What do humans have going for them?

...

So our special power is basic organization skills.

Humans have evil.

Dwarves and Elves try to live within their means and territory, trying to seek a measure of balance. The elves live in harmony with nature, while the Dwarves see no reason to expand beyond the mountains they feel comfortable in. These races are good and noble, and are willing to think beyond not only the needs of their people, but the world as a whole.

Humans, as opposed to Dwarves and Elves, are not usually good. They're typically neutral, and only because there are far worse races are they considered among the "goodly" races. Many have no qualms with destroying the environment or threatening regions with overpopulation, and even some of the more goodly humans still often have an expansionist philosophy that believes the world would be better off with its untamed areas governed and guided by humans.

Humans have a unique balance in that they have a range of philosophies within any human community, so that in comparison to the savage races there exists a degree of self-preservation and moderation absent from races like the Orcs and Goblins. Unlike the evil races, humans can be reasoned with to the point where while wars are often fought against humans, there are also times when there is not an immediate need to drive humans away. Humans are able to be savage and cruel, but also gentle and reserved, and it's from this ability to adapt to what the situation demands that they've become so successful as a race.

They can be evil. They can be good. And, part of this uncertainty of character makes it hard to know when and how to deal with them. A group of humans can be anything from a traveling band of merchants, to refugees, to bandits, to murderous cultists, or even just an acting troupe, and always having to second guess them gives them quite an advantage.

Humans have variety, they can specialize in anything so they can go anywhere, do anything, be anything. They also have the most reason to do anything because of their comparably short lifespans.
>In most settings humanity should either be enslaved or dead.
Name a few? Unlike other races humanity can fuck like rabbits(and we can fuck anything) so it all evens out. Plus we got some pretty insane heroes

All the settings are written by humans.

Ambition

The issue is most fantasy settings assume all races happen to be plopped down at the same time, or at minimum ignore the implications of races being widely spaced apart in their development. Humans for example would most likely be oucompeted before they even have the opportunity to actually become humans. Their development would likely be stalled if they are not outright wiped away. Imagine elves or some other higher race coming upon some tucked away pocket of humanity, that are stuck at the level of Aboriginals because the environment/conditions did not allow them to become as they usually are.

The reasoning usually is that people are simply too chickenshit to ever exclude evens because they are a mandatory component of most fantasy settings for relatability and self-insertion.

Humans have death that urges them forwards. Where elves spend eons diddling with stuff. Humans don't dawdle.

In fantasy settings the gods usually create the races, so I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about competition. Elfs jerk off in the woods and be all mystical and shit because they have fey ancestry, so they stay in the woods. Orcs are fucking retarded and incapable of powerful magic, and all the infighting. Two of the biggest competitors off the board. All the halfling races are too weak, only exception being dwarves, who like to live in seclusion guarding their mountain cities. Any other races you think can compete with humans?

Giants

That's exactly what I'm talking about right there. Most settings set out to make all the other races suck on purpose, or deficient in some very specific ways to allow humans to always be on top and the center of attention, or have a clear path to become that way.

Too big to make metal weapons, very little access to magic, lower birth rate. Usually neutral, and friendly. Also, can’t halfgaints be born from humans?

Blame the Allfather
Besides, none of them are weaker then humans, they’re just not as well rounded. That’s what you get when you spec into one category

>Also, can’t halfgaints be born from humans?
Well humans can usually breed with pretty much anything.

>Usually neutral, and friendly
Are they? I always thought they tended to be brutish and aggressive.

>and we can fuck anything) so it all evens out.
>Well humans can usually breed with pretty much anything.

This is from an unofficial source and doesn't actually hold true. It's just something taken from a chart found in the "Book of Erotic Fantasy", a terrible non-canon source that should be casually dismissed, alongside any and all conclusions drawn from it.

What's stopping a setting from having multiple well-rounded races instead of humans being the sole inheritors of such a seemingly innocuous yet all-powerful trait?

>he doesn't use the BoEF in every game he plays

Are humans related to giants in some way? Is that why we can breed with them but not other creatures? I guess that would explain why they're friendly to us.

*ballistas you in the noggin*
psssh, nothing personell, kid

We're roughly as smart as elves and dwarves, but mature much faster. When a 40-year-old elf or dwarf is still learning not to piss the bed, a human has been working productively for ~20-25 years, may well have made a lot of progress in life ambitions, and most likely has some more kids on the way if they aren't already working themselves.

Also we have some drive to accomplish things in the short time we have, while being much smarter and about as physically able as other short-lived races.

And we're more varied. Other races are basically one stereotype each, but there are humans of all kinds. We have humans for every time and place.

We are the only race to have OK legs.

>How is HFY even a thing? In most settings humanity should either be enslaved or dead.
isn't that literally it?
banding together to triumph over adversity?

Humans have the ambition and ignorance that can only come from a race that lives short lives. In other words, they can imagine great works and are stupid enough to believe they can succeed. Although they almost always fails, enough succeed that they accomplish more than the other races.

We out-breed the long lived races and outthink the goblinoids

Sure, the elves and dwarves have ancient culture and live long enough to become supremely skilled, but put ten schmucks with polearms against any single master swordsman and the swordsman loses

The orcs and goblins may be able to outbreed us, but they can't outthink us. They can't plan longterm like humans or the long lived races, and so are stuck as savage hunter-gatherers or nomads until some powerful leader briefly unites them only for them to fall apart again after his death

Humans are the perfect mix of populous and capable

One extra feat at first level and extra skill points. We're just good at leveling up.

>but what do humans have?

Full-year-round 24/7 libido

It depends on the setting

kobolds can out do them.

Adaptability.

>A sense of humor?
This is actually something I've thought about for sci-fi settings, as it's such an interesting and wholly weird trait in humans, and necessitates complex social abilities before it can be present.

I think it'd be a really neat way to differentiate humans from aliens in a sci-fi game.

Humans have persistence and adaptability.
Adding to this, in most settings, humans tend to be portrayed as on the shorter scale of life cycles, which means an industrious breed of monkey men can make first contact, get to know you, have their children perfectly fluent in your language and culture within 20 years, and have forced themselves into your society, and your neighbors, and are making themselves pretty darned good at, and even occasionally improving on your time-honored specialties and traditions in less than one of your species' generations.

You want to know what humans have? Simple, Humans have Brouzouf

But Kobolds are weird loners who kind of choose to be weak and pathetic so that their bitter, isolationist, and persecuted view of everything holds up, now aren't they?

>What's stopping a setting from having multiple well-rounded races instead of humans being the sole inheritors of such a seemingly innocuous yet all-powerful trait?
So we've gone from "Humans suck, it's unrealistic other races haven't wiped them out", to "Humans are OP, other races need their schtick.".

Make humans antimagic.

kobolds have bodies the size and general strength of literal children

how many toddlers could a knight in plate armor take in a fight?

In each case there are failings which limit the potential power of the other species. For Elves and Dwarves, it is presumably fertility, even if they are disproportionately capable on an individual level, there are still only so many of them--which makes sense, because if they reproduced like humans but just never died they'd quickly exhaust their environments and go extinct.

Orcs have... Well they're dumb, frankly. Dumb and aggressive, so they kill each other frequently and cannot into advanced civilization.

With humans you have the knowledge that we are capable of coming to dominate an earthlike environment because humans already have.

Don't knock it. Other races are too proud/stubborn/wild to work under a shitty manager to advance their career.

Individuality, other races have no ambition and thus end up being crushed

Spiral Energy?

Innovation.

We have the sexual potency to breed with most other races.

We must interbreed with the kobolds and integrate them into our genepool.

Depends on setting.

Numbers and adaptability.

Humans have the Gods. In my setting, the reason why humans live everywhere is because humans are kind of shitty and generic. As such, the Gods could make humans out of nearly everything. Some Gods used wheat and milk, which is why some humans are white. Some Gods used clay, which is why some humans are brown, and some Gods used ash, which is why some humans are black. Humans were created by the Gods and stick to them pretty closely. An elf studies with and negotiates with a God. A human worships one.

They are OP in the way they are portrayed. I mean, the "schtick" people like to associate with humans is a trait that is more or less necessary to succeed regardless. It's a double issue in my opinion. If humans are too lacking in most areas compared to the other races or developed long after them there's little reason why they would not have been outcompeted or wiped out.

Similarly, if humans are magically the only ones with numerous advantages of that sort, there's no reason why the other races would not have been destroyed instead again due to competition and hostility. Humans are far reaching and can live in nearly all of the locales of the other races and are known to relentlessly eliminate their enemies totally with little heed to ecology or preservation of culture.

That's my thing too.
The special thing of human is faith, the need to believe in something and to worship.
Other races have no such desires, and they find it ridiculous. And even when they see that the all faith things actually work quite well, they just can't do it. They can't be sincere, they're just doing it for the benefits, and the gods knows.

Humans actually exist, you see.

Humans have the largest reproductive organs. All the other races are like gorillas down there.

I’m sick and tired of humans always being the pure evil race in home brew settings. The past three games I’ve played that occurred in homebrew settings all had humans portrayed as evil, cruel beings, who were only alive because they bred fast enough to avoid genocidal efforts.

Actually on topic, humanity’s strength has always been its resourcefulness, which in most rpgs is their usual “jack of all trades” thing

In Tolkien-ein fantasy at least, it's frequently set during a period of time in which Humans are building up and outpacing all other races. Elves and Dwarves are fading, and the more violent races can't keep up with human's burgeoning technology.

I'm slowly building a setting for DnD based around the idea that the longer lived races were created first, but each one gets slowly overtaken by the faster adaptable ones that come later. At the time of most games Humans have been on top for a while, but Kobolds and other faster smaller sentients are poised to overtake them as the world shifts from the Age of Heroism to the Age of Industry. When all races have had an equal number of generations, then the Time of Ending occurs and the gods roll everything back to chaos and start again.

Humans are the wildcard, bitches
youtu.be/F5xrkNeO2QI

Writers and readers are human and as such humanity has to be great bc that’s easier for lazier readers/writers to empathize with.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveRaces

In EYE they had nothing until they met with aliens then used genetic engineering to create psychic warriors

I never understood this notion how in all settings all dwarves are made out to be less numerous than humans.

If anything, I'd expect the Dwarves to be far more numerous as well as more spread out than humanity, benefiting from superior subterranean agriculture and industrial capability. Their cities are larger, their technology more advanced, their culture foreign but sophisticated.

Even supposing humans breed more, that hardly matters if Dwarves have such longevity. Goblins breed more than humans and live even shorter, but they are dumb fucks and that doesn't help them jack shit. Long lives translating into sloth or slow progress is absolutely ridiculous as well, human technology flourished because humans lived longer to be smarter, not because they lived shorter to work harder.

The same goes for High Elves really. Unless High Elves have ridiculously difficult times breeding (say, even a full year of straight up every day copulation might not cut it) if humans and high elves started around the same time they'd be the dominant species on the planet.

Essentially this, or being "well rounded." The issue is that human has no real competition so anything we make we have to make up its capabilities and shortcomings relative to ours. So elves are good with magic because "well fuck they have to be good at something" and dwarves are tough because "well they are stocky" ultimately this method generally just leaves humans with "they are good all around."

A more nuanced way may be to do away with innate bonuses and base bonuses and advantages off of culture.
>Elves aren't better at magic it is just that the average elf young adult has had a century to master magic and had a teacher who had 800 years to master and develop new magic
>Orcs aren't innately stronger than other races (or at least not in any statistically significant way) but their diet and bellicose culture ensures they grow up tall and strong relative to races who consume diets with less protein and calcium

>Unfortunately Elves living for centuries results in extremely static culture, with the Elves being behind other races in terms of tactics and cultural ideas by hundreds of years (imagine a kingdom in the middle ages that still fought in phalanxes without and significant heavy cavalry)
>Unfortunately such a pragmatic culture of violence and aggression leaves little room for idle thinkers such as philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists and as a result Orcs are extremely superstitious with little collective scientific knowledge and significant cultural stagnation

Expanding underground is a lot slower and difficult than expanding aboveground.

Expanding your living space is going to take a fair bit of time and skill. Dwarves having a tendency of organizing themselves into clans which dictate much of how they live their lives, it is unlikely that an explosion in Dwarf population will happen as the clan is unlikely to allow breeding they cannot afford.

Nothing. Humans aren't naturally good at anything that other fantasy races aren't, that's the point. Humans are supposed to be a flawed, weak race who are disadvantaged. So it was in Tolkien, and so it was in ancient fantasy writings.

What was lost in translation between traditional fantasy and modern RPG-based fantasy is that all races aren't supposed to be equal. Traditional fantasy is always written from a specific perspective, so it never had to accommodate for certain races being weaker or stronger because it could always be overcome in the story. RPGs, on the other hand, have to be created to accommodate many races, and so stick on random imperfections with very little consistency.

Humans have the advantage of learning things quick, but in contrast not having enough of a lifespan to surpass an elven or a dwarven master in their skills.

This however means that if there's a sudden demand for mages, druids, warriors or any other class, it's best to train up a bunch of humans on the job until you got your shit together.

The Role of humans in a city with elves and dwarves is basically societal equivalent of duct tape. You throw them at a problem until some of the elder races finally has the time to handle the issue.

In the Dark Sun campaign setting, where Half-Giant is an actual race you can play, they were created using magic.

This.
In my own setting, a take on widespread and common fantasy tropes in which I try to explain how the hell that happened or why that's the way it is (dragons hoard gold because it's the most power-efficient natural battery basically) I've given up on trying to create equality. Objectively, in the world, some breeds in a species are better than others - maybe not in everything, but still. In my homebrew, from a purely stats perspective you aren't offered equality. Orcs have a higher racial net bonus to their attributes than humans, who in turn are better off than halflings.
Races and cultures and classes and so on shouldn't be equal. Start from a logical (in-universe) idea and build up to the end result from there.
In the face of, say, elves and orcs being overall superior to orcs, humans will have to adapt or die. At the end of the day, it's as simple as that.

>Expanding underground is a lot slower and difficult than expanding aboveground.
Depends upon the sophistication of technology/magic and available flora.

Also in any society ability to afford families is not something that happens at any level higher than the family, it is the familial resources which dictate whether or not parents will successfully rear children. This is affected by the availability of food, education, living conditions, all of which would be more accessible with sufficient technology and infrastructure which we can presume dwarves to have in superior to human beings.

In fact I would argue that underground expansion has much more potential than above ground expansion.

If you can handle ventilation and have a means of subterranean agriculture, you could put five times the amount of farmland as above ground simply by stacking them in layers. Cities could be built down rather than outward (or in addition to) and be layered, akin to having skyscrapers only instead it would be much more easier to facilitate transport in between them.

There's a reason the largest ant colonies are not built upward, but down.

Humans are a plague, we're like Skaven but less obviously evil.

Humans cheat!
Only humans came up with the concept of " organised crime" and criminality above the small gang level.
We lie, steal (both items and ideas!), wreck other races's stuff, and corrupt them through drugs/alcohol/ etc.
Basically, if we can find or create some leverage we'll use it to our advantage.

I like this, I'm stealing it

Human gods are real.

Humans alone live in the sun.
All others live in shadow - the dwarves and gnomes in their halls and homes, the elves in their dark forests by their murmuring brooks, the orcs and kobolds in their wretched caves.

Men build houses to shelter themselves from the night, not to hide from the light of the day. They work and build and fight under the proud gaze of the creators. Left alone, humans will build cities and grow crops and become great; it is only through the greed and sabotage of lesser races that they do not cover the world entirely.

Put simply, the humans have grain and faith; that's all you need.

Just remember that it took humans to combine dwarvish printing presses, woodcut illustrations, and racial sexual taboos/fetishes to produce the first pornographic magazines!

Most settings are sub-par genre fiction drek played without any meaningful self awareness.
With that said
>In most settings humanity should either be enslaved or dead.
Assuming you're talking about D&D, because we have elves and dwarves and shit and if you were talking about WHFB you'd have already read the lore because you are not dumb.
Assuming that we can say humans can gain class levels and advance stats and all that and generally can carry out any class role as well as anyone else because that extra +2 is nice but not generally meaningful in a significant way. And they get a free feat which is usually a significant advantage. So a human can be just about anything well with no real weakness. In OD&D they could be any class as opposed to other races.

Specialisation is nice and but being good at everything is oh so much better. The group is composed of specialists who work together to cover each other's weaknesses and support the whole. Every successful organisation follows this model. No warrior race was ever just warriors, no theocracy was just priest, no kingdom of scholars got by on brains alone.

If you want a fluffy reason: Elves don't breed, are isolationists, unconcerned with mortal squables and if OD&D is to be believed, slow learners. Dwarves are also isolationists who never breed and they routinly fuck themselves over with greed. Orcs are too busy fighting amoungst themselves to get anything done on thier own. Giants need too much food and space and are usually hunted by large numbers of little people.

What I really want to know is: why didn't we get those other kick ass EYE armours or vile Jian tits?

Do Dwarves and Elves really not breed all that much?

We breed like rabbits and can sustain on less food and harsher conditions than other races.
Elves have long livespans but it takes a thousand years to recover from a war.
Dwarves and Orcs are hardy... but take away their rations and put them in cold and only one tenth of them will live. A human can march for days without food
Up in the coldest mountains you'll find dwarves... and humans.
In the most disease ridden swamps you'll find kobolds... and humans.
Dense forests humans... and elves.
We'd be the mutt race.

We are cunning, inventive and breed like bunnys on viagra. Elves and dwarves just cant kill us quick enough.

Diplomacy. Humans are just enough like every other PC race to be relatable to all of them. They're the go-betweens of fantasy.

Fertility.

because this is a shit scenario, where all races are human with an extra shit, be creative,

> for example: elves live in the forest because they are basically a defense mechanism of a giant magic tree, they are all born of the tree as a fruit and build their cities around these trees

All you need to do is make the other races different from humans

All of them, if they're armed with crossbows, are standing on the other side of a moat filled with oil and hunkering behind stone cover that is chest-high for them, and have torches ready, and also they've collapsed the tunnel behind you.

Remember that kobolds have no racial penalty to their Intelligence. The average kobold is just as smart as the average human, and the kobold range of intelligence from retard to genius is the same as the human range. So anything humans could think up, kobolds could be expected to think up, too.

(Goblins also lack a penalty to Intelligence - and hobgoblins lack it AND don't have a stereotype of being stupid. Really, except for the fact that they're Evil, I can't think of a good reason for hobgoblins not to be a standard race).