Humans are "diverse"

Mine are sort of adaptable diplomats, engineers and artists.

This is all based on human Pattern Recognition, which is greater than any other race. This Pattern Recognition is what makes languages, machines and many other ideas easier for Humans.

assholes with a sense of smug superiority. Everyone hates them.

>humans are intelligent
>humans are creative

Humans are also extinct and their creations, organic or inorganic are fighting a major war to decide who becomes the heirs to their legacy.

The Tribes of Man Innumerable reckon in the thousands. Humans are worse than cockroaches. We survive. We adapt. We continue.
Humanity is less about biology and more about History.

Just like in real life!

The humans in my realm are completely unique — first and foremost, they all live in their mountain fortresses and make a stake in the world through their smithing and gemcutting. They might've been made famous by their world-renowned craftsmanship, but they have a reputation for being brutish yet honorable warriors, often going into battle with a Human axe in one hand and a mug of Human ale in the other. Also, given their penchant for tight quarters, they have evolved to stand at as high as 4'8" at their tallest. Another defining characteristic is their complete baldness, which they maintain to stop rocks or something from getting tangled in their hair.

To elaborate, Elves, etc aren't really inhuman. just Also-human. Humanish, is still mostly human.
Humanity and purity of Homo Sapiens-ity arent the same.

Post Homo humanity, humanity as a mind set. a soul-set.

Viral sapience, meme speciation.

Human are viscous.

Humans are tenacious.

No matter what enemy we face they shall underestimate the bottomless malice within the human heart.

Are there creatures in your setting that are biologically of the human species but "don't count?"

Underrated post.

The humans in my campaign are sourced back to their godly ancestors who would only sleep with their own kind to the point where humans are basically personifications of stupidity with a heavily diluted divine spark in them.

This gives them plot armor, so all other superior races can't push their inbred-shit in.

Humans are tinkerers. They constantly fiddle with mechanical bits and bobs and just don't seem at ease without something to occupy their hands. It could be as simple as restringing a bow or as complex as fixing a watch, humans will do it absentmindedly while having a conversation. If a human puts his mind to being an inventor or engineer he will surpass all but the geniuses and most dedicated members of another race.
Basically what some settings do with gnomes/goblins.

>Human are viscous
Kek

Humans have the best endurance and physical stamina. Orcs and dwarves are stronger, elves are faster, but they burn out much sooner than a human.

The 'humans will sleep with anything' stereotype exists, but this doesn't represent anything psychological or even cultural about humans; Lone wanderers travelling in the lands of other races, the kind of people most likely to be up for interspecies experimentation, are more usually male than female, and human males have acquired a reputation for lasting longer than just about any other race. Non-human males travelling in human lands, on the other hand, have acquired a reputation for being disappointing, and get shot down a lot more if they try anything.

Humans are descended from shapeshifting giants and some of their ancestors powers remain latent within them.

Being extinct

Humans are psychologically resilient to the point of unbreakable. Elves might be faster, dwarves might be sturdier, orcs might be stronger, but a human just never quits.

>What is humanity's "thing" in your home game, Veeky Forums?
They are the only race in the setting.
>But I said "no setting where there are only humans"!
No, quite literally there are no other races - no other animals or plants, sapient/sentient or not. They had to evolve to subsist on pure energy.

Humans are merchants to the highest degree
>You want a weapon? Go to the Human shop, he'll sell you a damn good sword at half the cost of Bori Ironcopperbeard
>You want slaves? Human slave-owner has them by the dozen, just avoid the elven ones, they bite.
>You want to be important? Buy a title from the Humans, there are dozens of them at premium rates.
>You want to have some comfort? Human prostitutes, fairly inexpensive and not to hard to look out when you get over their . . . plainness.
>You want a wife? Buy one from a Merchant Lord's family, you know there are reasons you see Half-everythings these days.
Humanity will buy and sell anything, hell, they even bought themselves a patron deity.

Define 'doesnt count'

Orchir are a tribe of savage humans who hunt trolls as a rite of passage, implanting the tusks/teeth of their prey into their body, it's regenerative properties causing the tooth to attach. the resulting 'tusked man' may appear inhuman. Warlords may go so far as to implant an entire mouth-load of troll teeth into their shoulders and back. blood mingles. Trollish genetic memory asserts itself in red rushes of akashic wholeness. Hail the Lord of the Wounds. Bikkati Bikkati Vrakka Mesh-Thoun

they also braid their hair.

>humans are viscous
Gotta admit, that's a pretty unique setting you got there.

Humans are team "Hold My Beer and Watch This."

Man, you guys will love this. The humans in my campaign are circle jerking fagbananas who desperately try to one-up each other by ranting about their unoriginal gay-ass ideas. They scoff at other races' ideas as banal and boring while failing to realize their own shortcomings as a race.

>Babe faced surfacers trying to steal Dwarven-kinds trait

When you eat nothing but earth worms and fungus for months because the goblins blockaded all the caverns out of the hold and then dug out a whole new cavern with nothing but picks and then killed them with broken said picks, you can have it you dumb fuck manling.

I take it you play one?

>Define 'doesnt count'
Are not or widely considered to not be part of the humanity-as-a-mind/soul-set thing you were talking about.

Everyone does in the setting.

Humans are just the result of halflings that were magically experimented on by [precursor race]. Many have since migrated from the rolling farmlands of civilization to the forests, mountains, swamps, and magical wastelands because they have double the curiosity and bravery of halflings.

REKT

Humans are empty vessels, waiting to be filled.

The gods love them.

All the time. The boost they get to their self-esteem factor scales with your sarcasm and satire skills, which is just nuts when you hit prime runner levels.

Of course. I mean, optimization is everything, right? Cultures are for schlocks.

Sapience is the divine right of humanity. Humanity is self-defining.

If a thing /can/ say it is human, it has all the qualities of humanty.

also mute people and the handicapped cause Veeky Forums autists love loopholes

So if humans are derivative of halflings are humans called twice-highs?

Fair enough. Just wondering if there were any weird edge cases defining the borders.

In my setting, languages are gifts from the Gods. Humans are the only people capable of LEARNING a language rather than being blessed with one.

Humans have an insatiable curiosity - they want to know anything and everything. The more forbidden the stronger they want it. They're the race that's the first to ask "Why?"

You'd think that would make them scientists and scholars, but it doesn't. There's other races that are far smarter and wiser.

No, it makes them thieves, spies and infiltrators of the highest order. Because they really REALLY want to know everybody else's secrets.

They write HFY fiction and sell it to the other races who think it's some sort of satire or jape.

There very well may be in the Tribes Innumerable.
Many Tribes of Mankind claim the blood of monsters, giants, animals, - even demons or spirits. but what defines humanity? at what line is humanity crossed? too little human, too much?
What is a half-human?
What is human?
What is a person?

Splintered.

Whereas most races rally around their planet and form an empire based on race, humans didn't have that option (long story short, a weeabo dragon bought earth and turned it into a time capsule). Humanity instead splintered into a bunch of different factions, all with their own goals, beliefs, and history.
If it wasn't for this they'd be the most powerful race in the galaxy, but the only thing that would motivate them to stop fighting each other is if someone tries to conquer earth. The last race who tried that is nearly extinct now.

You. I want to read your homebrew.

faggot

>humanities power is the power of hatred
I can dig it.

Had a setting I was planning where Humans are new to the scene, but they're defined differently by their opponents.

They basically seemingly "appeared" one day, and The Elves used them as mercenaries in a war against a rampaging Orcish Horde. The Humans (based to a degree on early Anglo-Saxons to the Elves' Roman Aesthetic) essentially negotiated a deal where they would be given significant a not-so insignificant amount of land in a territory well beyond the Empire's fringes and that's long been lost to Orcs.

Not only did they do their job well, they did it terrifyingly well. While The Elves were basically content to basically create a "killzone" along their borders to keep The Orcs from thinking about moving West, Humans hunted them down and kept driving them further and further east.

Now Humans basically stand as a kind of early, United Empire of sorts. To The Elves they're kind of a disturbingly effective younger race they want to nurture (thus they assist humans with architecture and governance, partially out of fear), while to Orcs they're more like Terminators than people.

Humanity's hat is basically what we're known for due to evolution: Stamina. They aren't the strongest or fastest, but Humans don't ever seem to stop. They seem to keep hunting you down well past the point it was sensible or even *worthwhile*.

Humans are a mostly coastal-fairing race and descendants of the first dwarves to reach the surface, which adapts to environs and due to this has reached places in the world the water-fearing dwarves do not. Various racial demographics exist between them due to this, and their adaptive nature means that they've often experimented upon themselves to cause change, or unwittingly mutated due to wild magic far more readily than other races.

Of the four elements the races of dwarfkin can be categorized under, humans are water.

They are the protagonist race. Despite supposedly being balanced, they always end up having the strongest fighter, the most powerful wizard, the most legendary thief. The other races are either idiots or shot themselves in the foot back in some ancient times, to make sure that the humans can spread without much resistance. The humans feel an unnecessary amount of self-importance because of this.

...Why would they have a "thing"? They're just people. They do whatever people do.

Humans are... there. Since all my players are playing long-lived races (elves, dwarves, and the like) the campaign takes place over decades, often involving great time skips, so part of the theme is that these long-lived races stay the same while the humans are replaced with great regularity, borders of human kigndoms expand and contract, entire lineages rise and fall, and all the while the PC's are basically drinking and doing odd adventuring jobs for cash.

My humans are Slavs. They are liked by almost everyone. Elves like them, because they both worship nature and fuck bears. Dwarves like them because they both drink heavily, have beards and fuck bears. Orcs like them because they are both primitive savages, fight among themselves and fuck bears.
Only goblins don't like them, because they both steal everything they can find, but goblins don't fuck bears.

Netero proved that humans are simply better than Chimera Ants.

I like urban fantasy settings where humans don't have a "thing" but the fantasy races don't have stupidly expansive organisations behind the mascarade.
The thing of humans is just that they fit in, they're entitled to more contacts and they don't have to hide. They also don't have weaknesses to things like daylight.
Meanwhile vamps, fae and the like will porbably have one bartenders and two regulars from a small bar worth of contacts. They also have the usual weaknesses in a world that's built for humans.
This makes fantasy races a lot more powerful defensively if they get a neat batcave but I don't let the game become sedentary most of the time.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=CIGHCoVzqtk

Elves are jungle aztecs Apocalypto style and dwarfs are df/tolkien while humans:

They are romans with colonial aspirations.
The only race that is constantly in war with itself and anything that happens to be in their way.
Therefor the only race to have a professional standing army worth a damn.
I'm thinking of giving human pc's the power of blood, mechanically similar to Conan the barbarian where if you do a vicious act you get more powerful.

I sense a magical realm but I also like your creativity.

I take it your setting has name based demonology?

Humanity is genetically malleable and easily psionically dominated. This has resulted in them being spread across half the multiverse by one alien empire or another, as they can adapt to a wide range of environments with only a little effort and can be easily induced to worship their masters as gods.
Perhaps not the most dignified of niches to occupy, but at this point wiping out humanity would require the destruction of a good chunk of the universe, so from an evolutionary perspective it has its upsides.

In my world, the main race of humans are massive racist (and mideval french design themed) cunts. They are at war with the other dominant race which are the elves, equally racist (and Asian Indian themed) cunts. They basically just stomp around all over everything while slapping their dicks on eachother in a massive war, while shitting on the lesser races like Dwarves (who are pacific islander themed) and Orcs (which are a sentient player race).

Humans are the extinct ancient empire.

Forces everyone to make a somewhat interesting character, the safest choice is gone.

I like this. It could make for some interesting backstory, with a bit of tweaking.
>Despite being known for spawning powerful psychics, humans are more vulnerable to psychic mental manipulation, and possess fewer psi-immune members per capita, than any other species.
>Human history is time and time again marred with the wreckage of powerful psychics building empires that scatter immediately upon their death.
>Human vulnerability to psychic influence also makes them more likely to be 'possessed' by items of great attraction and value, or swept up in the course of a charismatic leader.
>This means that while humans have as many heroes and villains as any other people, their villains are more villainous. Their heroes must be even greater to overcome them, but that's little consolation to the victims such heroes fail to protect in time.

The humans of my setting were created as a joint effort by the whole godly pantheon to have conduits to divine power scattered throughout the world. They're adaptable and hardy so that they can be found near the core of each race's (created by their own god) territorial expanse. They are subject to more godly influence through religion and find it easy to connect to any member of the pantheon. In a real emergency situation (one God goes crazy and its mortal followers start waging holy war, which happened once in the past) all of humanity can be hijacked by the gods to put that problem down.

They got ass-blisteringly powerful tech first and used it to conquer everyone else Roman Empire-style.

Humans are the crazy innovators of the setting. Using engines as an example, let's say you give a 6-cylinder internal combustion engine to an elf, a dwarf, and a human and tell them each to improve the design. The elf would make the engine lighter and more efficient. The dwarf would add a turbocharger, supercharger, and an extra pair of cylinders. The human would mutter something about it being boring, throw it out, and build a rotary engine.

Here it is, I think.

The universe was created by godlike (but non-god) beings who expended most of their power creating the universe and it's inhabitants, under the assumption that the mortals worshiping the would make them stronger. Instead the mortals came up with their own gods and worshiped those instead. The gods wanted more worshipers so they collectively created a new race specifically to be worshipers. Those are the humans.

Determination and power of will, to the point of insanity. The only being to achieve true and actual godhood in the setting was a human willing to give all and do the impossible to save everything from being devoured by raw psychic energy. The setting revolvs around the planet where the his ascendance was held, thousands of years ago, with demonic remains and ancient Empire's spaceships scattered under the planet's healed surface. The only humans there are the descendants of the capital ship's crew, that formed a city in the titan's wreckage. They are more akin to Noldor from LoTR and are unplayable. The playable races consist of dragonborn, elves and dwarves which are the result of chaotic energies changing the survivors of other battleships that were unable to protect themselves with void shields, when the final battle commenced.

Last six months our villian was a human who decided to conquer the world, because he thought he could govern it better.

The core races are related with humans being the most like their common ancestor race, they're the most flexible but suffer from all the vices, where each of the other races tends to focus more on one, meaning they're less easily distracted.

Dwarves are greedy, wanting more and more.
Gnomes are Lazy, why do something yourself when you can get someone bigger to do it for you?
Hobbits are lustful little fuckers, seeking pleasure above all.
Elves are Prideful to a fault, they won't accept help.
Dark elves are Wrathful, seething with hate the moment someone even thinks of crossing them.
Ogres are envious, raiding the "Lesser" races to take what they have because THEY deserve it more (since they're bigger and better!)
Orcs are gluttonous; kill, eat, repeat.

And Humans are all 7.

my setting is very innistrad/horror inspired, so humans are plucky, determined underdogs.

Humans are from another world. Also, they're highly mutable. Within a few hundred years of arriving they'd split into humans, dwarves and elves.

There's nothing special about them. My setting has no racial stats though, you can play as pretty much anything as long as I ok it.

Delicious to mindflayers

An experiment with mixing dwarves and elves

being a deathworld warrior species that has a xenophillic bent so they can be trusted to interact with aliens without freaking out and trying to murder them.

though their relatively highly developed emotional capacity and intellectual capacity leaves them more prone to PTSD than most intergalactic warrior species.

They come 2nd for largest, most physically impressive species and the best millitary race because they than better train into specific roles and disciplines due to the larger race being relatively unsocialable and therefore prefering generalism as opposedto specialisation.

They're all that, like real humans. It's the other races who lack some or all of those features, since they're not humans.

It's funny how you can tell what a person's ultimate wish fulfilment fantasy is by hearing them say what they would the core trait of humanity in an SF/fantasy setting. I get it that we humans want to have a special place in whatever settings we create, but it seems very strange to me that very, very few people admit to that being the case simply because that we first think about ourselves outright.

Huh, interesting question. I'd never really given it any thought, but if I had to say, it'd be their versatility and their mastery over the magitek of the setting.

Oh, also humans are muscular and strong, at least compared to the rest of civilized species. But it's more due to most of the other guys having penalties to physical stats than a human feature.

Greatly divided and the most populous race in the world.

Humans don't really get a thing as they're what every other race is compared to.

>Humans are "expendable"

I love that Harlan Ellison played AM in that game.

>In this dark time of divine warfare, Humans must choose Good or Evil. The Fate of their world may depend on that choice.

None because fantasy races being defined by a single characteristic is fucking stupid and lazy.

Humans in my setting can crossbreed with basically every other humanoid, whereas everything else has massive difficulty crossbreeding.

Also, most humans have massive difficulty breeding between themselves.

So I guess there's not a lot of pure humans around anymore, and so therefore they're prized for no reason other than novelty.

wow im really digging this
>5 year old post
hope ya get my (You) OP

They used to be a non-playable, elder race that is now slowly dying off. They tend to stay in their slowly decaying cities, working on projects too complex for lesser beings to grasp. Nowadays thanks to the players failing to stop +2000 of their brightest archanists fusing together forming a new god (and by doing so killing half of the already existing pantheon and fucking over the world) they've started to recover in numbers and strength and have begun again to take a more proactive role in the world.

What I find funny is how you can barely find anything about them being defined by some flaws, like the elves pride and dwarves greed. Humans are the biggest Mary Sues.

Alone. So depressingly alone. They ventured to the stars in hopes of proving there were others out there, and they found none. They created quantum computers and artificial intelligences, but never managed to imbue them with a "soul", a thing that sets life apart from machines. And so they are, meddling with genes, in hopes of building companions. But human imagination is limited, and they either end up with creatures that fall into the "human" or "animal" category, or with soulless flesh-machines.

They are lucky.

Things that should fail seemed touched by divine chance when a human is part of the team.

>pride is a flaw

Proud, prideful, haughty, lofty. Of couse it can be a flaw.

>They fuck bears
kek

That's false, in a lot of settings humans have corruption.

Also pride/arrogance is a faux flaw that elves normally share with other races including humans and dwarves, who may be less pompous but rarely are more humble than elves.