What a strange little creature you are, humans

What a strange little creature you are, humans.

You are weak, squishy, short-lived, untalented in the arcane arts, and pardon me for saying this, not particularly clever either. You have little of the sort of things - flying, fire breath, dominion over nature, inherent divinity - that the fey, the djinn, or my kin would find so trivial. You boast about fast breeding rate and technology, but even in these, goblins have you beat.

You are young. You come to a land already shaped and formed by your elders and try to carve a place of your own in it, like a toddler with a plastic trowel.

And yet... you persist. You survive, thrive even. You have covered the land, slowly pushed the rest of us to its fringes, into the dark places where you have not yet come - but likely will one day. Our time is over.

More curiously still, you resist our blood. In spite of your search for power and love and your - again, pardon me - rather lustful ways, in spite of the many arcane secrets we could teach you, show you in the art of pleasures, and infuse to the very essence of your children, your entire race... it is rare that you would take up on that and produce a half-elf, or a half-dragon.

And then it turns out that this halfbreed, with all his power and might, actually still is left behind by the full-blooded man. Go figure.

It is a riddle to me. I have heard but whispers, rumors, of the key to your success. I hope you may enlighten me on the matter.

Tell me, Veeky Forums... what is this "Ponusfeet" that so empowers you?

It's a little trick that expands our repertoire of abilities, born from ingenuity, talent, or just plain luck.

You'd be surprised what you can learn when you have some spare time and don't have to worry about finding proper fucking clothes, ancient one.

We're annoying. That's it. At the end of the day, we don't do it for god, gold, glory, or four our own race... we do it because we're petty, even amongst ourselves. We do things deliberately because we know someone, somewhere, will be less happy because we did it, and that sounds like fun. Because it makes us feel superior to them in some way. Outbreeding Elves and Dwarves, yet still dominating those who outbreed us? All just petty lust for superiority. Killing a Dragon, or a god? Well, what's more annoying than getting killed when you think you're immortal, or at least very close to it.

In short, there's no reason other than Humanity does it to spite everyone else for shits and giggles.

I tell you. For about tree fiddy.

This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name

Got-dang MONSTER

Sorry, but fantasy HFY is no less stupid than SciFi HFY. Go be somethign of worth on your own instead of trying to have a power fantasy wank based on noting but what species you happened to be born as. Or at the very fuckign least do the wanking in private instead of right in our faces.

Oh, well now we HAVE to make sure this thread hits bump limit, just to shit on this guy's parade.

Or could it be that you support HFY in your own way, knowing that HFY posters are the most stubborn mules the board has to offer, and so decide to benefit the thread by triggering our oppositional defiant nature? If so, thank you, hero.

I'm starting to think you people didn't see the pun on "bonus feat."

We do. It's just not very clever. Besides, I like the Annoying, spiteful HFY. It's very meta, and clever, which just adds to the natural charm of it all.

Well, fantasy and scifi have entirely different approaches to the matter of HFY.

In science fiction, humans are more often than not a weak young species from some backwater little world. HFY is a coping mechanism, an attempt to make ourselves feel all awesome again.

But in fantasy, humans are nearly always a weak young species that's somehow still managed to conquer the whole world from all the mighty and magical elves and dragons. HFY in this case becomes a the way things just are - even a puzzle, namely how the fuck did they do that.

It's far less annoying, because it's less subversive circlejerking and more just trying to figure things out.

Experimentation.

when one doesnt live long but have many young, way more experimentation happens.
If a human fails, who cares.
Long lived races are required to be conservative, they cannot risk losing one of their own.

Plus they spend too much time of their long lives already beeing old and jaded.

Well sir, goblins aren't that bright or strong. A human child with a nice big stick could handle one.

The elves take decades to decide any lasting legal matter. If they declare war on a human nation, when they finally get around to it the humans that offended them are long dead and their children do not take kindly to unprovoked attacks.

The dwarves and gnomes are so longed lived they take their time with every little thing. They can spend long years without looking up from their books, forges, or inventions.

And Hobbits? Please don't insult my people by suggesting we couldn't beat pudgy farmers.

Short lives are a advantage when you feel you must accomplish everything now.

You expect me to know that? Way I see it, it's all some kind of joke the gods play on the rest of us. This one race with no business winning at anything somehow wins at everything, and it's ridiculous!

Somewhere up there, in the high planes, the gods are laughing at us all.

>tfw i thought it was more tolkien dickgourging drivel but its actually a joke

Who else would read part of the instructions, start the test, and then finish the instructions only to realize you were taking a different test than you thought you were?

I accidentally wound up being a military linguist for the same reason.

>All those words
"Ponusfeet" is what you want to call it, dinglebob, then call it that. I call it "Not being a prissy". YOur gods, your story is always some great story about how some bored old god decided to create the perfect being for a purpose - Tougher, faster, stronger, smarter than anything. Well we weren't. If we humans were ever made on purpose I don't know, but I know this: We are not the toughest, meanest, fastest or anything, so we had to learn how to survive. And that we did.

Without eternal life
Without god-given cheatcodes

You learn a lot when you have to fight for survival. When nothing is given to you, you take everything by yourself.

And that is why this is our world. Now lay down, face down, arse up and lemme enroich you culturally.

Humans are the golden standard. Not particularly good at anything but kinda decent at most stuff.

>I'm starting to think you people didn't see the pun on "bonus feat."
That wasn't a pun, so nobody bothered acknowledging it.

If (you) were a little bit clever, you would have had the dragongirl say something about how humans get so much done in such a short time that it's as though the gods gave them extra feet.

Enough of our ancestors hurled themselves into the meatgrinder of creativity that we have a pretty good sense for gambling, whether it's money on the line, or our lives. Think about it. How many dragons are prone to taking big risks with potentially big payoffs? How many elves? Practically zero.

So yeah, there are a lot of amazing humans who have performed unimaginable feats of ingenuity, strength, or guile. But, look behind the curtain, and you'll see the ridiculous pile of bodies that those amazing humans are standing on top of. This doesn't invalidate their achievements, but it sure does explain them.

It's basically the logical conclusion of being all of incredibly numerous, too stupid to recognise obvious danger, and extremely thirsty for any sort of leg-up over our friends and neighbours.

Would a single bonus feat amplified by the sheer number of humanity allow it mechanically to get ahead of other races compared to the +dex- con, meditation and perception bonuses of the elves for example?

Would the sheer utility of the feat prevail?

But with that logic, wouldn't the dexterity bonus of the goblins apply even more, since they're even more numerous than humans?

Yes, but my line of reasoning is that the dexterity (and other) bonuses are static, allowing them only this advantage, while the human's feat (And a floating extra skillpoint) Allow them to have different advantages depending on the area where the human kingdom or whatever is formed.
This is exactly my conundrum, are the floating human bonuses better in the long run for the civilization than the static ones of the other races.

Pretty much. Humanity as a whole can't challenge any one race in their preferred niche, but the whole of humanity (or a sufficiently large population, at any rate) can challenge them on all the fields that that race is inherently mediocre/poor in.

This is the advantage of generalists in a large population, and part of the reason the majority of any military are generalists. If the whole military was only good at a single thing then they could get rolled over by any other military that was only passingly competent in the doctrine that ran counter to theirs.

There's also the propensity for humans to make use of anything and everything if it'll get them an edge. Even the most conservative human populations in fantasy are still less stubborn than dwarves or elves, but still more responsible in application of magic and technology than savage races like the orcs or goblins.