Why don't giants rule the world?

[TheAuldGrump]

Giants rule the world--the giant world.

Jotunheim and Muspelheim worked for the Norse....

Actually, it could be argued that dwarfs, alfs, and the various giants were all Outsiders in Norse mythology, they each had their own plane of existence. Humans were simply the beings that occupied the middle Earth, where the stories and battles took place. (Fat lot of good it will do us, too....)

The Auld Grump

 

[Umbran]

I fixed your math. Seriously.

I was speaking from birth, not from time of start of game.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

Another interesting question is why would they want to?

Seriously, once you 'rule the world', then what? You're responsible for it - when Bad Stuff happens you're the one everybody looks to to sort it out. Which is not fun.

I would suggest that most of the races mentioned don't want to rule the world - they have far more interesting goals.

 

[Clavis]

The Giants once were the dominant species on my campaign world's main continent. Then they overpopulated, started waging war against each other, and wrecked the continent's ecology. They succeeded in turning the entire central portion of the continent into desert, and were already a fallen race by the time the smaller races (Elves, Humans, Dwarves, and Halflings - Gnomes were already there) invaded and swept away the last vestiges of Giant civilization.

 

[delericho]

Numbers: there are millions of humans, and dozens of dragons. A dragon can tyrranise an area, but won't be able to directly rule the whole world.

or...

Food supplies: this ties into the above, but deals with social creatures. Each giant requires eight or more times as much food as a human, but a giant farmer can raise only double what a human can. This tightly constrains the size of giant tribes, and thus prevents them from dominating other races.

or...

Technology: Years of strife have forced humans to innovate in weapons and armour, and their social nature makes them keen to arm up in numbers. Up close, a giant can destroy any number of human knights, but give those knights room to charge in their full armour and heavy horses, and back them with hundreds of archers who are deadly from range, and the giants just don't have a chance.

or...

Desire: Frankly, humans are bugs. Why would a dragon want to bother ruling, when they can instead sleep away the decades in comfort, basking in the glow of their hordes?

 

[WhatGravitas]

Desire: Frankly, humans are bugs. Why would a dragon want to bother ruling, when they can instead sleep away the decades in comfort, basking in the glow of their hordes?

That's a good approach - consider Earth. I guess ants and insects are the real rulers of the Earth, because they're just freaking everywhere and you cannot win against a bunch of mosquitoes that want to suck your blood. Sure, you can hide... but exterminating all mosquitoes? Hardly likely.

Cheers, LT.

 

[InVinoVeritas]

Interesting notion, but the problem comes from the fact that in a fantasy world, more humans kill more giants or dragons than ants kill humans in our world. With the right conditions, ants could kill a person. But it's a lot easier in D&D for four humans to kill a giant.

We're not just some pesky bug that wanders in to eat their food. We're coming into kill them.

Good point. Perhaps it's not "Human is to Giant as Ant is to Human" but something more like "Human is to Giant as Rattlesnake is to Human." Still, even then, most of the same argument applies. Rattlesnakes are dangerous. Why haven't we killed off or enslaved all the rattlesnakes? Why don't we make sure they understand that we are their masters, and they live or die, prosper or suffer, at our whims?

Because it's a flat out waste of time, that's why. Giants and dragons are going to think much the same way. I, for example, care about having a place to live, food to eat, disposable income, a happy wife, entertainment, etc. All of those things I'm far better suited to get myself than to try to coerce a bed of rattlesnakes into doing it for me.

Furthermore, humans aren't trying to kill the giants or dragons. The vast, vast majority of humans, elves, etc. are too scared of them. It's only the PCs that are trying. They're likely the only group in a century to have even begun to try to kill them. How often in a campaign world do the PCs descend upon a dragon's lair, only to discover that they get there at the same time as another adventuring party, and that both parties are too late--a third party came through, killed the dragon, and made off with the loot. There's another dragon on the next mountain range to kill, if you hurry, but there's already a fourth party on the way. That doesn't particularly happen in most worlds.

Even then, in a world where humans are systematically wiping out the dragons, we can't truly say that one race rules another. Consider bears in a stream, catching and eating salmon. Do the bears rule over the salmon? No. If there are more bears and fewer salmon, so that the bears fight amongst themselves for the salmon, then do the bears rule over the salmon? No. Change it to something like lions and wildebeests, and rulership still does not change.

 

[DMH]

We're not just some pesky bug that wanders in to eat their food. We're coming into kill them.

And that is why I think kobolds are under estimated. The average kobold is as intelligent as the average human and have at least 3 times the breeding capacity. Give them a safe haven and they will pour over the land.

And what of social insectoids like the abeil? They work better together (within a hive) than even hobgoblins. All work for the betterment of the whole, unlike humans and most humanoids, dragons, giants, whatever.

 

[Eidalac]

"Whenever you see something like that, a Wizard did it."


But, in general, I'd say that the dominance issue is like to come from 2 factors (in most settings, at least):

1. Racial limitations. Some races, like Dragons and Giants, have too many hard-wired divisions and/or resource limitations (food) to band together in sufficient numbers to deal with the other races.

2. Bad timming. The races that might have the potential to dominate (Orcs, Hobgoblins, etc), have to deal with well established nations of the common races, who have a vested interest in keeping these 'lessers' in check. A human kingdom would keep an eye on nearby hoboblins, and if the warbands started to fall under a single leader, they'd take steps (maybe starting a war, or just sic some adventures on them).

Now, with #2, if something destabilized the 'super powers', then these other races would have a golden chance to come to the front - they just lack the means to do so themselves (and are actively prevented from getting to that point).

 

[QuaziquestGM]

Because we haven't had Affirmative Action to correct the abuse of past editions against Giants and Dragons!

Simply because the racist game designers have removed such unfair and atrocious rules as "extra weapons damage vs large creatures" and "subdueing of dragons", which long kept the Large Man and the Dragon down under the heel of the traditional player races, does not mean that the damage done from decades of such abuse has been healed.

(I'm going to stop there. To go any further with this satire by suggesting what "affirmative action" corrections and quotas would be "needed" would stay too far into politics. My intent is to introduce a metagame reason for giants and dragons not ruling: the rules of earlier editions were stacked against them. Large creatures took extra damage until 3rd ed. In Odnd and 1st ed dragons were described a cowards at heart who could be beaten into submission.)