What races aren't really taken seriously as enemies in your game, both by the setting's people and your players...

What races aren't really taken seriously as enemies in your game, both by the setting's people and your players? Should there be any races like that in a setting? If not, how do you make the less threatening races such as Gnomes, Halflings, Goblins, and Kobolds more intimidating?

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Kobolds. While they can be dangerous if they put their minds to it most of the time they're a mix between /k/ tier unnagrounds and expert tunnelers, the other time they're little more than overexcited puppies with way too much knowledge on how to kill people with rock falls, acid, fire and explosions.

Humans. Humans talk a big game and are cheap to hire, but they lose in a fair fight against pretty much everyone else.

Elves outskill them. Orcs overpower them. Dwarves outtank them. And so on.

Humans are shit at war but okay if you need someone to go pillage a podunk farm community or something. Just make sure you spend plenty of time blowing smoke up their ass about what big special boys they are, because their egos bruise easy and they are vengeful little shits.

Kobolds are downright terrifying in the world of 5e. Sure they go down easily, but they've got pack flanking, a good dex, and a tendency to gang up. A swarm of kobolds can be a serious threat to a village.

>how do you make the less threatening races such as Gnomes, Halflings, Goblins, and Kobolds more intimidating?
Make them ingenious fucks with clever fingers and sharp knives en masse or have them under the guidance of a dragon.

Kobolds often get treated like the Vietcong of races to make them more deadly I noticed.

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>how do you make the less threatening races such as Gnomes, Halflings, Goblins, and Kobolds more intimidating?
Numbers. Much like children, they’re manageable in small amounts but they can become wildly destructive and uncooperative in larger sums. Not the mention they often form sort of a hive mind when it comes to their peers, so they can erupt into mob mentalities in an instant. If you’ve ever been anywhere where a school field trip was going on, you’d know just how unruly they can be.

Now translate that behavior to those races, since most of them are like children to begin with.

>your group wanders into a town a little ways off the main road
>you notice an air of tension among the villagers and none come to greet you while plenty others just head inside their homes
>"we're sorry." is heard from a now shuttered window
>you hear a shriek from behind you and find the cleric screaming with his foot in the ground
>he was standing on a trap door and impaled his calf and foot on punji sticks coated in acid and feces
>the paladin rushes to him preparing a lay on hands before there's an audible click and everyone freezes
>you have just enough time to hear "MY" before the paladin goes up in flames halfway between you and the cleric
>as the ringing in your ears fades and the mental fog sets in you stand there numbly wondering "what was the paladins? His foot? His leg?"
>the shellshocked rogue wanders into your field of view shouting about rats and mothers maybe your hearing isn't fully back yet...
>as the rogue limps his way towards him you notice the cleric may not all be in one piece but he's definitely not dead
>maybe the rogue has the right idea you should regroup
>something is very wrong here and the cleric is smart he'll know what to do
>you take one lurching step after the rogue before another explosion goes off and the rogue is gone
>maybe he went to find the paladin, they always were close
>as you look around trying to find where they got off to you notice the cleric is dragging himself back the way you came
>that seems....prudent?
>the rogues sneaky and the paladins strong they'll make their way out and here you are still in the center of town!
>pa always said haste makes waste but you'll be the last man out at this rate
>the plans coming together and with a smile on your face you take a lurching step
>and fall flat on your face
>you're sure you just lost a tooth but that's okay you weren't pretty to begin with and when you find who tied your laces together you'll make sure they're just as handsome as you are

>you try to get up and fall right back down
>you can't feel your leg and your arms aren't really moving like you want
>you grit your remaining teeth and manage to roll yourself over
>after a while the black starts to fade away towards the edge of your vision and you can see the sky
>it all comes back to you in an instant
>this is wrong this is all wrong you have to leave
>the cleric
>he's still alive you can make it back to the last village and get him patched up perhaps even warn the duke
>this place needs to burn
>you try to push yourself up and you see it
>a nice gaping hole where your belly used to be
>you hear it a bit in the distance before you realize it's source
>laughter
>you're laughing
>you used to joke that the paladins cooking would melt a hole clean through the pot and now here we are
>oh if only the rogue were here, he'd get it
>you're on your back laughing so hard your vision is starting to blur from the tears
>as your vision starts to fade you see the cleric
>tough bastard might be carrying his own arm but he's limping away just the same
>at least he'll make it out and maybe this shithole will be bombed back to hell where it belongs
>as the black creeps back in you see movement
>at first you thought it was the tears again but no
>the grounds moving all over the village
>bushes and even the dirt itself move about revealing holes
>the clerics screaming but you can't see it
>the little slice of world you could see before is now taken up by a scale covered snout that popped out of the ground moments ago
>and it's laughing

Give them a mysterious vibe. They are sneaky bastards, after all.

>What races aren't really taken seriously as enemies in your game, both by the setting's people and your players?
Humans.

Aren't humans the jack of all trades in regards to this sort of thing?

My game isn't DnD. My game is Mage 2e.

Jack of all trades also means master of none, user.

Most settings are human centric for no other reason than the fact that the writers have a pro-human bias.

Remove that protection and humans quickly fall down the hill in fantasy specifically because we don't have a thing we are explicitly good at. We are, at best, average.

More importantly, we have a HUGE weakness because fantasy writing veers towards monocultures. There is ONE elvish civilization, there is ONE dwarf kingdom, etc. Humans are the exception, where you have a handful of human kingdoms that often fight among themselves. The only guys who are more infighty than us are the orcs, but they are bigger and stronger than us and always outnumber us 10 to 1 anyway.

So basically everyone else that matters is working together while we are fighting each other, meaning that instead of forming a unified front we open ourselves up to getting picked off one kingdom at a time because 'Pffff, not my problem. I don't even LIKE the Haldstadts. Those guys keep stealing my cows every summer!' This means that any dedicated long term campaign can whittle us down to half strength before we even realize the war we are supposed to be fighting.

I guess Halflings are technically worse at war than we are, on average, but their gimmick is being overlooked so its not like anyone can ever FIND the little fuckers to invade them anyway. Lucky little shits.

>where you have a handful of human kingdoms that often fight among themselves
To be fair, I think the Dwarves and Elves make up for that by constantly fighting each other, whereas the Humans tend to be at peace with the two factions more often than not. There's more infighting, but there's less outfighting.

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Stagnant monocultures tend to get curb stomped by barbarians every century or so.

>Remove that protection and humans quickly fall down the hill in fantasy specifically because we don't have a thing we are explicitly good at. We are, at best, average.

If you look at the natural world, this isn't a bad thing. Generalists can live anywhere while over-specialized animals are the first to die out with climate change, introduced predators, etc.

Sure. But the other fantasy races are not specialized to such a degree that they lose any significant generalization.

You would have to invent from whole cloth a headcanon to give a reason why elves would be worse than humans at anything. Pre-gunpowder, Orcs outclass us in everything but architecture and by all rights should fucking destroy any human civilization in their reach long before the first alchemist singes off their own eyebrows.

Everything we can do someone else can do better, and anything we did somehow make up first would quickly be stolen by everyone else because none of the fantasy races are so stupid they can't copy our ideas.

We likely won't go extinct, but its hard to imagine we would thrive as anything other than proxy forces for elves because we are like dogs to them.

Orcs are stupid, Dwarves and Elves both tend to be nonexpansionist and enjoy trading with humans.
>we are like dogs to them
That's... not how must fantasy treats Human-Elf relations. Elves are usually aloof towards humans due to their tiny life spans, but it's not like they treat them as unsapient.

>You would have to invent from whole cloth a headcanon to give a reason why elves would be worse than humans at anything.
They're less strong and durable than humans.

>Pre-gunpowder, Orcs outclass us in everything but architecture
And discipline. It's like a Germanic barbarian meeting a Roman legionnaire. Sure he's strong, but he's not working as a team.

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>They're less strong and durable than humans.

Literally only in DnD, and even that was because they had to balance them to be a playable race. In most fantasy setting Elves are just better than you. In LOTR, an Elf can outdrink a dwarf and toss a human around like a ragdoll.

Dorfs and elfs both really dislike to reproduce and orcs can't into agriculture.
If you want to create 2000 IQ alphabulls who lift entire mountains who obliterate pathetic small pener humies, more power to you. It just doesn't work like that in most of the settings.

>In LOTR, an Elf can outdrink a dwarf and toss a human around like a ragdoll.
Yes, but in LOTR Elves are the "do nothing" race. By their own nature they tend to be passive and indifferent to the changes of the world. But obviously they can't be a playable race in a TRPG if that's the case, because then it would force players to behave a certain way.

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>stagnant monocultures are stronger
read a history book

>Gnomes, Halflings, Goblins, and Kobolds
I wonder how deadly an alliance of those 4 races could be? Maybe throw in fairies for good measure.

Any kind of fae ever since our party had an experience where a pixie witch sneezed so hard she fell into a vat of runewater and killed herself.

HOW?

fuck off, retard

Humans are rats you can kill some but they'll never go extinct

I thought ratfolk were the rats of the setting...

Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

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Goblins are very intelligent and crafty, but they're absolute cowards and backstabbing cunts. One would imagine them as a bunch of evil scheming children in need of a master. A master inspires in them more fear than any at my or warrior.

That is why they obey him, and once they have that master they can gather by the thousands and become absolute zealots.
That means you have a fearless army of wicked high IQ children who want to stab you or murder you in your sleep.

Kobolds? Easy: wild and brutal, but know basic metalworking. They're tribal, but breed fast.

Shillings and gnomes? Pygmies with poison, tribal masks and demon summoning.

Just go the Goblin Slayer route