World demographics - how many of each major race?

[Bungus]

I'm not entirely sure what the question is as the answer is entirely up to you, what the basic assumptions of your world are. In other words, there is no one size fits all - what is your world like?

I would suggest that you not worry about the overall world so much and start with the primary region of the campaign. Sure, get a general sense of the overall world, but you don't want to build yourself into a corner and have to fit pre-determined criteria. Start with the main region and try to figure out what mixture you want to go with.

In a now-dying campaign I went with the assumption that dwarves were the most powerful political and military race, although not quite as populous as humans - just more organized. Elves were a somewhat distant third. Orcs were actually more populous than the civilized races but were very disorganized and warred amongs themselves, with different sub-races in different areas.

But again, you can go with whatever you want. What about a world in which humans are relatively few, perhaps most of them died off in a cataclysmic event or war and are just now starting to re-populate? Again, play with ideas - it is your world, after all!

Thanks for the input. When I DM, though, I'm the type that says, "I have a world that's somewhat like earth in terms of climate & geography. What type of adventure do you want - traditional Medieval, desert, ocean-going/aquatic, arctic, Asian/Oriental, jungle,..." So, unless I started with an area that had all of that, I couldn't really rely on one primary region.

 

[Li Shenron]

Would gnolls be a "major" enough race? What about lizardfolk? Any others? This is off the top of my head, so I could be missing a few biggies. I was thinking races like dragonborn, tieflings, genasi, devas, warforged, etc would be too rare to be considered "major" races, but I could be persuaded otherwise?

Why should you be persuaded? As others said, it's totally up to you which races you include, and which ones you want to be among the big players in your setting.

I think more importantly than getting the totals right is at least to make a decision on whether and how all these races mixed up in the territory.

Which races do you want to be secluded from the others? Which others are on friendly enough terms so that they live in the same territories?

The most typical setup in a D&D setting is to have "good" demihumans mixed up in the same cities, with a large dominance of humans in numbers, and then have a few exceptions like a city of mostly elves and another of mostly dwarves. Then keep some "evil" humanoids either scattered (and hidden) more or less everywhere and give some other a secluded kingdom instead.

But this is the most obvious setup, and you shouldn't be afraid to challenge that with some original twist.

 

[Derren]

In the end it all comes down to how much land and manpower is needed to feed the population.
In the medieval age a single farmer could likely only feed himself and about 2 other people. No idea how much land he needed for that. Thats why large orc and goblin populations don't make much sense. They might reproduce faster than humans, but without agriculture they would need huge tracks of good land to support a large population.

So when everything is equal the race with the best agricultural technology and/or lowest food consumption will be more numerous. Everything else depends on how the planet evolved, who occupied which land and who won military victories against the other races.

 

[ComradeGnull]

Didn't the Bolsheviks overthrow the Russian monarchy with a very small number of actual soldiers?

There wasn't a lot of direct fighting during the February and October revolutions- mostly mass strikes and protests. The Tsar ordering the troops to forcibly put down the protest actually touched off the mutiny that started the February Revolution. A lot of the military ultimately defected to the revolutionaries, leaving a force largely composed of Cossacks, pro-monarchist officers, and Imperial Guard units to fight for the White Army against the remains of the Russian regular army and a lot of conscripted workers in the Russian Civil War. The Red Army outnumbered the Whites (by about 600,000 men, according to Wikipedia) and the White army was less unified- there were a lot of regional independence movements and allied powers involved in the White movement.

This tangent brought to you by my long-lived obsession with Russian history.

 

[Desdichado]

Why should you be persuaded? As others said, it's totally up to you which races you include, and which ones you want to be among the big players in your setting.

Indeed. I've gotten rid of most of the traditional D&D races. In fact, my first thought was that I was going to have a human only fantasy setting--not unlike Newhon or the Hyborian Age or... well, or almost any published fantasy fiction. I decided to have a few magically influenced humans--the descendents of humans and Outsiders, or the descendents of cursed humans, or whatever. Therefore jann--sorta like fire genasi--and hellkin--sorta like tieflings--became major races in my setting. I also added a region infamous for its vampires, and a race that's based on the wildman archetype from Medieval artwork, which for convenience became not unlike the shifters of Eberron.

Despite all those, I still see my campaign as pretty much a human campaign, and I treat those other races as exotic humans, for the most part. I can't tell you how disinterested I am anymore in elves, dwarves, gnomes or halflings.

 

[NewJeffCT]

It depends on how much you want to change races like orcs, goblins & kobolds. Would you be okay with some goblins that do farming or fishing? Or, maybe the hobgoblins have goblin slaves that do the farming & fishing?

 

[Bungus]

Indeed. I've gotten rid of most of the traditional D&D races. In fact, my first thought was that I was going to have a human only fantasy setting--not unlike Newhon or the Hyborian Age or... well, or almost any published fantasy fiction. I decided to have a few magically influenced humans--the descendents of humans and Outsiders, or the descendents of cursed humans, or whatever. Therefore jann--sorta like fire genasi--and hellkin--sorta like tieflings--became major races in my setting. I also added a region infamous for its vampires, and a race that's based on the wildman archetype from Medieval artwork, which for convenience became not unlike the shifters of Eberron.

Despite all those, I still see my campaign as pretty much a human campaign, and I treat those other races as exotic humans, for the most part. I can't tell you how disinterested I am anymore in elves, dwarves, gnomes or halflings.

Interesting - no interest in four of the more popular races? How did that come about?

 

[Desdichado]

Interesting - no interest in four of the more popular races? How did that come about?

Hah! I thought my proclamation of a somewhat radical taste had killed the thread! Nice to see that there's at least a little life left.

First off, I'd argue that of those four, only two are popular: elves and dwarves. Gnomes and halflings get relatively little love, and gnomes in particular only play to either players with esoteric tastes, or characters of an esoteric nature. Reading between the lines, it seemed apparent to me that WotC agreed with me at the launch of 4e, since the gnome was not a player character option at first.

But far and away the most popular character type, in my own personal experience and in polls that I've read here and elsewhere--at least since the launch of 3e, if not before--is human. Not only that, except for Lord of the Rings (and books that are to a greater or lesser degree a pastiche of Lord of the Rings--stuff by Fiest or McKiernan, for instance) and D&D or Warhammer fiction, the assumption of elves and dwarves is not normal in fantasy fiction. Especially the kind that I read, which more and more is drifting into non-traditional molds. In other words, the elfs, dwarfs, gnomes and halflings of D&D are something that really is specific and unique to D&D and have little or no analog between the covers of the very same fantasy literature that inspired the game--excepting Tolkien, of course.

Now, granted--D&D isn't necessarily supposed to emulate fantasy fiction, and some folks would say that that's not the point, and that's not a problem. But for me, and I suspect a number of other gamers who came into the hobby through the same vector as me, the whole point of playing D&D, the whole reason that it was an attractive idea as a hobby in the first place, was because of our love of fantasy literature. What made the game sound like fun was being able to be involved more intimately in an experience that was not unlike a collaborative and semi-improvisational fantasy literature experience. As such, many of the disconnects between D&D and fantasy literature (speaking of the genre generically, of course, since obviously there's a lot of variety in setting, tone and feel amongst fantasy literature) got to be more and more grating and frustrating over time. In my case, it led to me leaving D&D entirely in the late-middle 80s over "creative differences" and I played some other games for a while before getting too busy to really game at all. Sometime in the mid-90s, I started poking my head back in the hobby again, checking out what was on the shelves at stores, and stuff like that. Around this time, White Wolf was at their heyday, and for a little while, I was captivated by the high concept of those games. That didn't last all that long, but it did manage to bring me back into the fold as a gamer, at least.

When 3e was released, I was ready to embrace more traditional fantasy again, and since the game was flexible enough to allow me to play the games I wanted to, I became specifically a D&D player again, and an enthusiastic one at that. But before long, the same issues that I had before started to grate against me again, and I felt more and more like D&D was a subgenre of fantasy unto itself that bore little relationship to anything else in the genre that wasn't specifically D&D already. So, again, I started casting my eyes about at what else was going on.

This time around, I had come to peace with the rules, at least--for the most part--and part of that was the flexibility inherent in all the various modular subsystems that were developed for other d20 games, or in Unearthed Arcana or by third parties who had developed new magic, new races, new classes, etc. So rather than ditch D&D for some other game--like Savage Worlds, for instance, which I suspect would be right up my alley if I ever got into it--I just houseruled the game more to my liking.

In the case of the races specifically, I came to associate them quite strongly with the D&D paradigm which I was rejecting. Luckily for me, I probably have literally hundreds of other racial options in print from one source or another, so I was able to give potential players in my campaign other options. Curiously, I ended up literally homebrewing most of my races myself rather than using ones in print, although there are some obvious similarities between some of mine and some that are more familiar. So for my setting, I have:

• Humans. Still the baseline, as in D&D.
• Azhar from the d20 Freeport setting. Conceptually, they are not far removed from an LA+0 fire genasi, though. I call mine jann, re-imagined them visually (somewhat hybridized with Red Men from Barsoom, actually) but use them mechanically as is.
• Another race that takes the azhar and gives it a more darkness/shadow twist rather than fire twist, but otherwise is built off the same mechanical "chassis." Visually, I imagined these guys as a hybrid between Nightcrawler of the X-men and Darth Maul. They have some obvious similarities to tieflings, so I even adopted a kinda sorta Bael Turath analog for their backstory too.
• Changelings are a custom-mechanics race, based loosely on the half-orc, but given a more wildman approach. Although I frequently call them based on the wildman/wose archetype from medieval heraldry, art and folklore, in reality they're probably more based on the shifters from Eberron and the tharn from Iron Kingdoms than anything else.
• Neanderthals from Frostburn are adopted pretty much exactly as is. Plus, everyone knows what a Neanderthal is, right?
• Although I've since decided that this is just another human culture after all, I also had a goblinoid empire, and made hobgoblins and goblins specifically PC choices in an earlier iteration of my setting. I kept everything except the mechanics--like I said, it's now just a somewhat exotic human culture rather than humanoid. I do maintain gnolls amongst this group, but rather than a separate race, it's a magical transformation that indiviausl can undergo to become elite shocktroops of this race's harsh and militaristic state religion.
• Not really a PC option, but vampires play a significant role in my setting too.

Other than that, I've also done away with most of the monstrous humanoids in my setting. Quite frankly, D&D has way too many. It's nice to have them as buffet options when you want them, but to consider that all of those races are really going to be in any given campaign is unbelievable and unworkable.

 

[Bungus]

wow, great stuff. It makes me reconsider my idea for a diverse world with many different races.

However, I do agree that D&D overall has too many humanoid/demi human races. Not to mention sub-races (how many sub-races of elf are there?)