Most fantasies are like this

Dragons & Elves: Immortal and powerful magic, natural ruling class. Take someone like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Napoleon and make them immortal and give them magic and sooner or later they'd take over the world. However dragons are naturally slothful so elves would do most of the actual ruling, dragons get food and gold without having to do boring paperwork and elves get a nuclear option if they ever need one, everybody wins.
Dwarves: Best craftsmen, Dwarven Guilds would be king, nuff said.
Humans: Most populous but have no innate skills, farmers and unskilled laborers.
Orcs: Naturally Chaotic and live by pillaging, Nomads.

Literally Shadowrun.

>Elves - upper class
>Dwarves - middle class

I see how it is now, OP is a dirty elfposter

No, it should be like this:

High Elves - rulers
Wood Elves - quaint country folk with cute customs for vacationing with
Dark Elves - entertainment workers, whores
Humans - extinct
Dwarves - extinct
Dragons - extinct
Orcs - scary foreign communists

How about we don't just shoehorn fantasy races into a setting unless you have a better use for them than a poor man's originality 'le social class' meme.

Name some then.

perfect

I don't have any, that's why I don't shoehorn fantasy races into my setting. I could see it if someone was talented at presenting a race that has an entirely different way of thinking than humans do, but I myself am not capable of this.

>dragons
>elves
>dwarves
giving a shit about lame human political structures

god damn I hate elves

>only put humans in your fantasy setting
Great advice, now fuck off.

Just pretend like I put a meme arrow on that last sentence, fellas.

My immersion is ruined

>Dragons, Elves, Dwarves, and Humans all inhabit different class structures in a system
>Orcs inhabit every echelon of their own equally complex system with just as many tiers of society

Does this mean that when Orcs inevitability use their "OP pls nerf" nomad empire building powers to take over nations they start acting like the Draconic ruling class, before said group of orcs gets conquered by another group of orcs not cosplaying as dragons?

Lets be real for a second, ok:
Dragons are dumb animals, unless they are chinese dragons. Dragons are the niggers of the sky. So they would be ahunter trophy and a pest if northing else.

Elves are gay tree-lovers, and would probably be into bestiality and phytophilia, so they would be modern germany. Fucking degenerate. Furthermore their tree-loving nature would make them unsivalized red-skins. The technologically advanced of them would be smarter than the smartest humans though, but that would just add to human contempt for them.

Dwarves: the midgets of an fantasy setting. They're greedy, loud, almost always hammered, and generally rude. They are the irishman of the fantasy setting and as such are seen below elves. They have their own functioning society though, and since they live like mole people only bastards as greedy as them would ever want to enter their shitty holds/fortresses.

Humans: Smart monkeys. Generaly pieces of shit, but opportunists. Therefore they almost always win civilization wise. They are weak so they make instruments or use orcs to do the hard work for them and have this petty thing called "morality" and "religion" which keeps them from regressing to dwarf or elve levels of niggerdom. Unfortunately out of the lot they are the least reprehensible and thus the only ones anyone would want to side with.

Orcs: Fucking Unga Gunga Bungas. They are the somalis of fantasy land: retarded, communistic, steal shit, but hey at least they're stong! They are below even elves (worse than even dwarves) and are generally enslaved by humans because of just how fucking dumb they are. Literally anyone (even dumbfuck elves) can take advantage of these fuckers. If gods exist, they certainly cursed these fuckers since nothing goes right when they're around. Incapable of forming their own societies, wander around like fucking nigger cattle, the smartest of them hate their own fucking race and prefer to be in the company of humans.

>t. farmer hamslock hobbitsley the third, esq.

Dont even get me fucking started on hobbits. The fucking neckbeards of fantasyland.

>Most fantasies are like this
>Humans - rule the world
>Elves and Dwarves - have a few city states
>Dragon - live in caves
I agree, this is pretty common.

>When it should be like this
>Dragons - rulers
Why would dragons rule? They don't have arms and thus couldn't sign any agreement.

>Elves - administers
Why would elves be good administrators? No setting I have read has ever mentioned elves being good at math or having people's skills.

>Dwarves - middle class
Dwarfs are protrayed as craftsmen (smiths) and miners. While smiths are held in high regard and were well payed miners were in most cases low-income workers or slaves.

>Humans - peasants
But if we look at medieval society humans do fulfill all of the other roles as well. Why would humans just be peasants here?

>Orcs - nomads
And who would be middle class orcs? Who would be ruler orcs? Administrator orcs? Do each nomadic orc tribe have their own dragon ruler? A small group of elf admins? A larger group of middle class dwarfs?

You can't divide human society into multiple parts and then assign a different race to each part and then have orcs use a different type of human society and not assign various other races control over other sectors of life there.

>Someone who maintains that mirrorshade sunglasses never went out of fashion

But they didn't

Depends on the setting.

Humanity wouldn't put up with this shit
unless all the other races kept humanity down with regular culling they'd break free and use superior numbers to commit genocide against all other races

>Humans
>win civilization wise

Dragons and elves don't have the numbers to compete with orcs or humans
Dwarves dont have the numbers and dont like leaving their holes in the ground
Orcs have a love-hate abusive relationship with humanity

Humanity has the numbers, the lack of responsibility, pride and the ambition to conquer any world they exist in regardless of the cost

Who includes nomads as a social class? Nomads can have kings and princes and merchants and nobles and so on like anyone else.

not to mention human are the only ones who bother creating machines

Skeletons very much have the ability to crap on everything. negativ energy is leagues above positive energy.

The sheer power of negative makes fleshlings irrelevant.

skeletons>a rancid shit on the sidewalk in the middle of a heavy rain someone stepped on>>>>>>>>>>>>elves

whatever lets you sleep at night, m8

Orcs, goblins, and dwarves do that too in various settings because they love war and greed respectively and that means machines for war and greed. And lord know that there's always going to be the retarded steampunk gnomes and shit that people like to chuck into otherwise decent fantasy.

Well dragons are usually solitary, and elves tend to prefer only dealing with elves if they have to, so those two I completely disagree with right off the bat.
Dwarves have actual disposition to manual labor, so that's kind of flawed even though they are also often depicted taking the various middle class roles
An entire race that does nothing aside from being peasants would be boring at best
And you're forgetting that orcs have historically had light sensitivity (basically until more recently when the difference between half orc and orc had lessened quite a bit) which I think would at least partially impede them as nomads

Skeletons and elves share the +2 dex bonus and the immortality, however skeletons
> live without food and water
> live without air
> don't sleep or go into a trance
> them claw attacks
> that natural armor
> that DR 5/blunt

And those are just the basic skeletons.

>Dragons and elves don't have the numbers to compete with orcs or humans
One pleb tier dragon could've destroyed all of medieval Europe. The fact is 99.9% of humans/orcs don't matter, only the tiny minority of them who are mages and there aren't enough of them to compete with dragons or elves. So you could say there is a number problem but it isn't in humanity's favor.
>Dwarves dont have the numbers
To do what? Take over the world? Probably not. But to take over every artisan job in Europe? Probably. You've got to remember that in the medieval days over 90% of people were farmers and unskilled laborers, Dwarves are great at jobs that require construction or craftsmanship and there are so few jobs like that in a medieval setting that they could easily corner the market.
>Orcs have a love-hate abusive relationship with humanity
Ok?
>Humanity has the numbers, the lack of responsibility, pride and the ambition to conquer any world they exist in regardless of the cost
Literally none of those things matter. Numbers don't matter if your enemy can rain fire on your head and "lack of responsibility, pride and the ambition to conquer any world" don't do you any good if you don't have the tools to achieve victory. But keep thinking like a Jap in WWII, I'm sure it will take you far.

You realize that humans can reach points in which they can take a dragon ez pz.

Just saying.

For example, read the cosmic section on pic related

Around Elves, watch yourselves...

Every setting that has dragons has at least a few humans who can actually go toe to toe with them

>implying the human peasantry wouldn't rise against their draconic overlords and the elvish bourgeoisie.

Nice try dragon/tg/.

Humanity has a real knack for making fucked up weapons and traps to catch and kill large creatures

Dragons would get fucked if they let humanity live long enough to make anti-dragon weapons and hunting gear and tactics

Dragons have to land at some point, they have to feed, they have to sleep in each of these situations they're vulnerable

this, also what prevents dwarves and elves from doing the same?

>Dragon attacks medieval europe
Have you even picked up a history book?
Cue the catholic church declaring a holy crusade to slay the dragon
Every fucking monarch would be tripping over themselves and each other trying to kill that thing
It would be a massive arms race to come up with the best weapon to kill it
The riches of every kingdom would have been poured into finding and killing it
This would have "united" all of Christendom (however briefly)
At best competing kings would have tried to sabotage one another's attempts

I don't think user was arguing whether or not the other races could kill dragons
Just that humans could

>implying the real humans wouldn't be throwing your subhuman communist asses off our glorious dragons

>actually "riding" your overlord
lmao this is what feudalists actually believe

riding coattails more like bootlicker

>The fact is 99.9% of humans/orcs don't matter, only the tiny minority of them who are mages and there aren't enough of them to compete with dragons or elves. So you could say there is a number problem but it isn't in humanity's favor.
>Humanity has a real knack for making fucked up weapons and traps to catch and kill large creatures
Like what?
>Dragons would get fucked if they let humanity live long enough to make anti-dragon weapons and hunting gear and tactics
Like what?
>Dragons have to land at some point, they have to feed, they have to sleep in each of these situations they're vulnerable
Dragon's can eat after they burn all the humans in the area to death and they can sleep in areas where humans can't reach.

>Dragons would get fucked if they let humanity live long enough to make anti-dragon weapons and hunting gear and tactics
Well I guess in that case dragons probably wouldn't let humanity reach that point. If intelligent dragons existed and humans were to ever to reach that point, then that means the dragons as a race fucked up in a big way.

It's not like it would be hard. Before the Industrial Age, the only things we had that would've been at all useful against dragons would've been ballistas, I guess on rotating platforms on top of towers, and even those wouldn't have been a massive OP game changer -- you still have to turn and fire this massive ballista and try to hit this flying, fast-moving, fire-breathing creature.

As for hunting gear and tactics... No, I really don't see it. If we're talking human hunting parties, then unless they catch the dragon sleeping, there is absolutely no way anything less than a batallion of humans armed with Chinese siege crossbows is doing shit to it. Maybe bows or crossbows if dragons have a soft underside.

And before you say "pikes" pikes only work on horsemen because horses are stupid animals. A dragon could just, y'know, not swoop directly into the wall of pikes and shields. A dragon could just, y'know, breathe fire at them, or maybe lift and drop large objects onto them if there's any nearby and it's feeling frisky.

Now, yeah, they could catch it sleeping. But likewise, what stops dragons from just swooping in and burning down human settlements/adventurer campsites at night while the humans are sleeping? I mean besides the fact that they wouldn't need to rely on surprise to kill humans?

>doesn't mean that the humans will accept being on the bottom of the social structure for long.
What are the gonna do? Commit suicide?

>HFYshit

You also forget how easily content people are and will be

Maybe in a 'wacky and silly' casual game.

Now, good world builders give each race a large area of land, such as a continent, from whence they orignate. Then they consider the age of the world and develop living societies (and consider if any nations or societies went extinct).

Dragons - everyone
Elves - eaten by dragons
Dwarves - eaten by dragons
Humans - eaten by dragons
Orcs - eaten by dragons

Races don't necessarily belong to the same society.
Also dragons don't have time for this ruling shit when they can sleep, eat and fuck at their leisure without dealing with what are basically animals to them

>humans have no skills
>made the computer youre currently using to tell us this
>actually crafted everything you imagine dwarves to be able to craft
>conceived the entirety of the mythology

Guys humans are just farmers and laborers lul

>pikes only work on horsemen because horses are stupid animals.

>Most humans are peasants
>Loe percetaje of humans make inovations/science/etc.
>Human adapts to everything, Dwarfs and Elves cannot

>Loe percetaje
wat
>Dwarfs and Elves cannot
why wouldn't they?

It's true though. Not sure what the issue is. The reason pikes are effective against horses is because horses are dumb enough to charge into them. Dragons wouldn't be.

Pikes are effective against literally everyone. No one could defeat the tercio or the phalanx, and those are over a thousand years apart.

Of course, because that's how it was back a few hundred years ago minus the magic.

More like the glorious Humans dominate everything and wipe out the impure and unclean. Slaughtering every other race down to the last child.

Dragons are kept in harems tho

>Elves try to overthrow the dragons
>Kill some drive off some into caves
>Dwarves try to overthrow weakened elves
>Magical war ensues, populations drastically reduced, no clear victor, segregation, Elves and Dwarves - have a few city states
>No one left, Humans - rule the world

No one could fly or breathe fire.

The point is, pikes work on everything, not just horses.

Similarly, no battlefield tactic would be able to defeat a flying fire-breathing creature.

Yeah, that's my point. I mentioned pikes because that's something I've heard occasionally.

"all you'd need is pikes! those are effective against cavalry and that's basically what dragons are! the dragon would try to swoop down and get impaled! ahaha fuck you dragon hfy!"

Ambitious humans will try and work their way into positions of power.
It becomes harder for dwarven merchants to make a profit if the smarter humans have formed a collective grain cartel and do a better job of negotiating prices.
It becomes harder for the elves to assess tithes if the same collectives also provide assistance with concealing the surplus produce.
It becomes harder for the dragons to enforce their rule if they have to keep having to order peasants relocated to repopulate areas where they wiped out the rebellious inhabitants, possibly having sustained injuries and even fatalities (depending on the humans' resourcefulness and ingenuity) during the process.

Phalanxes were beaten by the more mobile and tactically flexible cohort structure of the roman legions, tercios were only effective when they were supporting/ supported by missile troops, at least until the range, reliability and rate of fire of the missile troops made them self supporting.
So smaller, more mobile, pike blocks interspersed with volley firing missile weaponry formations could well hold their own against dragons.

>dragon rulers
Not really. Yeah, they're all scary and shit. Buuut people can kill them. And they don't care about ruling, just want their gold and nesting sites. They're just terror lizard magpies.

>elves as administrators
Why? Because they live for ages? The fuckers hate messing with nature. Guess were paper comes from for the administrational documents?

>Dwarfs middle class
Because social class is racial, apparently? An 'we like to drink and mine' are somehow middle class?

>human peasants
This is bait

>h-hur balastias take ages
The roman war machine would like a word with you, user.
Or would you prefer Byzantine flamethrowers to the face?

>dragons
Naturally strong, but too lazy to bother ruling
>Elves and dwarfs
Natural bonuses, but too focused on 'smugness' and 'muh ale and gems'
>Humans
actually able to adapt and grow
>orcs
Literal rodents

>Dark Elves Whores
Patrician Taste spotted

>However dragons are naturally slothful so elves would do most of the actual ruling, dragons get food and gold without having to do boring paperwork and elves get a nuclear option if they ever need one, everybody wins.

Yeah that's called Shadowrun.
Read a book sometime.

Human history is a lot older than the Romans, user. Also, Romans didn't deal with flying, fast-moving targets, much less ones that also breathe fire. Do you really think quick, accurate aiming is a thing you can do with a ballista? Aiming at all is barely a thing you do with ballistas.

How about recommending fantasy instead of cyberpunk trash?

Early missile weapons were rarely precision instruments like a modern sniper rifle, hence firing in volleys.
You don't have to be that accurate when there's enough of you firing to cover an area equivalent to a couple of football fields...

Dragons don't need to fight human armies to destroy human nations. Dragons could burn down human farmland and towns and eat to their hearts content, then sit around waiting for days for a human army to show up and fly away and do it again somewhere else. Basically imagine a nonstop 30 Years War.

You do realize that firearms came about in the late middle ages?
Read a fucking book user or just take the time to look up what your talking about before you shoot your mouth off like an idiot.

... Yes? Cannons face the same issues as ballistas (but worse since cannons take longer to load and fire). Hand cannons are a joke, and even with arquebuses it would be really difficult to take down a dragon.

I suppose I should've seen your autism coming said "anything less than a batallion of humans armed with gunpowder or Chinese siege crossbows," but I figured the gunpowder part would go without saying since anything siege crossbows can take out, gunpowder weapons could (beyond fire lances) take out. I guess I forgot how much trouble autists have with unstated implications.

>Thinking that the humans wouldn't wait until the harvest was in and dispersed to multiple, camouflaged, underground and fireproof granaries.
>Thinking they wouldn't have applied the same strategy to their essential industries and population centres, leaving the uninhabited towns as bait for the fantasy equivalent of a "flak trap".

>Dragons
>even bothering with ruling mortal kingdoms, what with enough generations dying in the time it takes their ruler to blink to forget who their ruler is

>Elves
>being capable enough administrators to react to immediate problems like storms and plagues when time means nothing to them

This is pretty good.

>Elves
>Not being the Austrians of your setting
Politically dominant, highly cultured and haughty nation which controls half the civilized world through marriages and treaties. Losing entire bloodlines of their monarchy through inbreeding is considered a minor setback. They can't fight very well in actual wars, but they've mastered the art of not needing to fight to begin with.

>When it should be like this
>Dragons - rulers
Literally the only thing I can agree with you on.

1/5, see me after class.

Why would they *want* to? Human races barely cooperate and are almost never divided neatly into class roles when we do. Why be stuck being a peasant ruled over by tree huggers and scaley death machines when you could be a king ruling over your own kind?

You're falling into the fallacy of believing fantasy races would not be even more specialized at doing things we can already do. Who's to say dwarves wouldn't have figured out electronics 200 years before humans did? Why would elven mythology not be even more dense and varied than our own?

>Implying that dragons are more than just gold-hoarding beasts.

Let's be honest here, a world with all those races existing at the same time isn't happening unless magic or handwaving is directly involved. Whichever is the oldest and most intelligent of the races is going to exterminate or halt the progress of all the others and live a life unchallenged like humans are on earth.

In one of the more traditional fantasy settings I ran, humans and orcs couldn't interbreed but were good friends for cultural and religious reasons. So you had these two large blobs of territory in the middle of everyone else that no one could clear out because their rival empires would attack and the codominions or brotherhood of the plains were valuable mercenaries.

Humans as Cossacks are the best humans and everyone else is gay.

>Whichever is the oldest and most intelligent of the races is going to exterminate or halt the progress of all the others and live a life unchallenged like humans are on earth.
So why haven't africans or asians or killed all the other human races? Caucasians even tried but only managed to kill off the amerindians, and only by accident at that too.

>human phenotype = fantasy species from different magical beginnings
>Caucasians tried to kill everyone
Well this is about as cringey as you can get

>They don't have arms and thus couldn't sign any agreement.
Dragonblood is priceless, that would be more than enough of a signature.
>Why would elves be good administrators? No setting I have read has ever mentioned elves being good at math or having people's skills.
They live a long time and don't deteriorate mentally like humans do. This implies superhuman memory which means they would make better administrators than humans would.
>Dwarfs are protrayed as craftsmen (smiths) and miners. While smiths are held in high regard and were well payed miners were in most cases low-income workers or slaves.
Are you somehow implying that humans couldn't and wouldn't mine for the dwarves?
>But if we look at medieval society humans do fulfill all of the other roles as well. Why would humans just be peasants here?
Because everyone else is better at those roles on top of living far longer
Why would you buy from some amateur human who has only been at his craft for a few decades and calls himself a "master" when you can by from Thorin Goodhammer whose clan has been specialists for generations and himself has been at dwarven master level for a dozen decades?
>And who would be middle class orcs? Who would be ruler orcs? Administrator orcs? Do each nomadic orc tribe have their own dragon ruler? A small group of elf admins? A larger group of middle class dwarfs?
It's implied that orcs are their own separate social structure. Are you retarded?
You must be retarded.

I think the problem with this thread is that the HFY retards are assuming humans just existed in a vacuum until suddenly magical shit, generous human population development included .They seem to be certain that intelligent beings who lived alongside humans somehow wouldn't adapt and subjugate humans but the other way around happens for some reason.

No you retard why are you assuming humans got populous enough and independent of dragon rule enough for a crusade to be viable?
The crusades could only be called because the church had the highest authority to call them.
How the fuck do you call a crusade against your own leader? Or something that can level your entire levy alone, peasants would rather accept dragon-sama than be burned alive for the sake of paying taxes to a human instead of a dragon.

Can you just go back to wherever shithole you came from?
Thanks.