Human Dominance

[Vymair]

For most games, I agree with the crowd who says its because we are humans and realize the variety of cultures and personalities you find within humanity. In "standard" D&D each of the others races cultures are fairly tightly defined. Therefore, by choosing a dwarf/elf/gnome, you have defined yourself within a tight area to roleplay. While some enjoy these roles, they don't lend themselves to the wide variety of ideas most people have for characters. You can play a stoic or libertine human, but you pretty much have to play the dwarf stoic. Same is true of most of the other demi-human races, it's tough to play against type.

As for my homebrew, humans are very much the minority as they just crossed the planar boundary and found a world dominated by Hobgoblins, Orcs, Dwarves and Hobbits (yes, Hobbits, not Halflings). I organized my game around the small human settlement but my party of six only has two humans. We've had some deaths, but we've had 3 Dwarves, 3 Humans, 2 Hobbits, 1 Orc, 1 Elan and a prominent Half-Orc NPC. Current party mix is 3 Dwarves and 2 Humans, the Elan died last session and the new character has yet to be introduced.

 

[Evilhalfling]

The consenus seems to be either that we are humans and relate better to humanity, or blamed on tolkien.
I stand in the first camp, and assert that tolkien, along with countless fantasy authors work from the same principle.
Now FR or others that have the whole "elves are leaving" shtick
are closer to the second.

I tried to run a campaign where the humans were failing under onslaughts of creatures and magics, but it didn't play that way.
The PCs fought hard against the trend and founded two cities, admitttedly one was run by a council of humans, elves, and halflings.

My Next campaign is set in a region dominated by dragons. With over 30 adult dragons on an island chain. Halflings, gnomes and goblins are related and they are the dominate civilized culture,
but humans dominate most other parts of the world. Humans come as dragon hunters, or merchants or are decended from others who did.

 

[DMH]

So, looking for an in-game answer? Humanity won't shut up and quit.

I think that the best set of rules for this are the human racial levels in Shaping the Self. The first level has Survivability as a class feature which gives things like (pick one) cold resistance 3, fire resistance 3, bonuses to saves vs disease, starvation, or suffocation or skill bonuses to survival type skills. The other 2 levels give other bonuses to untrained skills and doing the almost impossible.

 

[Virel]

I think the key reason humans are dominate is that EGG wanted them dominate because so much of his personal GreyHawk campaign was geared around research, he did about medival europe.

There isn't any reason humans should be dominate in a campaign if the DM wish otherwise.

My AD&D gaming experience started in 1980. Humans were dominate as we started with the GreyHawk setting. All the PC's were human. Then someone wanted to play a 1/2ling. Humans stayed the dominate race choice for players for a while but within the first year of gaming players were experimenting with elves and dwarves. Our game shifted in nature with a new batch of PC's that were rolled up, in the Wild Coast area. I decided that Celene wasn't going to be the typical elf kingdom withdrawing from the world. The idea of a Celene based campaign in GreyHawk stuck with the players and we are still using that setting today!

The first group of PC's were about 40% elven, %20 1/2 elven, & 40% human. Soon humans were in decline at least as PC's went. I was surprised at first but the group liked not playing humans. Today it's next to impossible to get any of them to play a human. Elves are the dominate race for PC's.

Losing the human centric aspect for players was probably the best thing that ever happened to my campaign world. Celene has turned out to be very much like Israel, IMC world, not popular with most of the other nations but a force to be reckoned with. Probably 1/2 of the PC's end up spying for Celene and futhering Celeanse interests. They have to their civilization is under threat in so many ways.

 

[fusangite]

As for my homebrew, humans are very much the minority as they just crossed the planar boundary and found a world dominated by Hobgoblins, Orcs, Dwarves and Hobbits (yes, Hobbits, not Halflings).

Is your doorbell circular-metal-banding? Beware, the thugs from the Tolkien estate will be there in minutes to put a stop to your highly upsetting plagiarism!

 

[Tonguez]

While there is some prehistoric past in which there were human-like non-humans walking around, I'm not sure what we can do with that piece of information when it comes to dealing with race relations in D&D. As natural selection is likely not operative in D&D, it seems like a bit of a dead end.

I have been thinking about this and have developed a vague thesis based around the whole Adaptation-Isolation discourse which will follow. As to the notion of natural selection I don't see why it should be a dead end. I concur that an evolutionary model doesn't fit, but what of 'Divine selection'. In one mythology I created the story went something like this

"Tiki the Carver is the creator of humans and Tiki is a thinking. When the other gods went forth to create their chosen races Tiki sat back and watched and thought and planned. So when he took his branch from the tree of life and gave it form he did not mark his creature for beauty or for strength or for grace or for power as the other gods had done. Instead he created her balanced in all ways, and he gave to his creature an innate curiosity to learn, and a will to survive and because She was balance in all ways she would adapt to all places and all conditions and so her children spread into all places from the burning deserts to the Snow covered tundra." - there you go Natural Selection by way of divine intervention

Anyway how thids relates to race relations

The survival of a given race depends on their ability to adapt to extreme changes in the environment. Homo Sapiens Sapiens was supremely adaptable and so survived, the other hominids were not adaptable and are now extinct (or bred out of existence) Now applying this to DnD Humans, Dwarfs and Elfs

1. Humans - are still supremely adaptable, regardless of terrain/ environment be it desert, arctic, small Islands or urban sprawl humans will adapt and thrive as humans. Even where skin color varies they are still recognisably human and hence humans dominate across the world

2. Dwarfs - Dwarfs are not adaptable, they are best suited for a vary limited environmental range (being mountain/underground)
However unlike the Neanderthals Dwarfs also have incredible stamina. Thus Dwarfs are long-suffering, when necessity calls them into new environments they are able to endure, get on with task at hand and survive. This is why Dwarfs tend to stay home and are consider gruff, they do not enjoy hot deserts or cool forest but they will endure them if they have to. However they are still overall limited by environment

3. Elfs - Elfs are highly unusual in how they manage environmental change. Rather than adapting to a environmental extermes elfs in fact transform. At some deep metaphysical level elfs are able to change their vary nature and become a new distinct species (a sub-race). Hence Drow, Sea Elfs, Wild Elfs and all the other varieties are distinct sets and have only limited commonality. However as each Elf subrace is specific to its given environment it results in a degree of isolation from other subraces. So where a brown skinned human will recognise a fair skinned human as 'human' and reinforce a sense of fraternity , a High Elf might not even recognise a Sea Elf or Noldor as having any connection at all. This elven Isolationsim is what keeps them from gaining dominance

Fit other races in somewhere else along the spectrum (or make them exterme transformation of the basic proto-Elf stock!)

of course its just a thought

 

[WayneLigon]

In Game: Humans are just better than the other humanoid races. The ability to adapt, coupled with a high birthrate and an inate drive to master their environment, ensures they are the dominant species wherever they go. They're simply better. Elves take years to adapt to changing circumstances, Dwarves are too tied to their traditional lifestyles, and Orcs (along with most of the other monstrous humanoids) are both too stupid and too tribal-minded (ie, they can't cooperate long enough to create a real civilization). Halflings come the closest of the various races, but they don't have the drive to dominate that humans do. Half-elves we really can't consider, since they probably don't have the numbers to be a 'real' race, but if they do then they probably eventually supplant humans - they have the drive that humans do plus the longer lifespan to create very stable societies. It depends on their birthrate, I suppose.

Out of Game: People like playing something familiar and we're more familiar with human-dominated cultures.

 

[fusangite]

Tonguez,

I think you need to clarify a few things before I can comment on your model:
(a) what aspects of a creature are capable of adapting (ie. changing) physically, mentally and socially? (Socially is an important question because of the way chaotic alignments seem to function as a disability under the system.)
(b) are creatures created by the god(s) they worship or is the creation of species done by particular gods with responsibility for more than one species?
(c) if survival factors are contingent upon the environment, aren't gods of particular plants or animals going to have a kind of secondary jurisdiction over the survival of creatures that depend on them?
(d) do the deities of non-sentient life recognize the life forms they patronize as lower in the hierarchy than sentient creatures?
(e) if different creator gods have different agendas, how is their relative success determined?

In Aristotelian physics, the system I apply most frequently to fill gaps in natural philosophy that the rules do not, there is no environmental adaptation. Because there is one god who favours humankind in a sacred natural order, the production of a particular ecological feature like the Nile River is predetermined based on the anticipated needs of the creatures dependent upon it. Because every object has a purpose, what the object does is comprehended in terms of fulfillment of said purpose.

Now this can be adapted (indeed was designed for) a hierarchical polytheistic system -- but it doesn't work for a polytheistic system without a clear order of precedence. If there is no single universal order, this physics does not work.

If you substitute an essentially ecological order, which you seem to be proposing, there is a real problem: not only must the humans make sense ecologically, the whole D&D system must make sense ecologically. Why would kobolds continue to exist? They are not as well-designed as goblins and hobgoblins and occupy the same ecological niche. Now, if there is a divine order in which kobolds are supposed to live and the created world actively facilitates this, that is one thing but if creation is just a big design competition amongst the gods, why don't some gods just lose?

It seems to me that the only way to make your system work is to consign kobolds to some Galapagos-esque environment where there are no other subterranean monstrous humanoids competing to occupy the same niche. So, my first reaction to your idea is yes, it could work but in a widely dispersed low-magic, low-tech archipelago. I see that you essentially acknowledge that in your proposal when it comes to elven sub-races but this is when you suggest a species adapted to multiple niches; a very different problem arises when you have multiple species adapted to a single niche.

 

[RFisher]

I think one of the reasons that I tend to prefer that PCs be human is that I want to discourage the "human in a furry suit" syndrome. Where a player who plays a non-human plays it exactly the way they'd play a human. I don't want playing a non-human to be about little else but the special abilities.

(& I'll reiterate that the PCs being human doesn't necessarily mean that humans dominate the game world.)

I'm much more interested in letting someone play a non-human character when they have some clear ideas on how the particular species of non-human would be different from humans.

Although, "humans in a furry suits" are perfect for some games.

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

IMC, humans and the other races are still fighting it out.

Orcs and humans get along very well, elves are a plotting, scheming, politically backbiting race who prefer to outlive other races than dirty thier hands with combat, but if they have to, they have thier legions of slaves. Goblins are an outcast race, rather strange. Kobolds are a degenerate spawn of a forgotten race. Halflings are road nomads, born on the move and dying on the move, while gnomes are sailors that live and die on the seas.

That's not counting campaign specific races.

But the world is still up for grabs, and still under contention.

Why are humans still in the running? Humans are very disciplined, breed quickly, are capable of building great works, and embrace warfare. Even the orcs cannot match the humans for warfare.

But, like I said, nobody dominates the world.