under a narrow and ultimately false personal definition.

So, instead of "humans", you're going to have an original race of "y humans" or "x humans", which is as cringe-inducing as your assertion that you're an authority on what defines humanity.

Humans are left open ended because it's going to take much more than a quick blurb to try and answer a question we've been struggling with for the last several millennia.

What's wrong with being the jack of all trades? Humans fit into the ability to do everything, or focus in on one task with a terrifying zeal

What's terrifying is that an elven mage will spend a hundred years slowly learning about magic, spending time dancing and living as they develop their spiritual maturity alongside books that speak just as much about magic as they do philosophy. All to become a rather talented lvl 1 mage

A human does it in 6 years, barely bathing, sitting in a cloistered room reading by candlelight for 17 hours a day, causing their health to decline, their eyesight to often weaken and their sense of right and wrong to sometimes blur as they hone in on every little note, hidden sentences in scrolls, all to push themselves just a little bit closer. And finally emerge as a talented lvl 1 mages.... who is not content to stay there for long.

What makes humans so strong is they can change so rapidly, suffering horrible tragedies, only for a new generation of talented individuals in every field from craftsmen, to mages, and warriors all to rise up a few short years later.

lmao Veeky Forums autists are so obsessed with subverting stereotypes

Guess what? Your edgy new setting is pure fanwank

What if I just don't HAVE humans?

Fuck off Martian.

Who?

What else could be the baseline race? Or do you think there is no need for one?

Let him be, user. Everyone was 14 once.
Of course, if we always did that, there'd be about 75% less threads...

>who
You can't trick me that easily, you little green man.

Honestly I was gonna do away with a Baseline Race entirely. Puts less emphasis on any one group (since no "main character" race to draw focus).

That's ridiculous. I'm not from Mars you dumb dumb.

And that's retarded.

Make a Gnostic setting.

Human have a piece of God in their soul. That make them infinitely more "magical" than any other race, even when they don't try to master their divine nature. They roam the world freely, having their own strange and seemingly unknowable goals.

They are seen as eldritch fair folk by all the other races, who have an upstanding agreement of protection against humans. No other change to the traditional fantasy setting: dwarfs are still shorties interested in mines and shit, elves are magical and close to nature, etc.

>How do you avoid making humans in your settings just the "jack of all trades" group of normies with a large population?

they are best astral mages.

like, supernaturally fucking good compared to any other races, with humans being gimped in externalization of magic. they compensate for this gimp by being very industrious with their magical resources, where cheap magical items are a dime a dozen compared to the quality that you would get from enchanters of other races. they even have a way to reproduce very cheep but very low quality air gems that only hold an extremely low (compared to natural made) 'air' magic

that is, if the other races still had contact with humans since their exile near a thousand years ago. right now they are in a Hodge-podge anachronistic 18th century civilization since their exile while the other races just kinda kept chugging along

Humans in my setting are very social, with expressive faces, distinct appearances and a strong sense of in-group solidarity. Other races are different - Elves all look like bitch-faced porcelain dolls, for example and can barely tell each other apart, while kobolds lead solitary lives outside of mating season, and have to make an effort to empathize with others.

Humans are the ancient, dying race clinging to relevance. Elves are usurping them with long lives, lots of kids, and marrying the remaining humans into noble elven families for that sweet human bloodline that interfaces with human super-technology.

Make them super diverse and cultural.

Like, all the other species are pretty much the same. Even when they've been seperated an put in radically different environments, the differences aren't very big, physically and culturally.

Your mountain dwarfs are basically the same as your hill dwarfs, and let's not even get into how similar those desert halflings and plain halflings are...

Meanwhile, you've got humans living only miles away from each other who have completely different languages, beliefs, etc...

>Or do you think there is no need for one?

Most systems I've seen with multiple species use humans a baseline (because humans are what they compare other species to when writing those other species), then have each race balanced by giving it advantages and disadvantages compared to the baseline. Which puts humans into the jack of all trades position mechanically.
There is no need for a baseline race that is balanced with the playable races. For example, Ironclaw has a baseline. Every playable race takes that baseline and is raised above it in racially specific ways. 3 skills they get bonuses to, 3 talents, some natural weapons.

The system not supporting a jack of all trades race, and the setting being a furry setting, meant that the question "what stats should humans have ?" led to a few pages of discussion:
sanguinegames.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=186&

Then Myriad Song was released. Same core rules as Ironclaw, but a sci-fi setting. Humans as one of the official races. They got the other stereotypical niche humans often get: The social race.

>How do you avoid making humans in your settings just the "jack of all trades" group of normies with a large population?
They are the "get married and have kids"-group. Humans always talk about getting married and having kids and whenever they move around it's always because of family matters.

Other species think them wierd and annoying.

Stop treating entire species as monocultures.

Fucking hell, this isn't hard.

I went with three "subraces" of humans. First where the Steel-Eyed (based on the hawk eyed men of Lensman fame), the Focused and the Common Stock.

Steel-eyes tend to rise to the top of whatever organization they are a part of, and most likely remembered by the longer lived races.

The Focused are those humans that have thrown their lives into "X". These are the Archmages and Engineers of the race.

The Common Stock are just that, common humans. They have an ability to loose themselves in the crowd.

The way I look at is that humanity churns out a thousand suck ass normals in the attempt to create the creme of the world. The masses of humanity are faceless toilers in the background.

>mfw a human rubs all the pics of his children in my face
>again
Please don't talk about your holidays.

>The humans are a massive, faceless monoculture with no individual or collective variance
>The [anything] are a massive, faceless monoculture with no individual or collective variance

Dropped. I'll go find a GM who cares about telling an actual story, instead of building a fucking 4X game.

This.

What are the stats for "colonizing piece of shit"?

This seems like a personality flaw, not physical /mental traits you could balance races around

Just remove whole "can master anything" thing, and give human race strong point(s). Do same for the rest.
Otherwise... well, just make some other race generic, but it will be rather hard not to create some kind of racist stereotype, inferior to "actual humans".

That's because you're only using one human civilization. Plot a dozen different human factions, and a bunch of orc factions, and watch the fireworks unfold.

Intuition
Humans more than any other race can make that almost impossible leap of logic that is needed to make the impossible possible

Humans in my setting are literally alien technomancers

They arrived to the world a couple of hundred years before the "present" through an interdimensional gate and instantly installed themselves and started colonizing as humans are wont to do.
Unlike the native humanoid species in the world they do not generate mana metabolically so they create massive mana extractors that drain it from the environment (with about a 10% efficiency) which have the side effect of creating large "dead zones" where magic has a high chance of fizzling out and being consumed.

They use this mana as a power source for technological gadgets such as energy guns and vehicles

There are very few humans in the world, some estimate total population to be in the low 1000s so they rarely appear in public. In large-scale conflicts the human city-state uses automaton foot soldiers armed with mana rifles.

The backstory is that in the late 2000s earth was running out of resources so they started gating people to other dimensions, this particular group was stranded on the setting but they were fully equipped to make the best of the situation

>How do you avoid making humans in your settings just the "jack of all trades" group of normies with a large population?

By making them the only playable species, and giving them plenty of diversity.

By making them divers--

Goddammit.
At least there is someone who knows his shit on Veeky Forums.

This pretty much sums up human civilization

Humans are generally standard in most aspects but sport a much more robust immune system that many take to be an endless font of energy. You'll never see a human farmer not in his fields even if his nose is running like a sprung dam and they almost never succumb to wounds if they don't outright die from blood loss. Beyond that is what i feel really sets them apart: Art.
Not to say that other races don't have their own forms of Art but that human art is the only one that is so varied it has its own styles, substyles, and ways to go about making those styles via medium and technique along with messages conveyed.

Example: Rodlins Caryatid
To the elves they wouldn't even call it art. It's organic shape is much too rough to be anything but a child's attempt at art and the physical subject seems repulsively oppressive.
Too the gnomes there's no dynamics to it. It's too still and doesn't speak of motion or even their favorite of overcoming odds. It might even say to them that the odds can always win against them which is a terrible way of thinking to them.
To the dwarves it's a far cry from their prowess at stonework but they can see that it's still art even if the hands that worked it seem afflicted by palsy but to them stone would never become a burden and the whole piece is overtly "lopsided" and lacking in precise angles and lines and altogether too soft in subject and form for their liking.
To the orcs its not embroidery which is the only art they truly know and to them art is just decoration. True art to an orc is an iron headed axe with a steel bit they got when raiding humans long ago that despite being so old has lasted far longer than the copper axes of their kind. An axe would be a mantle piece and source of pride to an orc family. A sculpture would be a rock that somehow looks like an oddly shaped orc beyond that it's nothing special, just a pretty rock.
To humans it's a source of tears and inspiration. It's a message that anyone can fall but not give up, you can bear your load for a lifetime even if it will kill you in the end but you did your best every step of the way and thats all anyone can do. Not everyone can be hercules but we can all be heroes.

You fucking don't. Until we meet some ayy lmaos from outer space we lack the perspective and can't say what separates a human from a sapient non-human. Humans are imperialistic? Or the best endurance runners? WE DON'T FUCKING KNOW. There are no orcs or elves in real life. You might be a deluded enough HFY grognard to think there are, but there really aren't.

So the bland, safe, jack-of-all-trades approach kinda makes sense. Particularly because anything else tends to either be a trite "deconstruction" or something that pigeonholes an entire setting because of how we perceive humanity (making your humans the tallest race, for example, instantly makes your setting "that setting where everyone is shorter than humans" that feels intrinsically limited in possibilities)

Humans are both short-lived (compared to geeric elves and dwarves) and make adequate spellcasters, so some fantasy human cultures can be obsessed with a secret of magically prolonging their lives (or living eternally). Necromancy is the first, but not the only, way to achieve that.

This question makes me think that you are either seriously lacking in critical thinking skills or that you are just wanting to compare notes, but was too autistic to clarify that.

Then again maybe I'm reading too much into it.

For starters humans' ability to BE a jack of all trades race makes them a viable asset to your campaign. If they seem boring then its because YOU are making them boring.

As previous anons have mentioned - lifespans for humans are alot shorter than other races. So its easy to plug them into the "do as much awesome shit and hoard as much awesome shit as i can before I die" subset. You could easily create a society based on the "rat race" and turn that shit into a financial/politcal campaign easily.

Or follow the viking/mongol warlord route and create a campaign involving a giant army of chaos sweeping the lands as a human warlord is driven by either lust or divine decree to take everything around him and make it his own.

Or what if your players find a small secluded town in the forest where everyone is immortal? What do?

Or you can reward a player for his choice in an obscure language talent by creating a secluded hamlet on the otherside of a mountain range that hasnt been exposed to modern day culture and as a result speak the language from an ancient fallen empire (that the PC just ao happens to speak)

Or you can get all native american with it and find a village of super spiritual shamans or cannibals or what have you.

Or make it more fantasy/magical and suppose theres a culture where every adolescent boy and girl gets a pet fairy (a la Ocarina of Time) as a coming of age rite and the players can get involved in freeing an enslaved race of winged little people or end up undoing (accidentally) some kind of ancient magical pact that was active to prevent the reoccurance of some evil?

Also... there's always steampunk...

>Also... there's always steampunk...
Almost nobody does steampunk correctly though, it's always faffing about with tophats and other boring shit that isn't at all punk.

In my setting for D&D, where the dragons have destroyed or enslaved every civilization, the humans are the only race fighting back, so there's a particular focus on their secluded nomadic life and their sharp tactics to bait and neutralize dragons. Though they still are quite Jack-of-all-tradey in their possibilities, they are mostly about their group tactics, cunning trap making and relentless perseverance. Pic related, I guess.

>one day I'll find players for this campaign. One day...

Well, this one idea I had put human out to sea. They lived mostly on small islands off the mainland because the mainland was full of big nasty monsters that would routinely fuck them over if tried building a civilization on their territory.

Really, anything that has dragons, trolls, giant spiders, and other typical fantasy tropes needs to explain how the hell humans with swords and spears managed to survive in spite of those sort of massive problems.

Either they're so rare that they're just things of legend, in which case why the FUCK do the players keep running into it? Or humanity has something that balances ou

Or a third option, which I don't think is exercised enough; humanity is desperately fighting for survival and not doing particularly hot. If there were kings and empires and general dominance like most settings, there would be focused campaigns to kill the fuck out of anything that threatened humanities existence. Willful and purposeful (and somewhat justified) genocide.

So humans are sailors and fishermen and trying to elk out an existence with constrained space and limited resources. The wide open fields are within sight, but any time they build anything over there, a group of trolls come by and take it all. Any defensive fortification gets razed by a dragon.

bump

My sci-fi setting had underhumans, midhumans and overhumans. Midhumans were charismatic and ambitious, Underhumans were savage yet very communal and empathetic and lastly Overhumans were obsessed with control, hiveminded yet able to retain individual thought.

>Humans are imperialistic, colonizing pieces of shit.
BLM detected

The problem with trying to define what humans are in relation to other sapient races is that we have nothing to compare them to in real life. We have animals, but animals are stoopid, and we don't want other fantasy races to be stoopid, do we?

Whenever we invent fantasy races, they end up based on humanity. It's very difficult to design a sapient fantasy race with complex technology and society WITHOUT taking inspiration from humanity. The only times you see people even try is with some really fringe speculative science fiction. Heck, the very idea of sapience is based off the characteristics we find in humans but not in animals.

Now, there are two ways to make fantasy races based off humanity: give them non-human traits, or exaggerate and focus on certain human traits.

The best example I can think of for the former right now is (I'm so sorry) part-animal monster girl japshit. You're taking a human and grafting on animal bits to both the body and the mind. You get snek girls who shed, are cold-blooded, and take hours to fuck (though admittedly that's mainly for magical realm purposes). The result of this "human + non-human" approach is to bring something foreign (animals in this case) and bringing them close enough to humanity for them to be relatable to us. The whole "furry scale" meme actually does a good job of illustrating this -- it's essentially the extreme end of animal anthropomorphization. It doesn't have to be animals, of course -- it could be machines, natural phenomena, or even plants (as is the case with the Ents in LotR).

For the latter, take dwarves for an example: they are essentially a version of humanity with certain traits of human nature -- industry, ingenuity, loyalty, and avarice -- emphasized. This helps us better understand ourselves by abstracting certain elements of ourselves. This is likely a big part of why they can be so satisfying to roleplay -- they let us take a group of our own personality traits and act them, and only them, out.

>Almost nobody does steampunk correctly though, it's always faffing about with tophats and other boring shit that isn't at all punk.
Despite this being obvious bait I'm going to point out YET AGAIN that steampunk is just a name created by association with cyberpunk, it does not have and never will have any actual, literal punk element to it. Call it victoriana in your mind if it pisses you off so much, just don't expect anything punk-related. It's completely retarded to expect one, let alone whine about how it's not correct if the never-ever-present punk element isn't present.

Cyberpunk also does not contain any actual punk element

Because both of these methods of creating a race use humans as a base to build upon, humans probably ARE going to feel generic by comparison. The only real ways around this are to A) give humans some quirk of their own, or B) leave an empty niche for humans to fill -- if there are elves and gnomes and hobbits and orcs, but no dwarves, humans can take on the role of dwarves.

Both of these two solutions can backfire, though: in the former case, the quirk humans are given can feel contrived and out of place, making the humans feel less human. You can't just give humans wings or horns to make them more interesting. And the second method can go unnoticed altogether if you don't play up the traits that make them a fit for that missing niche -- and if it goes unnoticed, people might ask, "y cant I play dorf" without realizing that the humans ARE the setting's dwarves. Of course, even if they do realize that humans are the new dwarves, they may very well miss the old ones.

TL;DR: Humans are generic because they're the template from which the other races are made. Instead of making humans more interesting, people have a tendency to make a more interesting version of humans, and then just turn that into another race.

>This helps us better understand ourselves by abstracting certain elements of ourselves.
This. Roleplaying is (or should be) centered around exploring and plaing with parts of yourself and how they react to the Other. No phrasing intended.
Bizarre, unrelatable and truly alien races aren't very useful, except in a very specific campaign like delta green or coc. Sure, you can make a world where humans were the first ancestral race or where all the characters come from competing hiveminds of moths, but who'd ever play it.

The best solution I can think of to this dilemma is to take advantage of mankind's relative genericness. Maybe the human's genericness is the very thing that makes them special. Maybe in your worlds creation myth, humans are literally the template from which the gods created the other races. Maybe humans diplomats are common for the purposes of race relations, because they can better empathize with each of the other races individually than the other races can with each other -- that would explain why the human language is called "Common".

>A) give humans some quirk of their own
I'd change this to "a thing other races would define them by"

Like for cultures, on earth, there is no single 'generic' culture, and no single 'nitche' for each culture, but all cultures have things that others define them buy.

I mean, if you're just going for physiology, which ones are 'average' is pretty easy to set, but also not hugely interesting, or enough to make them generic.

For example, I'm working on setting where low level magic is pretty common, and each species is better at using some medium for magic.
Humans use words. Typically in song, but other races also use song, it's human spell songs where the focus is on the words.
Having language spilled into other parts of their culture and reputation.

Of course, this is a very european style of magic, so I needed to have another race exist that does traditional African style magic, but off topic.

I think the two different ways to create a fantasy race that mentions also translate into two different types of roleplay: one about examining who you are, and one about examining who you are not. The former is analogous to races like dwarves, whereas the latter is analogous to races like monster girls.

You can become more familiar with yourself by taking elements of yourself and examining them and playing them, or you can become more familiar with something else by taking the role of that thing. There's a lot of overlap between the two, obviously, but those two different functions that roleplay can perform are distinct.

I think part of the appeal behind the furry fandom is rooted in this: you're either using animal characteristics as a metaphor for yourself (introspective roleplay), or playing around with animal characteristics to explore what you aren't used to (explorative roleplay).

>ill just replace typical elves with humans and typical humans with elves
>im so clever
>im this generation tolkien

That sounds more like "leaving a niche empty" to me. You're having something (in this case, lyrics) that other races must leave out of their respective schticks so it can be part of the human's schtick. After all, they wouldn't define humans by it if it defined them just as much as it defined the humans, now would they?

These niches are, of course, not static. It's perfectly possible to construct a niche differently by changing some of the traits. You can have the niches over lap as much or as little as you like.

The word "niche", as I'm using it, means "a collection of human traits that fit together nicely and form the focus of the race". For dwarves, it's "industry, ingenuity, loyalty, and avarice", not just something retardedly specific like "smithing" or "mining".

What I had in mind when writing the post were either post-posthumans, AIs, or really alien aliens like the euphoric goo in Evangelion. Maybe a mix of all three. Furries were the last thing on my mind. In fact, I often pretend they don't exist.

okay, then we're using the term differently.

I took 'niche' to mean something stronger and more focused. So I get what you are saying, and am okay with it.

But at that level, it's hard to even have distinct cultures, let a long races, if you can't have some being more associated with certain ideas. Or better collection of ideas. Just don't let it get to the point of 'planet of hats' where everyone is defined by that thing and only that thing.

I know that's not what you had on your mind. I was just describing the type of roleplay that results from adding traits to yourself rather than distilling traits from yourself.

Sorry for mentioning furries; I'm an apologist

I meant "niche" in the sense "role to fill". Sorry for the confusion.

I personally make Elves the builders of empires and civilization and tone done their magical ability (while still potent, because they have a lot of time to study it) and make the elves have pseudo-european cultures instead of the humans as most other fantasy does.

Humans, while still capable of great civilizations are the race of great magicians, producing far more mages with far higher potency more than any other race and I base their foremost empires on the Byzantines and pre-islamic ME cultures.

As is expected, Elves and Humans do not get a long as the elves tend to go OOGA BOOGA WHERE DA HUMAN WIMMEN AT.

In my setting I'm working on humans are only the second most populous races, orcs being more common. Humans are pretty good at empire building, diplomacy and deception. Elves are good at magic and weird shit but are fairly rare and have difficulty functioning in society, Orcs are healthy and well rounded, kinda jack of all trade but are often blunt. Dwarves are smart but tend to have more analytical rather than social intelligence.

Can we at least try to keep the autism insults to things that are actually tangibly autistic?

Like, how you saying:
>autists are so obsessed with subverting stereotypes

Is actually not accurate at all, but something more fitting for, ironically enough, an autist to say.

Autism is a meme word devoid of meaning, like cuck.

Use your imagination. You can just make your game so that the "standard" race is literally anything but human. Then you can reflect that mechanically. You can do it like very early D&D and make it so non-humans can't pick a class. You can make a human-only game and use non-humans strictly as NPCs. You can just make a very narrative-focused game so that mechanics don't matter as much. You can ommit humans.

Also, humans being the "average" race comes from D&D and gross misreadings of Tolkien. Read actual mythology and old fantasy literature

>implying there is anything wrong with imperialism or colonization
>implying they aren't moral imperatives

And you're a nigger

Don't try to avoid that. Make humans regular normies who can motivate others easily and awake empathy.

David Weber's Oath of Swords series' setting sort of does this, every other race mutated from humans.
Dwarves were first, then elves, then (race unique to setting), half-elves were created by giving a population of sorcerously gifted humans elf-like longevity in exchange for giving up their magical abilities rather than crossbreeding elves and humans as crossbreeds are sterile.
The youngest race is halflings, no one's sure where they came from, they're assumed to be some sort of fallout from the apocalyptic magical war a few centuries ago.

Humans throw stuff and can walk frighteningly long distances.

Have exceptional individuals as examples instead of trying to pigeonhole entire races.

So, Errant Story?

If you were being faithful to history and your setting, it would work the other way around.
Humans are the jack of all trades, the trick is giving stat bonuses based on what nation they're from or what biome they live in, and adjusting accordingly.

You can avoid having standard humans & instead have some mutated or differentiated offspring of humanity like the Squats, Ogryn or Ratlings. Why should all humans be vanilla humans?

>If you were being faithful to history and your setting, it would work the other way around.
user, despite what your ero-doujins and HFY fics say, elves are not a real thing.

Literally this.

The only humans in my setting are island bound analogues to Hellenistic Greeks. Only thing they got going for them is trade, freedom, dosh, and boats.

What if you injected Dune humans into a fantasy setting and made them the majority of the human population?

You know how Gnomes/Dwarves/Goblins are sometimes made into a tinkerer race, occasionally building steampunk shit? I didn't do that with any of those races in my setting, so I ascribed that trait to the humans.

I make human societies fluctuate and have advantages/disadvantages depending on their given society.

For example (and just using historical societies to make things clear) if I were to have a nation like Sparta they'd be more militaristic in their approach to life. You wouldn't find many casters amongst them nor those particularly interested in intrigue. This would reflect in what those who grow up in this society are good at. You would find them to be of bigger, more athletic builds.

Contrast that with say a society like Athens where there would be a noticable amount of magical users while the governmental halls are filled with up and coming demagogues. While there wouldn't be many good with the blade there are plenty who could see you cut down with the tongue and the staff.

Just because the rule set says they are the "jack of all trades" doesn't mean you need to apply this in every single situation across the spectrum. In my eyes this just means that I have unlimited creative freedom when constructing how a given human society behaves, trains, fights, thinks, and interacts.

this.

there everyone's second enemy. elves hate dorfs for destroying there forest. willing to put up with humans doing some small manageable damage. dorfs hate elves and distrust humans. humans have a hard time getting along with everyone but everyone is willing to put up with them for the time being and treat them as second class citizens

I'm stealing your setting.
Tell me more, Senpai ^^

Literally every sentient species would be like that. The only reason they're not in fantasy is because they don't exist and you make their traits up, so you can do the same shit with humans.

I'm making humans the religious ones. Basically humans were SO generic and boring that when they were invented every little Godling could make them, almost like a mold. The Gods started spinning humans out of silk, fermenting them in wine, sculpting with clay. Humans at the very least give lip service to their creator gods, and most are much more religious.

The other races don't really get it. Everyone, including humans, get a spot in the afterlife by the Beuracracy of Heaven. So the other races don't really give a shit.

First you have to recognize that monocultures are dumb. Then you select traits that would be inherent regardless of culture and build from there. For humans, I take queues from a few aspects of how humans were different from other animals. Humans were great runners, and early tribes literally ran their prey into exhaustion.

As an example: For some D&D homebrew (where all playable races had +2 to a physical stat and +1 to a mental stat) I gave the humans present in the area of the campaign +2 constitution, +1 intelligence, and the Endurance feat for free. They were hardier than most others and trended towards more mobile cultures, taking advantage of their natural ability to cross great distances with relative ease.

By not making them jakc of all trades group of normies with a large population.

It's that fucking simple, you brain-dead cunt