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Tanuki Tales
2014-01-12, 11:11 PM
Something that I've lately been hung up on as I'm putting together a game (and mini-bits of a setting) for my IRL group is the concept of multiple civilized sapient races cohabiting the same continent (or more) to the point of creating the familiar setting that a lot of games use.

When I first started doing table top gaming back when 3.5 edition was released for the Dungeons and Dragons game, I never had thought twice about having a plethora of creatures with cultures brushing elbows with each other in the various media I was exposed to. It was in fact just up until recently that I even began questioning set up, since it was something so common in fiction.

But now I am starting to question the possibility of this happening and find myself trying to find some way to rationalize it or at least do away with it without diluting the flavor all those races brought (something I'm doing in a piece of homebrew concerning a race of "mongrel-folk" descended from humanity).

So, I ask all of you, how do you make it make internal sense in your games without resorting to literal Divine Intervention (the gods made everything and make it so) or having one race being dominant and the rest enslaved? I had read on one site that this could occur if the races didn't fill the same ecological niche, didn't fight for the same resources and were kept separate until they were sufficiently advanced enough to not just automatically try to wipe each other out.

I'm not interested in "don't worry about" or "you're thinking too deep" or any other handwaving ways to make it work.

Thank you in advance for any weighing in anyone does! :smallsmile:

CoffeeIncluded
2014-01-12, 11:35 PM
We humans are actually the last surviving members of our genus. But what if we weren't? My personal take on it is that all the races--humans, dwarves, orcs, elves, halflings, gnomes, and even goblinoids, are human. Or, to be more accurate, Homo something. At one point we had Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalis, and Homo floresiensis (quite literally hobbits; adult specimens were about three and a half feet tall and 55 pounds) living on the planet at the same time. Now imagine we had more species of the Homo genus. And imagine that none of these species ever went extinct like the Neanderthals and real-life hobbits did.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-12, 11:40 PM
We humans are actually the last surviving members of our genus. But what if we weren't? My personal take on it is that all the races--humans, dwarves, orcs, elves, halflings, gnomes, and even goblinoids, are human. Or, to be more accurate, Homo something. At one point we had Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalis, and Homo floresiensis (quite literally hobbits; adult specimens were about three and a half feet tall and 55 pounds) living on the planet at the same time. Now imagine we had more species of the Homo genus. And imagine that none of these species ever went extinct like the Neanderthals and real-life hobbits did.

But why didn't they go extinct? That's my whole obstacle on this; I can conceptualize more races evolving, but not rationalize how they can have co-existed and got to the point of having neighboring civilizations that didn't wipe each other out.

CoffeeIncluded
2014-01-12, 11:42 PM
But why didn't they go extinct? That's my whole obstacle on this; I can conceptualize more races evolving, but not rationalize how they can co-existed and got to the point of having neighboring civilizations that didn't wipe each other out.

Maybe they lived on different continents and any contact has been recent. Maybe they preferred trading or mating or whatever with each other to killing each other for however long it occurred. Maybe there was just never total war.

Winter_Wolf
2014-01-12, 11:42 PM
How about convergent evolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution)? Or parallel evolution (apparently they're different things). Of course that does raise the question, "how is it that humans can interbreed with anything and everything?" At least CoffeeIncluded's approach answers that question as far as most humanoids go.

Broken Twin
2014-01-12, 11:46 PM
I know I tend to have the exact same problem when it comes to races. Especially trying to explain why races that are capable of interbreeding are still distinct races after apparently living next to each other for generations.

Personally, I prefer to use sentient races that are completely different to each other. One example I have is in the setting I'm working on right now I have the majority of halflings and treants living together in a culturally symbiotic relationship. The treants taught halflings magic, and in thanks the halflings help tend and protect the treants' forest homes.

I find eliminating the potential for crossbreeding greatly increases the believability of multiple intelligent species co-existing. A dwarf and a human can fall in love and get married, but unless they're adopting they're not having kids. Cities are more 'melting pot' then distinct races, although racial neighbourhoods (ala the stereotypical 'Chinatown') still exist.

Racial relationships vary by culture. In some kindgoms lizardfolk have no rights beyond being pets/slaves, while in others lizardfolk routinely run for and win political positions.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-12, 11:49 PM
Maybe they lived on different continents and any contact has been recent. Maybe they preferred trading or mating or whatever with each other to killing each other for however long it occurred. Maybe there was just never total war.

Once again, why? The reason that the other Homo genus went extinct is currently postulated as interbreeding, while the popular one was that we wiped them out.

I had mentioned above that the only answer I really found was that they need to be kept away for a sufficiently long enough time for genocide not to be the first answer to ensure personal survive.


How about convergent evolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution)? Or parallel evolution (apparently they're different things). Of course that does raise the question, "how is it that humans can interbreed with anything and everything?" At least CoffeeIncluded's approach answers that question as far as most humanoids go.

I'm not asking "why they came to be", that's easy enough to explain or handwave (no problems handwaving that one), but "why didn't they get wiped out" like we saw on Earth.

A_Man
2014-01-12, 11:58 PM
I'm not asking "why they came to be", that's easy enough to explain or handwave (no problems handwaving that one), but "why didn't they get wiped out" like we saw on Earth.

Probably because on Earth, Homo Sapiens were the "best", be it in physical appearance, strength, or intelligence (I'm not certain why exactly homo Sapiens won out, since I've heard that Neanderthals were more intelligent then our species), but in the fantasy world, all the races had specific advantages. The elves lived best in the forests, the dwarves survived best in the mountains, and humans managed to survive by being good in all things.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-13, 12:04 AM
Probably because on Earth, Homo Sapiens were the "best", be it in physical appearance, strength, or intelligence (I'm not certain why exactly homo Sapiens won out, since I've heard that Neanderthals were more intelligent then our species), but in the fantasy world, all the races had specific advantages. The elves lived best in the forests, the dwarves survived best in the mountains, and humans managed to survive by being good in all things.

Then why didn't the Elves or the Dwarves wipe out humanity? They live longer, they're better than humanity in many ways, they had grander societies (stereotypically). Human military targets would be easily wiped out and if the "elder races" ever got a real bug up their bum, then they'd just wipe them out.

If humanity was all around better than Elves or Dwarves, why didn't they wipe them out? If Elves were arrogant, flightly and incapable of looking at the short term, humanity would have been the coffin nail before they recognized them as a threat. If Dwarves were blind to the world outside their mountains, loathe to change or adapt and incapable of giving up on the past, why didn't the more versatile humanity find the holes in their armor and bury them?

And races like Orcs make even less sense if humanity didn't already have sufficient might to not be swept aside when such brutal, physically superior races came to a tribal level.

Broken Twin
2014-01-13, 12:09 AM
An easy way to understand why one species hasn't wiped out the others would be to ensure that they thrive in different landscapes. If dwarves are adapted to life underground and humans aren't, they're a lot less likely to fight over land/resources, and it would be difficult for them to wipe each other out. Maybe elves are better adapted to high altitudes, and live on mountaintops where humans have trouble breathing.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-13, 12:13 AM
An easy way to understand why one species hasn't wiped out the others would be to ensure that they thrive in different landscapes. If dwarves are adapted to life underground and humans aren't, they're a lot less likely to fight over land/resources, and it would be difficult for them to wipe each other out. Maybe elves are better adapted to high altitudes, and live on mountaintops where humans have trouble breathing.

I know, that was something I mentioned in the first post (and depending on how different they are, maybe the second one too). And your Halfling/Treant symbiosis falls under the second one, with the two filling non-competing ecological niches. Weren't the Hobbits in the Shire part of a similar relationship too, by the by?

I was just curious if there were answers other than "keep them away from each other till they can play nice" or "don't have them compete for the same resources".

AuraTwilight
2014-01-13, 12:21 AM
The existence of gods that are personally invested in specific races REALLY helps to explain a lot of this.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-13, 12:24 AM
The existence of gods that are personally invested in specific races REALLY helps to explain a lot of this.


So, I ask all of you, how do you make it make internal sense in your games without resorting to literal Divine Intervention (the gods made everything and make it so) or having one race being dominant and the rest enslaved?

*polite cough*

Scow2
2014-01-13, 12:24 AM
Ecological niches really does nail it, with attempts to

Elves and dwarves dominate the Forests and Mountains, respectively.

If anyone tried to eliminate/subjugate the dwarves, they'd be eating Lava and Steel faster than you can say "Bloody Boatmurdered!" But, they cannot take the Plains very well because of their poor maneuverability. They can pop in and out of holes pretty easily.

Elves dominate the forests. They lack the numbers to mount effective offensive campaigns outside the forests, though - but inside, it's chasing ghosts.

Humans pretty much dominate grasslands and riverways - it's why they're the dominant race in D&D, with Dwarves stuck in the hills and mountains, and Elves stuck in the forests. Of course, it's not so much the humans themselves as their Horses and Dogs.

Gnomes pretty much hide from the world.

Halflings are content to be second-class citizens with Ghostlike avengers.


Another reason why no race becomes absolutely dominant is because there are so damn many of them - a Monopoly cannot form because as soon as one pulls too far ahead, other races band against its expansion until it's pulled back into the pack.

Erik Vale
2014-01-13, 12:27 AM
Resoning from my dads world that had divergent evolution and alien explanations for Dragons, Fey, Elves, Dwarves, Giants, Horde [Ocs/Goblins/Ogres/Orgs] and Humans, with divine intervention seeming sporadic.


First, There were dragons. They are unsocial orrigionally left by aliens and generally live alone in mountains in study/other, this is caused by their unintelligent and viscous youth. Their raw strength means they survive, lack of civilization/numbers ensure they don't dominate [I think we just killed one of 3 in the region, however it seemed to be a rather stupid adult].

Fey are just aliens and live only partially connected to our plane and only regularly interact with the elves [I think].

Elves evolved from magic trees, grew powerful, but were complacent. Similarly for Dwarves but a more normal evolution. Niether of them killed humans because at the time they were no threat, and the Horde were easy to point in the other direction and couldn't organise themselves for more than three minutes as Orgs weren't a thing yet.

Then men get iron + steel [Volcanic Eruption + Luck apperently] and continental shifts have occurred. Men have basically conquered all of themselves [elves and dwarves generally stay out of the way but are widespread], and Horde are only just starting to get their act together. The horde are not even a blip and barely occupy space so:

Humans expand, sheer numbers almost wipe the elves and dwarves and giants out [not sure what's been happening with the giants in the mean time], forcing them back to the recesses of the world to make space for themselves. They have their empires, expansion grinds to a halt [as it does], due to slow repopulation elves/dwarves don't ever get back on the front foot and just sit around. Again, lore is short on the giants.

Org's appear, they organise the horde, the elves/dwarves aren't keeping them in check, the human empires have grown lazy, man is nearly wipped out, the horde kept at bay only by human heroes and very big walls.

Some sort of collapse effects the Org's, the Horde again dissasemble going from Mongolian Empire of doomness minus the horses to stupid barbarians occasionally led by a powerful smart guy. Given that I believe campaigns did happen around now, I guess it's due to a couple of plucky and eventually high powered human heroes, this however occured 1+ thousand years ago.

Humanity begins to rebuild, and are only just pushing back against the horde successfully aside from founding heavily walled cities. Some elves still exist who remember humanities attack, and they can remember events through special books [Alex Ghostwalker has used one of said books, and he would be having a special talk with his mother [ageless family line of natural magicians akin to sorcerers who specialize in teleportation, abberations due to magic are a thing] should he ever contact her], we have only started meeting dwarves so I've no clue there, and Giants are illusive beings occasionally hunted by powerful necromancers who stay well away from everything else. Dragons occasionally rule horde tribes using them to gather subsistence and otherwise ignore them, the one we killed was however going to help wipe out a city in the beginning of a genocidal war we plucky heroes are going to have to help stop.

So, TLSR. Genocide did happen. Reason more than one species live on Orios Humans became lazy, Horde are dumb and disorganised [hunter gatherer level still despite humans having steel and just shy of gunpowder because fantasy] and something handwavy or campaigny happened, and Elves/Dwarves were never in conflict with other races up until humanity muderstomped them, and Dragons have no reason to wipe everybody out.

As for the reason there are more than one horde race, Ogres are really dumb, Orcs are good hunters but not as strong as ogres or as smart as goblins, and goblins while weak and numerous are smart, so they all developed symbiotic relationships, at least, as far as staying away from eachother except to fight/raid humans and fight/enslave each other goes, and Orgs are newish and few in number [For example, there are maybe 30-50 in a army of 10000] despite being powerful magic users.

Broken Twin
2014-01-13, 12:27 AM
And your Halfling/Treant symbiosis falls under the second one, with the two filling non-competing ecological niches. Weren't the Hobbits in the Shire part of a similar relationship too, by the by?

Don't think so with the hobbits (I don't think they even knew about the ents until LotR happened), but that's pretty much how it works, yeah. Halflings don't eat treant food and vis-versa, and their massive size difference means that they can assist each other in ways that they can't by themselves. Their settlements are fairly sprawling, with lots of open space and greenery. They tend to follow the rule of "Give what you take", so for every area they cut down for development, another area is planted in kind. Outsiders are treated with respect, but at a distance. They'll trade with you, but don't expect to be able to walk around without a "Helpful Local Guide".



I was just curious if there were answers other than "keep them away from each other till they can play nice" or "don't have them compete for the same resources".

Well, you could always just HAVE them in competition. Have the main groups going at each other (either openly or in a cold war), with smaller groups that intermingle (due to either mutual advantage or other factors).

Edit: I mean, lord knows we still have countries in close proximity to each other that have been fighting each other for a very, very long time. Not really that different from what you're talking about.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-13, 12:41 AM
I know I tend to have the exact same problem when it comes to races. Especially trying to explain why races that are capable of interbreeding are still distinct races after apparently living next to each other for generations. This is, sadly, not a problem. The world, and the single nation of the USA, is composed of many different ethnicities.



Then why didn't the Elves or the Dwarves wipe out humanity? They live longer, they're better than humanity in many ways, they had grander societies (stereotypically). Human military targets would be easily wiped out and if the "elder races" ever got a real bug up their bum, then they'd just wipe them out.

If humanity was all around better than Elves or Dwarves, why didn't they wipe them out? If Elves were arrogant, flightly and incapable of looking at the short term, humanity would have been the coffin nail before they recognized them as a threat. If Dwarves were blind to the world outside their mountains, loathe to change or adapt and incapable of giving up on the past, why didn't the more versatile humanity find the holes in their armor and bury them?

And races like Orcs make even less sense if humanity didn't already have sufficient might to not be swept aside when such brutal, physically superior races came to a tribal level. Why didn't the Aztec wipe out the Cherokee? They hated the Cherokee and were powerful. Their power and willingness was not enough (thank God).

Erik Vale
2014-01-13, 12:49 AM
This is, sadly, not a problem. The world, and the single nation of the USA, is composed of many different ethnicities.


Whilst for the most part I agree with you, and the problem is kind of dealt with by mongrelfolk fluff [I think, haven't read myself], half-elves/orcs and half X templates, it does rather stretch the imagination a bit that there aren't more half-x's and such available in core.

Of course, for the most part I normally choose not to think of it, generally playing really inhuman races or humans.

Tvtyrant
2014-01-13, 12:52 AM
I don't think a created world with racial gods and fiendish incursions really meets our standards for SotF/Darwinism. If the god of Halflings says they won't go extinct, they don't go extinct.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-13, 12:54 AM
Erik: You are right in that. My comment was to the point that an ethnic or racial group disappearing from breeding was not a give in, and I dare say unlikely. However you would get some groups interbreeding more likely than not, as you have said.

Depending on the breeding rates and who has how many recessive genes, one race might simply overtake another when interbreeding does occur. Or, you might get ethnicities and races which occur from multiple groups mixing. Honestly, you'd probably get both.

Erik Vale
2014-01-13, 12:56 AM
I don't think a created world with racial gods and fiendish incursions really meets our standards for SotF/Darwinism. If the god of Halflings says they won't go extinct, they don't go extinct.

Again with the no-handwavy. The OP is purely interested in reasons that work without handwaving.

However, I am kinda interested in why Deamons [not devils or demons, I know why for those two] haven't banded together to slowly eat sections of the material. Unless they have and we don't hear about it because dead with souls eaten tell no tales.


Erik: You are right in that. My comment was to the point that an ethnic or racial group disappearing from breeding was not a give in, and I dare say unlikely. However you would get some groups interbreeding more likely than not, as you have said.

Depending on the breeding rates and who has how many recessive genes, one race might simply overtake another when interbreeding does occur. Or, you might get ethnicities and races which occur from multiple groups mixing. Honestly, you'd probably get both.

True. Might be why there are no half-dwarves. [Half Dwarves, I think you mean short man or tall dwarf sonny]

Tvtyrant
2014-01-13, 01:05 AM
Again with the no-handwavy. The OP is purely interested in reasons that work without handwaving.

However, I am kinda interested in why Deamons [not devils or demons, I know why for those two] haven't banded together to slowly eat sections of the material. Unless they have and we don't hear about it because dead with souls eaten tell no tales.


So we are going to ignore the direct intervention of gods where it is a daily occurrence? (Did we really just hand waive hand-waives?) Because in some settings like Dragonlance it is pretty much the bread and butter of the setting. On the flipside there is Dark Sun where there were decently successful attempts to genocide all none-Halflings.

Depends on the setting, but probably size issues. An individual planet on the Prime in Planescape is so small by comparison to one of the Outer Planes that conquering it would benefit you nearly nothing but may very well cost you everything (no longer considered neutral by everyone else.)

Broken Twin
2014-01-13, 01:10 AM
On the subject of demons/devils, I've come to my favorite conclusion that being from outside the material plane are not 'real' in the same sense that material beings are. They exist as concepts brought to life via magic. Sentient races have believed in demons for so long that the magic aether outside of the material plane gave birth to them. Same with gods, extraplanar worlds, and everything else.

I think a big problem with my ability to accept multiple independant species comes from me living in a time where the melting pot culture is the norm (in my area, anyway). When you're used to everything and everyone being so interconnected, it's hard to remember that back then people were a lot more seperated, by land and by culture.

Also, my sense of scale is usually off. I tend to imagine most fantasy worlds as about the size of Great Britian, even if they're actually designed to be much bigger. It's hard to imagine drastically different cultures surviving in close proximity to each other without crossover happening.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-13, 01:10 AM
TV: Some settings go with the idea that gods don't occur until later in the setting, when many of the races are already set up.


Erik: If the devils/whatever-you-said don't band together it's likely for similar reasons to why people don't. If it's not, then it'll be due to some quality or circumstance they have.

There are no half-dwarves because Tolkien didn't mention them.


Twin: Well... I can relate to that.

BWR
2014-01-13, 01:53 AM
True. Might be why there are no half-dwarves. [Half Dwarves, I think you mean short man or tall dwarf sonny]

Sure there are half-dwarves. They're called muls.

As for the OP, there isn't really any way to excuse the vast amount of D&D creatures living in the same world IRL, not just various intelligent humanoids. If you assume that many of these really nasty monsters and predators live in the same world as RL fauna, they should have by rights out-competed every normal predator.

As for intelligent races, several worlds have a general theme of humanity slowly outbreeding other races, or slowly pushing them back. It's a process that takes a while but one that could easily lead to non-humans being either extinct or near as.
FR, for instance, had for many years the very Tolkien-esque matter of the Elven Retreat, where elves were slowly moving to their own elf-only island that was hidden by magic somewhere far away.
In most of the Known World of Mystara, humans are dominant and most humanoids are forced to live to the nastiest, least hospitable lands in the area. This tends to make the humanoids desperate and vicious, which only strengthens the human/demi-human idea that they are beasts and should be killed.

Yora
2014-01-13, 02:19 AM
I don't see a reason why a single intelligent race would be the default assumption. The only somewhat good one is, that higher intelligence is apparently something that evolution creates very rarely.

But historically, our number of known examples comes down to one. And homo sapiens didn't genocidically whipe out neanderthals. That was more a case of a shrinking ecological habitat at the end of the ice age, and assimilation into homo sapiens populations.
Also, humans did treat other ethnicities as different species often enough and still didn't try to exterminate each other most of the time. Those few modern cases we know about didn't even succeed. There was massive depopulation in the Americas, but that wasn't so much because of violence, but an accident causes by a lack of immunities to Euro-Asian-African diseases. And even though the death toll was absolutely massive, it still didn't wipe out the american people, they still exist, though in highly reduced numbers. And this is still a special case, because of the geographic isolation of the Americas from the other continents. It wouldn't happen if the populations had always had contact with each other.

Kelb_Panthera
2014-01-13, 02:22 AM
It's really not that surprising.

IRL there are multiple ethnic groups that have lived adjacent to each other for centuries and often still do but none has wiped out its neighbors and often not for lack of trying.

A fantasy setting just replaces the typical divide of ethnicity with a more dramatic divide of species. The fact that those species are nevertheless sapient humanoids makes the difference largely academic with very few exceptions.

If you're actually asking how all these creatures evolved alongside each other; don't. There's nothing but madness down that road. Just accept that the various races creation myths are historical fact and leave it alone. Science and fantasy don't get along all that well.

Erik Vale
2014-01-13, 02:27 AM
I would like to rebuff by saying that diseases were deliberately spread to native Americans by Europeans. [Smallpox blankets I think]
A major accidentally spread one [I think] would be the black plague with infested rats travelling by boat from Asia to Europe.

I instead again substitute that the reason real life genocides tend not to succeed are due to laziness [why do I need to go kill more Native Americans when I could instead just laze around in my huge tracts of land that I've already stolen/Why go kill the elves for minimum 20 to 1 death rate when I can laze around in my huge cities], or lack of ability [Nazi vs Jews].

I don't think I've gone to far past the avoid IRL since I'm making no judgements and will proceed no further, however if anyone would like me to remove bits do let me know.

BMXSummoner
2014-01-13, 04:24 AM
Well you mentioned many of the reasons in can work in your post, but just to give the topic a full discourse.

1. Because of 'the gods'. The gods want it this way and that's why it is. Either there was no evolution period (where primitive bands killed each other for scarce resources), so everybody got off to a pretty solid start with the gods help and there was no need for scarcity themed genocide, or if there was an evolutionary, the gods helped it along to the point where this never came up.

2. Ecological differences. Taking Humans and Dwarfs (for a stereotypical example), if humans were wanderers over land who built their cities on plains and at rivers, and dwarfs were mountain dwelling people who had half their civilization underground, and the rest next to mountains, chances are the resources to lead a genocide against the other probably were never advantageous enough to be worth it.

3. Distance. If the two don't meet til they can trade and form alliances for mutual benefit (or fear war for mutual loss and destruction), then there probably won't be a genocide.

4. Symbiotic relationships. Lets say one race can kill monsters that attack the 'tribe' and the other has the fine motor skills or intelligence to build agricultural infrastructure, they may need each other to survive. There's a lot of reasons down this line.

5. Slavery. One group bred the other as slaves. Pretty straight forward.

6. Bigger problems. If your world is overrun by giant lizards which snack on these (presumably humanoid) races, then they may just be able to eek out separate existences, and genocide isn't really high on their priority list.

7. No scarcity. If resources are aplenty or at least were aplenty for long enough that these races became entrenched enough to the point where when hard times came genocide wasn't gonna happen, then that 'exterminate the other guys' thing maybe never came up.

8. Rarity. Maybe one race is really rare and sparse, and they just don't take up enough resources to be worth exterminating. If they live really long and are really dangerous (think vampires) then genocide, even if preferable, might not be possible. On the reverse, destroying an entire population 100 times your size probably isn't worth your time, and if they provide you with resources of some kind (continue thinking vampires) then even less so.

9. Late to the party. Maybe one race got to civilization early, and by the time the other was catching up, they didn't feel the need to exterminate them (for moral reasons, or slavery, or they felt no need, or whatever).

10. Genocide isn't easy. Hell, maybe they tried their damnedest to 'kill 'em all', but 'hey, those jerks just won't die'. Wiping out an entire race isn't exactly 'easy'.

11. Evolution was a bit different. Maybe this version of evolution just got to the 'play nice' part pretty fast. Or at least the part where, 'Hey. Lets just trade with these guys instead of killing them all.' Why not? It's your world. We have a rough idea of how one species, 'homo sapiens', came to power, and some conflicting theories on one potential competitor. It's a real tough call to say racial genocide is an evolutionary must based on just one example (and more of a 'maybe' example at that).

That's just off the top of my head. I would think that some combination of these is available for your setting, but if not, well, tough call without a lot more info.



I know I tend to have the exact same problem when it comes to races. Especially trying to explain why races that are capable of interbreeding are still distinct races after apparently living next to each other for generations.


I don't think it's that hard. Africa and Europe are not so far apart, and yet we still very much have 'Africans' and 'Europeans'. Cultural ties can be a very strong thing, and at that, because it's your world, they can be as strong as you want them to be (ex: Dwarfs who mate with humans are exiled, or executed, or shunned, or whatever else you like best. Or maybe they generally just don't 'do it' for each other.)

Beyond that maybe only 1/10 (or 1/100, or 1/1000, or whatever) matches between a human and a dwarf result in a pregnancy, or result in a living birth. Or maybe they're extremely susceptible to birth disorders, or some special disease, or a regular disease, or they all get incredible magic powers and go insane. Whatever you like best.

I think it's important to remember when building a world that you can write any rule you want, and with enough creativity you can explain anything, no hand-waving needed. You might to go back some and rewrite some typical conventions and assumptions from our world, or introduce a lot of new elements, but 'doesn't immediately make sense' shouldn't be an answer, it should be a starting point.

Mastikator
2014-01-13, 05:35 AM
You can't take a world based on the concept that divine intervention is practically mundane, take that very intervention away and then ask how it makes sense.

It's like kicking down the legs of a chair and then wondering why it still doesn't stand.

I would not try to make it make internal sense without divine intervention. If I can take out the divine intervention of the equation then I must also change the result of the equation.
And the only way multiple sapient species exist is if they are restricted from accessing each other.
The dwarves for example NEVER leave their subterranean homes, and nobody else can survive down there. Any middle ground between dwarves and any other race is quickly squashed by both sides.
Most "evil" races don't exist anymore, no orcs or goblins or ogres or trolls, they have all been wiped out.
Elves are probably wiped out too by the quick breeding humans. Gnomes are wiped out by dwarves. Halflings are either enslaved by humans or wiped out.

Either that or the humans were wiped out by some other dominating species.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-13, 05:56 AM
I recommend looking at the post above yours. It sums up the possibilities decently.

SouthpawSoldier
2014-01-13, 06:50 AM
What about the premise of the Shanara series? Post apocalyptic H. sapiens sapiens diverged into into H. sapiens alfus, H. sapiens nanus, H. sapiens gnomis, and so on so forth.

Those who who sheltered underground took on certain traits, those who received high exposure or had a high degree of mutation took on others.

Berenger
2014-01-13, 07:07 AM
Then why didn't the Elves or the Dwarves wipe out humanity? They live longer, they're better than humanity in many ways, they had grander societies (stereotypically). Human military targets would be easily wiped out and if the "elder races" ever got a real bug up their bum, then they'd just wipe them out.

Humans as a race have an awesome advantage that doesn't show up on the character sheet: faster reproduction. Even if the dwarves and elves are super elite due to their racial boni and the experience of a long life span, it would be like "regular army vs. special forces". A team of elven rangers may kill human warriors in droves, but inevitably they will suffer some losses, too. And until the newborn son of the dead ranger is old enough to exact revenge, he is facing the many descendants (fifth generation!) of the human that killed his his father. This kind of war is very unsexy for both sides. Being spammed to death is not fun. Having to spam your enemy to death is no fun, either.

Driderman
2014-01-13, 08:38 AM
Genocide on a complete scale is pretty difficult, why would any nation or fantasy race commit generations of manpower and resources to eradicating another race entirely in the first place, barring divine intervention (Your God(s) command(s): kill all the [insert race here]) or having some immortal dictator rule over them that has a century-spanning plan for destroying another race?

Real interactions between nations and cultures changes dynamically, from day to day, year to year, generation to generation.
Unless you have some crazy race all thorougly committed to the most callous practice of realpolitik you can imagine, why would the races by default be in so bitter competition that they would seek to remove each other from the map entirely?

Another_Poet
2014-01-13, 09:22 AM
What if the answer is religion?

I don't mean a "the gods made it that way" handwave. What if the long-lived elves and dwarves really could have wiped out humans, but they were under religious injunctions from the gods not to destroy another sentient race?

These settings often feature active, interventionist gods after all. You can't try to apply logic to one part of fantasy (multiple races) and not the others (active gods for each race).

The result would be that most intelligent races have occasional wars from time to time but do not go on an annihilation rampage because their Good gods prohibit it.

This would also explain why orcs (for instance) are universally hated. Their god does not care if they destroy the other races, making them significantly more dangerous - they're the only race that doesn't shy away from genocide.

Meanwhile, the presence of orcs gives the other races a common enemy, making it all the more reasonable that they've banded together.

Driderman
2014-01-13, 10:13 AM
Something that I've lately been hung up on as I'm putting together a game (and mini-bits of a setting) for my IRL group is the concept of multiple civilized sapient races cohabiting the same continent (or more) to the point of creating the familiar setting that a lot of games use.

When I first started doing table top gaming back when 3.5 edition was released for the Dungeons and Dragons game, I never had thought twice about having a plethora of creatures with cultures brushing elbows with each other in the various media I was exposed to. It was in fact just up until recently that I even began questioning set up, since it was something so common in fiction.

But now I am starting to question the possibility of this happening and find myself trying to find some way to rationalize it or at least do away with it without diluting the flavor all those races brought (something I'm doing in a piece of homebrew concerning a race of "mongrel-folk" descended from humanity).

So, I ask all of you, how do you make it make internal sense in your games without resorting to literal Divine Intervention (the gods made everything and make it so) or having one race being dominant and the rest enslaved? I had read on one site that this could occur if the races didn't fill the same ecological niche, didn't fight for the same resources and were kept separate until they were sufficiently advanced enough to not just automatically try to wipe each other out.

I'm not interested in "don't worry about" or "you're thinking too deep" or any other handwaving ways to make it work.

Thank you in advance for any weighing in anyone does! :smallsmile:

To expand on my earlier answer, it seems that you're assuming that the various sapient species would have a natural inclination to wipe each other out or enslave each other, but why would this necessarily be the case?
While you can equate the various fantasy races with the various Homo genii, it would (as far as I see it) probably be more correct to equate the fantasy races with real world cultures and try to imagine how different cultures would interact with each other.

Mastikator
2014-01-13, 10:22 AM
To expand on my earlier answer, it seems that you're assuming that the various sapient species would have a natural inclination to wipe each other out or enslave each other, but why would this necessarily be the case?
While you can equate the various fantasy races with the various Homo genii, it would (as far as I see it) probably be more correct to equate the fantasy races with real world cultures and try to imagine how different cultures would interact with each other.

Most races are just humans with special hats (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats). And humans do genocide quite frequently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll check out this list. I doubt its complete, however note that there are still 2 genocides ongoing today.
Unless "not doing genocide" and "trying to wipe out everyone else" was explicitly removed or omitted from the setting and all the races based on humans (read: all of them) then trying to wipe each other out is exactly what the races would do.
Most settings try to be nicer and just do deep racism instead, like between dwarves and elves, dwarves and orcs, dwarves and goblins, elves and orcs, elves and sometimes humans. There's no good logical reason why one side wouldn't eventually succeed.

Titanium Dragon
2014-01-13, 10:38 AM
Really, I tend to find that if you're going for realism, you want to restrict the number of races. And really, you probably want to generally restrict the number of races anyway; the more races you have, the less character any individual race is likely to have. The fewer races you have, the more diversity each race is likely to have and the more time you can spend fleshing each of them out.

However, having a race full of tons of different races rubbing elbows creates its own sort of flavor, which you may enjoy, though it is more likely to reduce the diversity shown by each race in order to give them any real character at all.

Driderman
2014-01-13, 10:39 AM
Most races are just humans with special hats (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats). And humans do genocide quite frequently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll check out this list. I doubt its complete, however note that there are still 2 genocides ongoing today.
Unless "not doing genocide" and "trying to wipe out everyone else" was explicitly removed or omitted from the setting and all the races based on humans (read: all of them) then trying to wipe each other out is exactly what the races would do.
Most settings try to be nicer and just do deep racism instead, like between dwarves and elves, dwarves and orcs, dwarves and goblins, elves and orcs, elves and sometimes humans. There's no good logical reason why one side wouldn't eventually succeed.

Based on real-world logic, we can safely assume that the majority of all these attempted genocides will also completely and utterly fail at wiping out the race/culture in question, then.
I know there are plenty of attempted genocides happening and have happened throughout history, but they've rarely, if ever, actually eradicated anyone completely. Also, this might be straying too close to breaking the "no real world politics/religion" rule.

Scow2
2014-01-13, 10:44 AM
Most races are just humans with special hats (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats). And humans do genocide quite frequently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll check out this list. I doubt its complete, however note that there are still 2 genocides ongoing today.
Unless "not doing genocide" and "trying to wipe out everyone else" was explicitly removed or omitted from the setting and all the races based on humans (read: all of them) then trying to wipe each other out is exactly what the races would do.
Most settings try to be nicer and just do deep racism instead, like between dwarves and elves, dwarves and orcs, dwarves and goblins, elves and orcs, elves and sometimes humans. There's no good logical reason why one side wouldn't eventually succeed.Funny thing - every single one of those races is still around today, and many are doing quite well.

If one race can get another at a disadvantage, there's a small chance of genocide - but that race has friends in other races, and trying to enact genocide requires resource expenditure that reduces protection from other races.

Another, non-deific 'handwave' for multiple races is Heroes, and other racial avengers.

The question is how do you expect the other races to have the strength to wipe out a similarly-strong race, when there are dozens of other races ready to gang up and smack your race down if it tries going for genocide.

In D&D, there are three dominant races
Kobolds, who outbreed almost every other race, and can easily hide when the going gets tough.
Humans, who have to get along with other races and species to survive, and excel at doing so.
Sahuagin, who already rule 70%+ the surface of the world, and don't care about the remaining 30% because it's not wet enough for them.

NichG
2014-01-13, 10:48 AM
Genocide is actually a red herring here. The reason that different types of creature occupying the same niche tend to eliminate all but one type isn't because 'one type kills the others' but is rather because of differential growth rates.

If one species doubles its 'resting' population level every 10 years and another doubles its 'resting' population level every 12 years, then eventually there will just be much much more of the former than the latter, without any form of violence being required. The ratio of the latter to the former decreases exponentially with time. If there is some limited space to live in (e.g. an effective population cap), then the decrease of that ratio means a decrease in the absolute population level of the slower-growing species. Eventually that means extinction, without any overt violence or act of genocide needed.

In fact, even with zero difference in growth rate it can happen, but instead of happening exponentially (and so being only logarithmically dependent on the actual population numbers) it happens according to a random walk, which means it takes ~sqrt(N) time where N is the population size - so that can take much, much longer to occur.

The thing is though, even the exponential case could take a very long time - thousands or tens of thousands of years. The smaller the difference in relative survival/growth rate, the longer its going to take.

Another way to do it is to actually have everything be the same species after all. For example, you get a dwarf or an elf or a human based on the environment in which the child was born. This particular effect could even be heritable for a few generations via epigenetic factors. So you effectively have one species but multiple phenotypes, where what ends up being expressed is based on environmental/etc factors. You could even have something like what ants have, where there are certain controllable factors that allow someone to intentionally create an 'elf' child or a 'dwarf' child by, e.g., exposure to certain compounds, roots, magical fields, etc during childhood.

Driderman
2014-01-13, 11:35 AM
While I won't second the math, I'm in total agreement, which I was trying to convey with my posts: Barring a century-spanning dedication to the complete removal of another race, genocide certainly isn't going to account for fantasy races wiping each other out.

Jay R
2014-01-13, 12:14 PM
Bear in mind that the word "race" can mean "species" or "cultural subgroup of humans".

In fact, we live on a world with multiple races. Use world history as a guide, but with orcs, elves, etc. taking the place of Nordics, Hispanics, Europeans, Africans, Polynesians, etc.

Mastikator
2014-01-13, 01:17 PM
Funny thing - every single one of those races is still around today, and many are doing quite well.[snip]

There's a strong correlation between technological advancement and kill count. A fantasy world where magic-tech is available the potential for killing is theoretically higher.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-13, 01:29 PM
Nuclear weapons have been around for a while now... They're a high point in terms of destructive force outpacing defensive capabilities. If one side has nukes and the other doesn't, then it's a different context.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-13, 01:44 PM
I'm catching up still, a lot of good points and things to digest, but I want to address two things:

1. I'm getting particularly annoyed by people either continually bringing up "the gods did it" or trying to shove that down my throat. I don't like using active or meddling gods in the games I play and run. I like to either use absent gods or gods of ambiguous existence. I don't like playing in or running settings where people who are not akin to physical gods themselves know definitively how the cosmos runs.

2. I think it's a little fallacious to compare multiple humanoid races to human ethnic groups (and how they interact) unless you're flat out saying they're all sub-species of one larger species. If Humans are primates, Dwarves are some kind of evolved mole people, etc., then why would they interact like members of the same species? It's fine to impose that type of interaction on them, but I don't see it as being the go-to explanation without being a hand-wave.

Edit:

Magic as a killing tool is also something that hasn't been addressed. Nukes haven't caused genocides (I only mentioned Neanderthals being killed off as the popular theory, not my personal belief) because they tend to also be bad for the ones using them. If they suddenly had a way to kill massive amounts of creatures, cleanly, with no seeming repercussions to them for using it, why wouldn't they think about using such an option?

Red Fel
2014-01-13, 02:01 PM
I'm going to hop onboard the "ecological niches are the winner" and "war and genocide are red herrings" bandwagons here.

Suppose, in the beginning, you had a single species. We'll call it Prime, for clarification. There were many tribes of the prime, and the land was fairly consistent. They were hunter-gatherers, living in the plains and near the forested areas. There were battles over territory.

And then climate change occurred. Make it dramatic, make it gradual, whichever. Some humans fled to the forests, to seek the shelter of the trees. (Perhaps the sun had grown unbearable?) Others fled to the mountains, to find caves for protection. (Perhaps weather conditions?) Still others fled to the sea, as perhaps conditions were milder there. (No idea why.) And perhaps some remained in the plains, determined to make their niche.

Fast-forward a vast period of time, or assume change occurs more quickly in this world. The calamity passes, and the plains-dwellers have survived and thrived. Some, quicker and more savage, retain their hunter-gatherer ways. Others, perhaps the smaller, weaker, and smarter, have constructed walled cities to protect themselves. Over time, the hunter-gatherers remained mostly the same, becoming humans, but the city-dwellers, breeding for intelligence rather than physical prowess, diminished physically, becoming gnomes. The forest-dwellers delved deeper into the pristine, untouched woods, until they found the deepest places, where the sun rarely reached. Forced to build shelters in the trees as protection from wild beasts, they developed a tree-centered culture, involving reverence for and devotion to nature. Protected from an excess of harmful sunlight, they aged more gracefully, and with a rigorous exercise regimen (involving moving from tree to tree) they retained a level of fitness throughout their long lives. Obviously, elves. The cave-dwellers adapted to their rocky surroundings by becoming rockier themselves, albeit not in a literal sense - their skins became thick and tough, their temperaments became more blunt and severe. Given that they lived in the mountains, where there was little protection from the sun outside of the caves, they tended to remain inside, and over time expanded and developed cavernous networks. Blah blah, dwarven history.

You can figure something out with the people who went to the sea. Something something, fish-people.

It's hard to kill off an entire population. Really hard. War isn't going to be a likely source of destruction. Further, as the above example illustrates, most of the races have no need to bother one another. Elves, dwarves, and fishfaces aren't likely to ever leave their homes. Gnomes are probably reluctant to leave their cities. Humans are too stupid to wage full-scale war. The probability of interaction is likely low, barring some fluke. For example, gnomes need lumber, bumble into woods, discover elves, trade results. Human hunting party reaches mountains, runs into conflict with dwarves, something something.

War, full-scale war, is usually fought for a reason. Conquest and ideology are common choices, but it's rare that somebody says, "Well, let's kill all the tuskmouths today." To get the nations to go to war, you have to give them a reason - say the notion of life underwater offends the elves, so they kill fishfaces on sight. Or say that the gnomes have decided they need trees, so they start cutting freely, which leads the elves to decide that all gnomes have to die. Because proportionate response. Even with the availability of magical weapons that would enable effortless mass-slaughter, there would have to be a reason to go to war, and by conveniently separating the different races, there's not one, at least until people advance enough to be "modern" by D&D standards, and are able to conquer and inhabit new environments.

I agree, however, that you need to limit the number of intelligent races you're bringing to bear in a campaign like this. If you're ruling out divine intervention, there are only so many ecological niches you can create, without repeating, to create distinct species. For example, Gray Elves and Wild Elves would probably end up competing. Dwarves and Goblins and Trolls would be in a state of constant war, simply due to how they live. (Notice, that's pretty much where they are in any fantasy setting.) Humans would probably try to sleep with kill anything trying to thrive in their area. And so forth. Limiting the numbers makes the idea that these races developed independently more feasible.

Rakaydos
2014-01-13, 02:27 PM
I'm catching up still, a lot of good points and things to digest, but I want to address two things:

1. I'm getting particularly annoyed by people either continually bringing up "the gods did it" or trying to shove that down my throat. I don't like using active or meddling gods in the games I play and run. I like to either use absent gods or gods of ambiguous existence. I don't like playing in or running settings where people who are not akin to physical gods themselves know definitively how the cosmos runs.

Something almost as good, however, is Coincidence. How did all these races coexist? Noone knows. Religius leaders take it as proof that THEIR religion is the true way, while scholars debate the very issues before us.

Y'know, just like our world. The difference between coincidence and divine intervention is up to the viewpoint of the debater.

Broken Twin
2014-01-13, 02:31 PM
A couple of good castings of familicide and you're all set on wiping out other species! :smalltongue:

In my settings, I usually go with a couple of different methods. Some species evolved into different ecological niches, some underwent attempted/successful genocide, some grew up in harmony with each other, others remain locked in conflict...

Either way, I usually stick to a max of seven sapient species. Each one may have multiple races/cultures within them, and for the most part it seems to work. Players chose culture, species, and race upon character creation.

Scow2
2014-01-13, 03:20 PM
2. I think it's a little fallacious to compare multiple humanoid races to human ethnic groups (and how they interact) unless you're flat out saying they're all sub-species of one larger species. If Humans are primates, Dwarves are some kind of evolved mole people, etc., then why would they interact like members of the same species? It's fine to impose that type of interaction on them, but I don't see it as being the go-to explanation without being a hand-wave.People treating other ethnic groups as human is a somewhat recent concept. Multiple intelligent species survive better than unintelligent species by exercising long-term planning and contingencies to ensure that they don't get wiped out. I've been playing Guild Wars 2 recently... and if it weren't for Player Characters being immortal one-man-armies, the various races that hate each other would still manage to survive independently locked in a racial war - and each one develops strategies to ensure they survive in the long run.


Magic as a killing tool is also something that hasn't been addressed. Nukes haven't caused genocides (I only mentioned Neanderthals being killed off as the popular theory, not my personal belief) because they tend to also be bad for the ones using them. If they suddenly had a way to kill massive amounts of creatures, cleanly, with no seeming repercussions to them for using it, why wouldn't they think about using such an option?Because they or others like the other species (Much as humans like Tigers and Wolves, despite how much they try to kill us), and the other species have the SAME weapons available, and also have defenses against them.

Intelligence grants incredible species-wide durability.

Knaight
2014-01-13, 04:42 PM
Look at other fairly close species, that aren't even remotely humanoid. The black and brown rat (rattus rattus and rattus norvegius) are fairly similar animals. They occupy essentially the same ecological niches. There's a very large overlap in where they live, with the brown rat being basically everywhere and the black rat living in some of what is brown rat territory. The rattus genus alone has over a dozen species, many of which are doing quite well with no real risk of extinction, with lots of territory overlap, particularly with the brown and black rats with huge territory.

The point is, similar species with similar ecological niches aren't particularly uncommon. Human level intelligence doesn't necessarily change that.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-13, 04:49 PM
Look at other fairly close species, that aren't even remotely humanoid. The black and brown rat (rattus rattus and rattus norvegius) are fairly similar animals. They occupy essentially the same ecological niches. There's a very large overlap in where they live, with the brown rat being basically everywhere and the black rat living in some of what is brown rat territory. The rattus genus alone has over a dozen species, many of which are doing quite well with no real risk of extinction, with lots of territory overlap, particularly with the brown and black rats with huge territory.

The point is, similar species with similar ecological niches aren't particularly uncommon. Human level intelligence doesn't necessarily change that.

Then explain why we're the only civilized, sapient species and all of the others are gone. You can't point at the co-habitation of non-sapient creatures as evidence to justify the rational co-existence of multiple sapient species in the same niche.

Rats don't know that if they wiped out all the other rat species, then their own species would have higher chances to survive, for example.

falloutimperial
2014-01-13, 05:06 PM
There is the potential for people to compare too strongly human ethnic relations with interspecies relations of sentient groups and saying that genocide would be likely. It strikes me as just as likely that coexisting sentient groups would tolerate one another while making most plans within their own subgroup. Especially in the sparse lands of not-medieval times, the idea of distant aliens may seem irrelevant to the common folks. Remember in our own world that humans did not usually seek to eliminate the various monsters and demihumans that they believed it.

Knaight
2014-01-13, 05:31 PM
Then explain why we're the only civilized, sapient species and all of the others are gone. You can't point at the co-habitation of non-sapient creatures as evidence to justify the rational co-existence of multiple sapient species in the same niche.

Rats don't know that if they wiped out all the other rat species, then their own species would have higher chances to survive, for example.

Why are you assuming that because that is currently the case it's the only possible option? We've been around with other tool using, sapient species before. It's entirely possible that there will be multiple in the future. Speciation is a slow process with quite a bit of randomness involved, unless you're looking at the generational times and population sizes typical of something akin to bacterial strains.

It's also worth looking at the Toba event. It created a population bottleneck in humans, and also likely did so in homo floresiensis and denisova hominin. Homo floresiensis never really expanded much, and was likely subsequently wiped out in a smaller volcanic eruption. There's also the matter of the Red Deer Cave discovery, though whether the remains found there were even from a separate species is questionable. Basically, humans surviving at all was a matter of luck, both in happening to survive the Toba event and in not dealing with a sufficiently bad local catastrophe prior to expanding to a large geographical area. Sheer dumb luck could have preserved more species, it simply didn't. Coming back to the rats, one of the differences here is that rat populations are less fragile to begin with due to larger numbers and faster replacement after population bottlenecks, intelligence doesn't even come into the survival differences for these sorts of events.

As far as wiping out the other species go, you're assuming that the species are even capable of banding together to pursue this, which seems questionable. Look at humans - up until relatively recently the largest unified cultural groups were extended families. More recently than that were small city states with some outlying areas. Warfare between these city states over resources was pretty routine, as were alliances between them - but, if you look at the fantasy races, there's no particular reason for the alliances to fall along species lines. I'd expect plenty of human states allying with elf states against other human states, and similar things.

Basically, the extinction states you're looking at only make sense if there is a strong species wide identification, rather than identification to a tribe, city, nation, etc.

All that's needed is that the mass extinction events don't happen, and multiple species are suddenly a much better possibility. Adding to that, there are incentives to not killing the other sapient human species in many fantasy worlds. The tendency to be full of unclaimed wilderness and dangerous beasts means that it is likely easier to expand in that direction, and keeping other sentient species around to help deal with very dangerous non-sentient ones just makes sense.

Erik Vale
2014-01-13, 05:31 PM
There is the potential for people to compare too strongly human ethnic relations with interspecies relations of sentient groups and saying that genocide would be likely. It strikes me as just as likely that coexisting sentient groups would tolerate one another while making most plans within their own subgroup. Especially in the sparse lands of not-medieval times, the idea of distant aliens may seem irrelevant to the common folks. Remember in our own world that humans did not usually seek to eliminate the various monsters and demihumans that they believed it.

Problem with that is, they were all/mostly mythically super powerful.
And then the inquisition want's to disagree with you as far as witches/warlocks are concerned, also werewolf and vampire hunters were also a thing for a time... I think.

Though yes, that didn't happen for a long long time, but I disagree that groups would just stay away from eachother, there are plenty of empire expansions that show opposite even though they weren't aiming for genocide, earlier at the hunter gatherer level I believe you, but at that stage breeding/lack of resources causes such events, and there is the chance for one or more to pull ahead to the point where it is entirely reasonable to kill the others as vermin unless you keep them as slaves or for moral reasons leave them alone.

SiuiS
2014-01-13, 05:34 PM
I'm curious. We have all these different cultures with different ethnic traits, here on earth; but having different (but interbreedable) species with different ethnic traits is weird?

What is the difference between a setting with europeans/Africans/Turks/Gaels, and humans/elves/gnomes/dwarves?

Knaight's response highlights my own. I find the idea that simply because we call them another species (which has happened with other ethnicities!) you get a united and global front is... Silly.

Driderman
2014-01-13, 05:39 PM
2. I think it's a little fallacious to compare multiple humanoid races to human ethnic groups (and how they interact) unless you're flat out saying they're all sub-species of one larger species. If Humans are primates, Dwarves are some kind of evolved mole people, etc., then why would they interact like members of the same species? It's fine to impose that type of interaction on them, but I don't see it as being the go-to explanation without being a hand-wave.


In that case, they don't kill each other for the same reasons that penguins, kangaroos, monkeys and other animal species don't kill each other. If no human mode of thought is to be assumed, and no comparison to similiar real world situations is to be made, you can make up whatever explanation you want since there's nothing to base it on anyway.

Erik Vale
2014-01-13, 05:58 PM
I'm curious. We have all these different cultures with different ethnic traits, here on earth; but having different (but interbreedable) species with different ethnic traits is weird?

What is the difference between a setting with europeans/Africans/Turks/Gaels, and humans/elves/gnomes/dwarves?


Because of the severe difference in traits. Compare drow fluff/crunch with humans. Is there any reason the two wouldn't be trying to kill eachother from the start fluff, and the differences crunch wise are far larger than minor culture/language differences, vastly different skin tone and different genetic predilections.

I will say that I'm all for fantasy worlds with many races, however when many occupy the same niche I think there needs to be a slightly better reason then 'just never happened'. Of course, if that reason is lazyness/not wanting to die for minor gains, I'm happy with that [see my Orios spoiler, bottom of page 1 I think]

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-13, 06:02 PM
In that case, they don't kill each other for the same reasons that penguins, kangaroos, monkeys and other animal species don't kill each other. If no human mode of thought is to be assumed, and no comparison to similiar real world situations is to be made, you can make up whatever explanation you want since there's nothing to base it on anyway.

This is being discussed currently, but as I pointed out with Knaight's rat example, those animals don't know that wiping out other animals increases the potential rate of survival for their own species. You can't use non-sapient life as a model for how sapient life would interact.

We could only really look at those specific populations of primates and possibly some other animals (like Octopi) to find non-human examples. But whether they're sapient enough to realize that being the only thing in their ecological niche is to their own benefit is another question entirely.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-13, 06:04 PM
Rats don't know that if they wiped out all the other rat species, then their own species would have higher chances to survive, for example. This is very modern concept...

Rhynn
2014-01-13, 06:13 PM
So, I ask all of you, how do you make it make internal sense in your games without resorting to literal Divine Intervention (the gods made everything and make it so)

Why would we? Why should we?

The main literary examples, from myths and sagas to Tolkien, use exactly that. And like Mastikator points out, you're taking out one of the most common major foundations of fantasy world history, and then saying that the rest of it doesn't make sense. How could it?

Anyway...

Elves and dwarves are usually presented as being slow breeders, which means they won't be outbreeding anyone, and they won't be competing for resources as desperately as humans. If they came first (evolved from apes, planar travel, made from stone by giants, whatever tickles your banana), developed to Copper/Bronze Age levels, and then humans arrived (again, in whatever manner you like; IIRC Faerun's humans all originate from other planets/planes); the advanced elves and dwarves had no reason to wipe them out, and the humans lacked the means to wipe them out, and contact with the elves and dwarves got the humans up to the cities & farming -level of civilization fast, where trade is of more interest and you need much less space to live in to begin with.

Distance is also a more than sufficient answer. Pre-industrial agricultural societies just don't spread that fast, and seas, mountain ranges, and deserts can do a decent job of separating them, or at least making conquest and migration less likely.

That whole "wipe out and/or assimilate" thing is mostly pre-agricultural stuff, where hunting and gathering requires much larger territories compared to the size of the groups, and where the groups are small and centralized enough to wipe out. It get a lot harder for a kingdom to wipe out a kingdom, generally.

SouthpawSoldier also makes a good point. Why should the divergence be prehistorical/Stone Age/earlier? Someone referred to Dark Sun, too, where halflings were the original sapient humanoids, and they created the other races in an attempt to respond to drastically changing climate conditions.

Knaight
2014-01-13, 06:16 PM
Because of the severe difference in traits. Compare drow fluff/crunch with humans. Is there any reason the two wouldn't be trying to kill eachother from the start fluff, and the differences crunch wise are far larger than minor culture/language differences, vastly different skin tone and different genetic predilections.

Both are likely mostly composed of individuals which aren't particularly fond of the concept of throwing themselves at a bunch of armed enemies. Very few people actually are. There's a much larger group that could be convinced to go out and kill the other if they actually get something from it, but then that works out into not having the global fronts again as the civilization that might be viably attacked for gain isn't going to necessarily be the one of the other species.


This is being discussed currently, but as I pointed out with Knaight's rat example, those animals don't know that wiping out other animals increases the potential rate of survival for their own species. You can't use non-sapient life as a model for how sapient life would interact.
This only really matters if they actually define the in group as their entire species. Given the extent to which this still doesn't happen with humans, and given that an in group defined even at a national level is also quite recent, this seems questionable. People look out for the interests of their groups, as they define them. Their species is probably way down on the list.

Take classical Greece. You'll likely get a bunch of people who identify with their city, with something to the effect of "I am an Athenian". This is usually going to be more important than their identification of themselves with Hellenic culture in general, which is likely then more important than their identification with humans as a species. This is in an area where the city states are usually considered fairly closely related, and where humanist ideas which did center the species were particularly strong.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-13, 06:22 PM
Look at other fairly close species, that aren't even remotely humanoid. The black and brown rat (rattus rattus and rattus norvegius) are fairly similar animals. They occupy essentially the same ecological niches. There's a very large overlap in where they live, with the brown rat being basically everywhere and the black rat living in some of what is brown rat territory. The rattus genus alone has over a dozen species, many of which are doing quite well with no real risk of extinction, with lots of territory overlap, particularly with the brown and black rats with huge territory.

The point is, similar species with similar ecological niches aren't particularly uncommon. Human level intelligence doesn't necessarily change that.

You're actually missing a large part of the story, where brown rats have replaced black rats in most parts of the world and continue to do so where they are introduced. The huge range of brown rats in, say, Europe, was originally the territory of black rats.

When one species uses the resources more effectively and reproduces faster, it doesn't come to war. Other species in the same niche just go extinct.

I'd just go with putting the races in distinct environments in radically different geographic regions. Elves on one continent, humans another, dwarves might live underground and not come out. It's entirely possible for multiple species to have developed in isolation to some level of sentience before they encountered each other. And it is very likely that even if war occurs when they finally interact you'll still have the other groups around afterwards. They might not live together, and I think that is fine for fantasy, and they might not like one another but they would still all be around.

The issue does come up, though, if you try to extend this too far. Elves live a long time, but they take a long time to reach maturity and have lower reproduction rates than humans. Eventually there will be more humans, and more humans will need more space. Over a few centuries they'll probably fight the elves for this space, and kill a few here and there. Eventually this will catch up to the slower growing species as they're forced onto less land, and have less members. Each war will hurt them more and more, and they won't be able to recover. Less land, less survivors, more humans every year and more conflict. Poof, no more elves. Dwarves would face the same fate as humans need more and more metal.

I'd go with some sort of mutually assured destruction, truth be told. A third party threat, of some such. I kind of assume this is the role of orcs/goblins in most DnD settings. There are a ton of them, they're nomadic and hard to wipe out, they reproduce quickly, and they're violent. You can't wipe them out because they can just move and rebound too quickly, you have to focus on keeping them down just to keep from being overwhelmed. Sure, the elves and humans could go to war. It's just that if they did they'd be unable to devote resources to the goblinoid threat, and both sides would be wiped out. It's two competitors on one trophic level being kept in check by a predator on a higher trophic level, and it makes sense ecologically.


If you want a kitchen-sink sort of setting, you either need a really damned big planet or something like Planescape going on.

Knaight
2014-01-13, 06:29 PM
You're actually missing a large part of the story, where brown rats have replaced black rats in most parts of the world and continue to do so where they are introduced. The huge range of brown rats in, say, Europe, was originally the territory of black rats.

When one species uses the resources more effectively and reproduces faster, it doesn't come to war. Other species in the same niche just go extinct.

They are in the process of replacing them, they haven't replaced them by any means. Black rats are still very far from extinction. It's also worth noting that the analog actually fits a lot of fantasy - elves, dwarves, etc. are frequently on the decline towards extinction, where humans are frequently growing.

Rats are also different in that they are basically at capacity within their niche and environment, and as such out breeding is going to be a much bigger concern. Spreading out further isn't really an option, though there are changes in capacity around food humans waste. Without being at capacity, breeding causing another species to move towards extinction isn't really as much of a thing, as they are going to be displaced instead.


Why would we? Why should we?

The main literary examples, from myths and sagas to Tolkien, use exactly that. And like Mastikator points out, you're taking out one of the most common major foundations of fantasy world history, and then saying that the rest of it doesn't make sense. How could it?
We would because we don't want interventionist gods in a setting, and still want fantasy races. That's really all that's needed. Just because the main literary examples have interventionist gods in them doesn't mean that there's some obligation to stick them in works that we make now.

SiuiS
2014-01-13, 06:32 PM
Because of the severe difference in traits. Compare drow fluff/crunch with humans. Is there any reason the two wouldn't be trying to kill eachother from the start fluff, and the differences crunch wise are far larger than minor culture/language differences, vastly different skin tone and different genetic predilections.

One lives ten miles below the ground in an environment custom designed to cater to them and which they are so adapted to that they actually lose their ecological advantages when outside of it for too long, and the other has an instinctual fear of the niche of the other and wouldn't want to go there.

Or, one is a standard mortal race and the other is a mythological equivalent of the driving and bitterly impartial forces of craft, whose perspective on reality is utterly orthogonal to anything a lesser, surface dwelling monkey would find important.

Or, one would flourish and the other doesn't exist because without divine intervention [b]OR[/i] the pre-post apocalyptic high cultural background the stronger one would never have been splintered off from it's base, and exiled in such. Way that they would develop these powers.



Dungeons and Dragons is a post-apocalyptic setting. The reason this stuff hasn't happened? Because by the time the game starts society has risen and fallen a half dozen times. It's the dark ages. People are more interested in not being eaten by Grue than in waging a war against an equally skilled culture that they categorically lack the capacity to extinguish.



I will say that I'm all for fantasy worlds with many races, however when many occupy the same niche I think there needs to be a slightly better reason then 'just never happened'. Of course, if that reason is lazyness/not wanting to die for minor gains, I'm happy with that [see my Orios spoiler, bottom of page 1 I think]

Let's be fair here; this is a gross generalization that makes a ton of assumptions.
1) in a magical world of magic with magic, every race is a multihundredthousand or multimillion year old work of evolutionary forces guided only by what we would experience in modern nonmagic unmagical earth without magic.
2) dwarves are not literal wardens of earth, elves are not manifestations of mayure's graces and cruelty and orcs don't spawn mysteriously without reproduction in the bowels of the earth to spill out and murder as part of an absurd but natural cycle.
3) there is a single condensifiable history of the planet, and for some reason the multimillion year tradition of races and civilizations in turn rising to near-singularity status before collapsing into barbarism doesn't happen despite all those ancient ruins and mystic artifacts lying around.
4) in a world where the ability to step sideways to new and uncharted vistas the likes of which makes modern humanity's ideas of space travel and colonization look like spitting into the wind and giggling, migration across planes and worlds of infinitude rather than fighting over close resources doesn't occur to anyone ever.
5) in a world where the forces of nature and supernature, morality, ethics and philosophy sometimes crawl out of your head and walk the earth, shape gotta a whim, no one would have very valid and scientifically verifiable qualms about exterminating an entire species 'for our greater good'.


The entire concept is ludicrous, really. You know what the default assumption for prehistoric D&D races should be? The Cold war. Every shaman and mystic worth their salt who wants to eradicate the other tribes will bring literal hellfire from the sky. And so will every other shaman. It's mutually assured destruction that manifests at around the same time people realize that after they eat fruit, flowers come out of where they buried their stool and maybe they could use this somehow.

Any race smart enough to seek ecological supremacy is smart enough to do so economically because force just won't work.

Harbinger
2014-01-13, 06:33 PM
The way I see it is that they simply have no need to wipe each other out. They all fill different ecological niches. Humans and neanderthals were incompatible because they were trying to fill the same niche. Dwarves living in their caves simply have no need to wipe out the tribe of humans living on the grassy plains miles and miles away. And then there's races like halflings who voluntarily integrate with humans, and races like gnomes and kobolds who just hide away from everyone else. Actually, maybe that's why those two races hate each other so much: they're trying to fill the same niche.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-13, 06:37 PM
The issue does come up, though, if you try to extend this too far. Elves live a long time, but they take a long time to reach maturity and have lower reproduction rates than humans. Eventually there will be more humans, and more humans will need more space. Over a few centuries they'll probably fight the elves for this space, and kill a few here and there. Eventually this will catch up to the slower growing species as they're forced onto less land, and have less members. Each war will hurt them more and more, and they won't be able to recover. Less land, less survivors, more humans every year and more conflict. Poof, no more elves. Dwarves would face the same fate as humans need more and more metal. Who would you rather fight? Legolas, or the average Joe?

If a given group of elves are terribly at diplomacy, war, defence, and happen to be in a desired area, they will be conquered by those who are good at diplomacy, and war in neighbouring areas (by no certainty genocided). If those elves are instead great diplomats, warriors, with strongly defended homes, whose land isn't that much better than what the other six human groups have... you'll go to war with one of the six human groups, who you have already been feuding with for the past fifty generations over the land you each currently possess.

Can you get the other six human groups to ally with you against the elves? If the elves are good with diplomacy, probably not--but maybe.

By that point though, we might as well say any given people or nation should be extinct, because of the potential of other groups ganging up on them which exists.

The Oni
2014-01-13, 06:44 PM
I really don't see why this is a problem.

Literally, in one of my settings humans and halflings are literally just divergent Homo species; the halflings originated in an area dominated ecologically by very large animals. Height was a disadvantage because it made it harder to duck and cover in the tall grass, so the indigenous people never got much taller than 3 1/2 feet. They didn't hate eachother but likewise didn't find eachother very sexually appealing given the height difference, so they kept to themselves mostly and became distinct populations. Easy. It's just as easy to say elves evolved from something intelligent but non-simian (cats for instance?) and the blueprint of a fully evolved race tends towards humanoid, thus resulting in convergent evolution close enough to reproduce?

While I'm all for Grimdark settings, it seems odd that the default setting for any species with a big brain and opposable thumbs is "genocide your neighbors." Expect fantasy racism? Sure. Occasional wars? Absolutely. But typically if your race spans the full alignment spectrum, it seems really odd that your kingdoms and empires would want to utterly wipe out another sentient race rather than trading, learning, or even making vassal states out of them.

Remember, Warhammer 40K's races tend towards omnicidal for a reason and that reason is Chaos Gods and eldritch abominations scourging the galaxy like it's going out of style. In the absence of absolute soul-crushing monstrosities, it seems like most sentient beings would try "live and let live" for the most part.

Wardog
2014-01-13, 06:48 PM
I'm curious. We have all these different cultures with different ethnic traits, here on earth; but having different (but interbreedable) species with different ethnic traits is weird?

What is the difference between a setting with europeans/Africans/Turks/Gaels, and humans/elves/gnomes/dwarves?

Knaight's response highlights my own. I find the idea that simply because we call them another species (which has happened with other ethnicities!) you get a united and global front is... Silly.

I suppose you could argue that all these cultures are to an extent ephemeral. Are present-day Europeans/Africas/Turks/Gaels etc the same "people" or culture as their ancestors? The individuals are obviously different. The culture is different. Go back far enough, and the language is different as well. Cultures can appear, diverge, merge, and go extinct without the people themselves being wiped out. As long as the world isn't a total meltingpot (and maybe even then) you will always have multiple cultures. They just might not be the same ones you had 1000 years ago, or 1000 years in the future.

In contrast, if humans/elves/gnomes/dwarves cannot interbreed (and no significant evolution occurs while they are around) you will never have any other species, and if one goes extinct, there will always be fewer species. Which doesn't mean you couldn't have multiple species, but I expect that is a reason why they are less likely.

And if they can interbreed, then (depending on how often it happens) you will probably end up with essentially one species with a lot of variability, only some of which match the idea of the "pure" species, and with cultures cutting across species. (You'll probably get the equivilent of 19th century anthropologists going around measuring the pointedness of people's ears etc to try to classify people as "humans" or "elves" etc, but the reality will be far fuzzier than any arbitrary categories they try to put people into).



As for how or why you could have multiple sentient species:
As several people have said or implied, it could be down to ecological specialization. If the dwarves are so much better at living in mountains than anyone else, then no-one will be able to drive them out of the mountains, while they themselves will probably never be too successful outside the mountains. And if (as is stereotypically the case) humans are the best generalists, then they will be able to go anywhere, and survive elsewhere if a specialist pushes them out of one niche. And once proper societies develop with trade, diplomacy, etc then having some humans living in all territories will probably be advantagous for the humans and their hosts. (And if the dwarves decide to expel all the humans from the mountains, then the humans may retaliate by persuading all the other races to attack the dwarves. Or just embargo them).

So while I think "multiple sentient species" is probably less ecologically stable than "multiple cultures within the same species", I don't think it would be impossible to evolve, nor would it inevitably lead to genocide.

Besides, RL history has plenty of examples of one culture allying with a very foreign culture to fight their much-more-culturally-similar neighbours (whether because their neighbours are a easier target/imminent threat, or because of some seemingly minor ideological reason that outsiders would think irrelivent but to the people involved are more important than anything else). "I know orcs are ugly, smelly, stupid, and prone to pillaging anything at the drop of a hat, but by God! at least they have the decency to open their eggs at the narrow end!"

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-13, 06:49 PM
Who would you rather fight? Legolas, or the average Joe?

If a given group of elves are terribly at diplomacy, war, defence, and happen to be in a desired area, they will be conquered by those who are good at diplomacy, and war in neighbouring areas (by no certainty genocided). If those elves are instead great diplomats, warriors, with strongly defended homes, whose land isn't that much better than what the other six human groups have... you'll go to war with one of the six human groups, who you have already been feuding with for the past fifty generations over the land you each currently possess.

Can you get the other six human groups to ally with you against the elves? If the elves are good with diplomacy, probably not--but maybe.

By that point though, we might as well say any given people or nation should be extinct, because of the potential of other groups ganging up on them which exists.

How many nations that were around 1000 years ago are still around? How many are now compounds of former holdfasts, that were conquered by one group and turned into one of the nations we know now? How many nations were wiped out in North America alone? How many different Kings lived in what is now Spain 1200 years ago?

Who knows what we'll have 1,000 years from now, let alone 100? I bet the lines look way different, though.

CombatOwl
2014-01-13, 06:49 PM
Something that I've lately been hung up on as I'm putting together a game (and mini-bits of a setting) for my IRL group is the concept of multiple civilized sapient races cohabiting the same continent (or more) to the point of creating the familiar setting that a lot of games use.

Why? The differences between, say, D&D elves and D&D humans is apparently mostly cultural where the elves get some favored genes for extreme longevity.


When I first started doing table top gaming back when 3.5 edition was released for the Dungeons and Dragons game, I never had thought twice about having a plethora of creatures with cultures brushing elbows with each other in the various media I was exposed to. It was in fact just up until recently that I even began questioning set up, since it was something so common in fiction.

But now I am starting to question the possibility of this happening and find myself trying to find some way to rationalize it or at least do away with it without diluting the flavor all those races brought (something I'm doing in a piece of homebrew concerning a race of "mongrel-folk" descended from humanity).

So, I ask all of you, how do you make it make internal sense in your games without resorting to literal Divine Intervention (the gods made everything and make it so) or having one race being dominant and the rest enslaved? I had read on one site that this could occur if the races didn't fill the same ecological niche, didn't fight for the same resources and were kept separate until they were sufficiently advanced enough to not just automatically try to wipe each other out.

Eh? Slavery is mostly a product of economic systems, and as those evolve, the need for slavery diminishes. It's really not hard to see why you would have different cultures coexisting. How do cultures coexist today? Not every radically different set of cultures wars all the time. Even at a very basic level, military detente and comparative advantage should lead to some kind of relationship other than continual war and slavery.

For a more concrete historical example, consider the Ottoman Empire, which for hundreds of years managed to keep some very different cultures under the same governing system. Sure it eventually failed, but states tend to do that. Hell, modern federal republics are an example of how to keep different cultures on the same page and not continually fighting each other.

From a sociological standpoint, what D&D races imply is that states have to fiercely, aggressively assert "melting pot" style national identities--finding common historical ground to unite otherwise disparate people. "We may all be different, but by the Emperor, we must all band together to fight these other people, who are not us."

LibraryOgre
2014-01-13, 06:54 PM
So, I ask all of you, how do you make it make internal sense in your games without resorting to literal Divine Intervention (the gods made everything and make it so) or having one race being dominant and the rest enslaved? I had read on one site that this could occur if the races didn't fill the same ecological niche, didn't fight for the same resources and were kept separate until they were sufficiently advanced enough to not just automatically try to wipe each other out.


For me, there's the fact that there IS literal divine intervention in the settings. Many races are the literal creations of their deities... some were born, some were made, some were found, but almost all races have an explicit creation myth that, and, given the interventionist nature of deities, there's little reason to believe that they are not true.

Another option is from the Forgotten Realms, where at least one race is explicitly a transplant from elsewhere (the orcs). This has happened in the last 40,000 years, and, while this seems like a really long time, keep in mind that humans coexisted with other hominids for ten times that long. Power parities (especially with magical technology, and even a relative technological parity) means that it's hard for any one group to dominate quickly... you can do it by surprise, but run into pockets of resistance which keep you honest.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-13, 07:04 PM
Why? The differences between, say, D&D elves and D&D humans is apparently mostly cultural where the elves get some favored genes for extreme longevity.

In DnD, at least for 3.X, humans are statistically superior to Elves all around. Only Grey Elves are even considered as a viable option alongside humans and that's for wizards.




Eh? Slavery is mostly a product of economic systems, and as those evolve, the need for slavery diminishes. It's really not hard to see why you would have different cultures coexisting. How do cultures coexist today? Not every radically different set of cultures wars all the time. Even at a very basic level, military detente and comparative advantage should lead to some kind of relationship other than continual war and slavery.

For a more concrete historical example, consider the Ottoman Empire, which for hundreds of years managed to keep some very different cultures under the same governing system. Sure it eventually failed, but states tend to do that. Hell, modern federal republics are an example of how to keep different cultures on the same page and not continually fighting each other.

From a sociological standpoint, what D&D races imply is that states have to fiercely, aggressively assert "melting pot" style national identities--finding common historical ground to unite otherwise disparate people. "We may all be different, but by the Emperor, we must all band together to fight these other people, who are not us."


I'm beginning to completely see how, if we treat all the races as ring species of one larger genetic template, they could potentially co-exist with one another. You can then treat them more like cultures and ethnicities than as separate species.

What I'm not seeing much of is explanations for when they're not of the same species. When each race is completely alien in mind set and, in some ways, biology to one another. When they literally look at each other and can feel unsettled that something so completely incomprehensible to their way of life happens to look just like them and mirror how their society works (think how most of the races react to Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy or how even Humans react to Dwarves).

NichG
2014-01-13, 07:14 PM
Niche exclusion isn't about inter-species violence. So even if you have different sentient species and they want to fight each-other, they're not really going to wipe each-other out. The timescale of extinction is generally much longer than just a war.

So really, you can have a bunch of intelligent species that all hate each-other and want to kill each-other on sight but are in different niches, and that could easily be even more ecologically stable than a setup where they all get along but there are significant differences in growth rates and they share the same niche/carrying capacity.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-13, 07:20 PM
Niche exclusion isn't about inter-species violence. So even if you have different sentient species and they want to fight each-other, they're not really going to wipe each-other out. The timescale of extinction is generally much longer than just a war.

So really, you can have a bunch of intelligent species that all hate each-other and want to kill each-other on sight but are in different niches, and that could easily be even more ecologically stable than a setup where they all get along but there are significant differences in growth rates and they share the same niche/carrying capacity.

Given even a medieval society, though, what niche wouldn't humans occupy? Unless we're going with Deep-Sea Elves and Antarctic Orcs, I'm not sure I could see using this as a reason. Any society that has tools an agriculture will want resources from any of the areas people are advising, and there will be competition for these areas.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-13, 07:22 PM
Jacob: What you say is true, no nation's borders last forever. That thankfully has little to do with genocide.


Owl: I don't think slavery has ever been needed. A convenient source of labour which can help one group get ahead of another. You could argue that staying ahead of he competition is a need, to which I can't argue since I don't have enough data as to whether slave-owning societies do get ahead.


Tanuki: Humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs are not that alien to each other. If you made them that alien to each other, then they'd be something different with the same name--that remaining an option if you choose to pursue it.

NichG
2014-01-13, 07:30 PM
Given even a medieval society, though, what niche wouldn't humans occupy? Unless we're going with Deep-Sea Elves and Antarctic Orcs, I'm not sure I could see using this as a reason. Any society that has tools an agriculture will want resources from any of the areas people are advising, and there will be competition for these areas.

Well, all it takes is differential access to niches and you'll get some degree of stabilization.

For example, lets say humans are 50% efficient at utilizing resource A and 51% efficient at utilizing resource B. If dwarves are 51%/50% instead, then I think you can end up with both humans and dwarves being ecologically stable.

A really simple case of this is where some regions have only A and other regions have only B. In regions with only A, dwarves win out asymptotically. In regions with only B, humans win out asymptotically. With migration, you find some number of humans in A regions and some number of dwarves in B regions, but neither species goes extinct.

Edit: Checked it for the following system, it seems to work:


Edit: fixed some equation errors here...

dH/dt = H*( RHA+RHB - H )
dD/dt = D*( RDA+RDB - D )

where RHA is the amount of resource A that humans harvest, RDA is the amount of resource B that humans harvest, etc, and are determined by competition:

RHA + RDA = 1
RHB + RDB = 1

RHA ~ H*(1-a+b)
RDA ~ D*(1+a)

RHB ~ H*(1+a+b)
RDB ~ D*(1-a)

The quantity 'a' determines the difference in competitiveness for each resource. The quantity 'b' is an inherent bias towards humans.

Edit edit:
For a=0.05, b=0.003, I get about 20% dwarves and 80% humans in equilibrium. As b increases, the dwarven population drops sharply - 10% at b=0.004, and less than 1% at b=0.005.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-13, 08:25 PM
I'm guessing you meant RDA is resource A harvested by Dwarves.

You're also assuming resources renewing at a constant rate, such that each race is capable of harvesting as much as it can for its population. Which doesn't make sense if this is a limiting resource.

Try it with some A and B variables, with differing renewal rates.

dA/dt=A+bA-A(RDA+RHA)
b being a renewal rate.
RXA being a "harvesting rate" by race X (D or H)
And Actual amount harvested as:
DA=RDA*A
HA=RHA*A
HR=HA+HB
Tie population changes to these numbers instead:
dH/dt=H*(HR/(H*HUR))
With HUR being Humans usage of all resources, giving decline when resources are reduced and each race isn't capable of harvesting enough for all of its members. You could find equilibrium points, sure, and whether or not you hit one would depend on starting populations of each race and resource.

Granted, something like this would probably actually work in a real world setting, assuming both races evolved isolated from each other long enough to develop language. I'd assume if they reached such a point, they'd probably wind up just agreeing to trade. By focusing each race where it is best suited to harvest, they'd be able to optimize the amount of resources available to all via trading.

CombatOwl
2014-01-13, 08:35 PM
What I'm not seeing much of is explanations for when they're not of the same species. When each race is completely alien in mind set and, in some ways, biology to one another.

Culture trumps Biology. If your culture says "these people are different but acceptable," then that will almost certainly be the prevailing rule.


When they literally look at each other and can feel unsettled that something so completely incomprehensible to their way of life happens to look just like them and mirror how their society works (think how most of the races react to Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy or how even Humans react to Dwarves).

Warhammer anything involves stupid political decision making by everyone involved. It's not by any means something that you should draw from for guidance on hypothetical interspecies relationships. The people who proposed the setting were quite literally using any bull**** excuse they could think of to establish a situation of perpetual warfare so as to sell figurines for a wargame. All of them are settings specifically designed so as to provide an excuse for people to fight, continuously.

Tanuki Tales
2014-01-13, 09:03 PM
Culture trumps Biology. If your culture says "these people are different but acceptable," then that will almost certainly be the prevailing rule.

If that comes about.




Warhammer anything involves stupid political decision making by everyone involved. It's not by any means something that you should draw from for guidance on hypothetical interspecies relationships. The people who proposed the setting were quite literally using any bull**** excuse they could think of to establish a situation of perpetual warfare so as to sell figurines for a wargame. All of them are settings specifically designed so as to provide an excuse for people to fight, continuously.

That in no way discredits the reaction to Skaven or the fact that humanity can view Dwarves as completely alien in mindset even though they seem to be otherwise "human" to sometimes make humans forget they're a different race entirely.

Rakaydos
2014-01-13, 09:38 PM
As far as "totally alien" races, how many were you thinking, to all be mutually xenophobic?

I figure Fey, could be one standard, where the race follows the Grimm template, but exists outside the world proper with a strong relationship to magic. Call it the World Beyond.

Cobolds, Sfartelves, Dwarves, and Drow and so forth could be rolled into one Underdark race, with a total mastery of The World Below. Mine the earth at your own risk, for you may intrude upon their realm.

An Avian race, possibly draconic, could inhabit the World Above, especially if your world includes flying mountians and the like to be their domain. Less numerous than the surface folk, they nevertheless have their unreachable redoubts.

You might aalso add an aquatic race as well, Troglodites of the Deeps and their fabled city of atlantis. Not sure what to call their world, though.

NichG
2014-01-13, 09:47 PM
I'm guessing you meant RDA is resource A harvested by Dwarves.

You're also assuming resources renewing at a constant rate, such that each race is capable of harvesting as much as it can for its population. Which doesn't make sense if this is a limiting resource.


The total amount of resource available per unit time is held constant, and the available amount of resources per time determines the carrying capacity of the system. Introducing a renewal rate just creates another timescale in the problem, but in the asymptotic limit it shouldn't actually change anything. Basically, having the resources 'instantly' renew is just the equivalent of integrating out that short time-scale.

The general form tends to look like:

dP/dt = P*(C-P)

where C is the carrying capacity (e.g. the population sustainable by the system's resource flux). The form you proposed is similar, but you have to muck around a bit to preserve exponential growth in a resource glut. Basically if you want to think about dividing up resources, you need a form like:

dP/dt = P^2*(C/P-1)

Its the same equation, but here you're 'dividing' the carrying capacity up across the population, and then having a sort of overcrowding term.

Anyhow, you can certainly get behaviors that depend on the initial conditions and have various transition points. Its possible to have human/dwarf coexistence, one-species dominance, both species going extinct, etc, based on the parameters. The point is more, there's nothing irrational about having species coexistence - the population dynamics allows for that, even with very weak niche separation. Of course, you can also find parameters where the species won't coexist.

Kelb_Panthera
2014-01-13, 09:52 PM
Because of the severe difference in traits. Compare drow fluff/crunch with humans. Is there any reason the two wouldn't be trying to kill eachother from the start fluff, and the differences crunch wise are far larger than minor culture/language differences, vastly different skin tone and different genetic predilections.

I will say that I'm all for fantasy worlds with many races, however when many occupy the same niche I think there needs to be a slightly better reason then 'just never happened'. Of course, if that reason is lazyness/not wanting to die for minor gains, I'm happy with that [see my Orios spoiler, bottom of page 1 I think]

Bad example. Drow fluff says that they would've murdered themselves into extinction eons ago if not for regular deific intervention.

Even ignoring that, the two species live in completely separate environments with very little direct interaction. There's also the matter of their actual mechanical differences being pretty trivial. Drow are spell-resistant and that's the only real advantage that they have. They breed a bit slower, they advance a bit slower (LA +2), they don't operate well in daylight, they have similar life expectancy even though they -can- live much longer, and they antagonize literally every culture that isn't their own and often antagonize themselves as well being strongly xenophobic and identifying strongly with their cities and noble houses. In the rare instance that drow and humans -do- come into contact they do, in fact, try to murder each other until one or the other is no longer present. If the underdark wasn't so full of defensible positions the drow couldn't survive against the natural predators that exist in their ecology. (We'll just ignore the fact that there are -way- too many high level predators in that ecology for it to sustain itself like it does.)


In DnD, at least for 3.X, humans are statistically superior to Elves all around. Only Grey Elves are even considered as a viable option alongside humans and that's for wizards.

This is true enough but at the same time the mechanical differences between the various PC races are pretty slim and LA actually accomplishes its intended goal of keeping the more powerful races in check when compared to the races that they would otherwise completely overwhelm in natural selection terms.


What I'm not seeing much of is explanations for when they're not of the same species. When each race is completely alien in mind set and, in some ways, biology to one another. When they literally look at each other and can feel unsettled that something so completely incomprehensible to their way of life happens to look just like them and mirror how their society works (think how most of the races react to Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy or how even Humans react to Dwarves).

That's the thing; if they're of such an alien mindset, then why does their society, nevermind language, mirror our own so closely? The only reasonable answer is that either their mindset isn't so alien as all that or their culture doesn't make any sense to them either. The latter is absurd so the only reasonable conclusion is that their mindset isn't actually alien.

As for biology; when you look at it broadly, there's really not that much difference between any two mammals, save for the occasional specialized feature. Even more broadly all animals share more than a few biological features and functions; respiration, the need to consume foodstuffs, instinctive drive to reproduce, even social behavior in a lot of creatures. Just how alien other species are is really not that impressive when you look at it critically.

Jay R
2014-01-13, 10:30 PM
2. I think it's a little fallacious to compare multiple humanoid races to human ethnic groups (and how they interact) unless you're flat out saying they're all sub-species of one larger species. If Humans are primates, Dwarves are some kind of evolved mole people, etc., then why would they interact like members of the same species? It's fine to impose that type of interaction on them, but I don't see it as being the go-to explanation without being a hand-wave.

I don't see it as not being the go-to explanation without being a hand-wave, either.

Many early tribes had a word that meant "people", but only their own tribe. So yes, they treated other tribes as a different species.

By modern biology, if they can interbreed freely, they are the same species, so yes, humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, and dragons are all one species.

In fact, that's nonsense, so modern rules of biology don't directly apply. Which means that all your assumptions about how two sapient species would interact are suspect. We know they behave differently in at least one important way - they interbreed.

And that alone might be enough. Would you wipe out a clan that are related to your cousin?

Another valid reason could very easily be that they have overlapping, but not identical, ecological niches. Humans might wipe out all the dwarves on the plains, but once the invading force goes into the caves, the dwarves have an insurmountable combat advantage. Similarly, other races might be able to push the elves back into the forest, but they won't win many battles there. The Goblin races' comparative advantage is likely to be fecundity. They breed faster than the other races can find and kill them. (Also, they win the night battles; humans win the day battles.)

Besides, once you've pushed the dwarves into the mountains, why would you want to wipe them out? They aren't taking any of your farmland, and they're better miners than you are. It's probably better for you to trade them food for metals.

All in all, it's bad for one race to kill off its trading partners - of any species.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-13, 10:45 PM
The total amount of resource available per unit time is held constant, and the available amount of resources per time determines the carrying capacity of the system. Introducing a renewal rate just creates another timescale in the problem, but in the asymptotic limit it shouldn't actually change anything. Basically, having the resources 'instantly' renew is just the equivalent of integrating out that short time-scale.

The general form tends to look like:

dP/dt = P*(C-P)

where C is the carrying capacity (e.g. the population sustainable by the system's resource flux). The form you proposed is similar, but you have to muck around a bit to preserve exponential growth in a resource glut. Basically if you want to think about dividing up resources, you need a form like:

dP/dt = P^2*(C/P-1)

Its the same equation, but here you're 'dividing' the carrying capacity up across the population, and then having a sort of overcrowding term.

Anyhow, you can certainly get behaviors that depend on the initial conditions and have various transition points. Its possible to have human/dwarf coexistence, one-species dominance, both species going extinct, etc, based on the parameters. The point is more, there's nothing irrational about having species coexistence - the population dynamics allows for that, even with very weak niche separation. Of course, you can also find parameters where the species won't coexist.
The short time scale can be important in these systems, though, when considering resource limitations and carrying capacity. Figuring for the end point is well and good in infinite populations with infinite resources, but realistically there are minimum population thresholds below which a species can die out. Allowing the populations to undergo cycling lets you see this sort of situation, and cyclical populations better reflect natural systems anyway. Just because the asymptote is above zero doesn't mean part of the pathway there isn't zero.

Wasn't trying to argue that it's impossible for species coexistence, though. If anything arguments for niche specialization have been the only real reasons I've thought were decently viable here.

MonochromeTiger
2014-01-13, 11:26 PM
ok, so you want to know why multiple races could coexist on the same world without one wiping all the others out... counter question, why would multiple races, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, each capable of thinking and acting in ways their counterparts might not consider, instantly go "hmm let's kill each other off it makes complete sense"?

you could argue mathematical superiority on stats but they don't KNOW those stats, they might notice one race is usually stronger or faster but even that requires observation to verify. throw that same "I'm superior to them" mentality into one race or even give one race the overused "me kill everything because me hyper violent" idiocy and you now have that one specific race ticking off ALL of the other races, meaning that if they seriously want to wipe everyone out they've made themselves a target for each and every other race that wants to stay alive.

I agree with the comments bringing up 40k and warhammer fantasy as bad sources for actual diplomacy, they intentionally went out of their way for EVERY race to hate the others, even their closest allies. for reactions to skaven, consider a rat that you've spent years thinking of as nothing more than a vermin, now think of a much bigger rat wearing clothes walking around on two legs and talking..now throw in the warhammer standard of "if it moves kill it". dwarves being different, "oh no they don't think the same way as us that means we have to kill them"..no. just no. short of having a valid reason to motivate your entire race towards killing another (and potentially getting the attention of multiple others that will gang up on you to keep from being next) you're not going to manage to kill them off any more effectively than they can kill you.

a clean killing spell that has a high radius? who's to say you figure it out first, who's to say they don't make a defense or counter for it? how are you even certain that whoever makes it and is capable of using it WANTS to use it? not every spell caster is going to be going around wearing a "*world name here* is for humans" tee-shirt painting their face in the colors of the human capital's flag and killing off anything that isn't human when those non humans could give resources humans don't have access to or don't have the means or will to gather. heck a wizard would probably find the loss of so many different ways of thinking abhorrent, kill them and you kill a potential source of information and learning that can further your own progress.

Scow2
2014-01-14, 12:14 AM
2. I think it's a little fallacious to compare multiple humanoid races to human ethnic groups (and how they interact) unless you're flat out saying they're all sub-species of one larger species. If Humans are primates, Dwarves are some kind of evolved mole people, etc., then why would they interact like members of the same species? It's fine to impose that type of interaction on them, but I don't see it as being the go-to explanation without being a hand-wave.The big reason they'd treat each other as members of the same species is because they (Can) speak the same language and have the same facial expressions - they are able to communicate.


Because of the severe difference in traits. Compare drow fluff/crunch with humans. Is there any reason the two wouldn't be trying to kill eachother from the start fluff, and the differences crunch wise are far larger than minor culture/language differences, vastly different skin tone and different genetic predilections.They are trying to kill each other... but each one has an overwhelmingly powerful "Home Field Advantage" that prevents annihilation.


This is being discussed currently, but as I pointed out with Knaight's rat example, those animals don't know that wiping out other animals increases the potential rate of survival for their own species. You can't use non-sapient life as a model for how sapient life would interact."Species" is a pretty modern concept, and extremely flawed one as well. People value empathic features more than ancient genetic heritage - and wiping out other races DOESN'T ensure greater chance of survival if there are more than two races in the same area trying to fill similar niches.


You're actually missing a large part of the story, where brown rats have replaced black rats in most parts of the world and continue to do so where they are introduced. The huge range of brown rats in, say, Europe, was originally the territory of black rats.

When one species uses the resources more effectively and reproduces faster, it doesn't come to war. Other species in the same niche just go extinct.Rats, unlike Intelligent Species, are incapable of adapting to a changing environment. Sapient species are capable of rapid environmental adaptation - nonsapients require gradual evolution and natural selection to adapt. People merely require an individual to think, "Meh, I think I'll do something else" - and suddenly it fills a completely different niche, or takes a new, less-directly-competitive take on the niche.

Eventually, multiple sentient species will hit an equilibrium.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-14, 01:25 AM
Rats, unlike Intelligent Species, are incapable of adapting to a changing environment. Sapient species are capable of rapid environmental adaptation - nonsapients require gradual evolution and natural selection to adapt. People merely require an individual to think, "Meh, I think I'll do something else" - and suddenly it fills a completely different niche, or takes a new, less-directly-competitive take on the niche.

Eventually, multiple sentient species will hit an equilibrium.
Hey now, rats are highly intelligent incredibly well adapted animals! They're social, hierarchical, and more altruistic than dolphins! One of only two animals on the planet that can play basketball, so that puts them pretty high in my book.

I like that human ingenuity in your example boils down to "Meh, I'll do something else". The really big changes in how we take on our "niche" (I assume we're just talking strictly about ways we obtain food and survive, not creating a subgenre of music to try and sell CD's to teens or something) have been the start of agriculture, industrial revolution, and nitrogen fixing. None of these was a particularly small decision.

But I agree on your end point. If one race is better suited for X/Y/Z you aren't going to start doing that yourself and try and take over their niche. You'll just enslave them, probably, and make them work it for you. And then after a few hundred years of strife and war, some semblance of peaceful trade will probably show up, hopefully.

Anyone watch Avatar? I haven't. I hear it's about humans coming into contact with an alien race on a planet they want resources from. From what I hear everything goes to ****. That's probably fairly accurate, including the few people who want to save the aliens for whatever reasons.

MonochromeTiger
2014-01-14, 02:19 AM
Hey now, rats are highly intelligent incredibly well adapted animals! They're social, hierarchical, and more altruistic than dolphins! One of only two animals on the planet that can play basketball, so that puts them pretty high in my book.

...yeah I can't complain there, playing a sport where professionals get paid millions while others do more useful and vital tasks for almost nothing DOES seem like a point in favor of a rat's intelligence. cats are still better though.



But I agree on your end point. If one race is better suited for X/Y/Z you aren't going to start doing that yourself and try and take over their niche. You'll just enslave them, probably, and make them work it for you. And then after a few hundred years of strife and war, some semblance of peaceful trade will probably show up, hopefully.

this is another part of why I wonder why people seem to think that every race in fantasy should be killing each other rather than coexist...what's easy for one won't always be easy for the other, why risk mining for metals when the dwarves are far better at it and have conditioning to make it less dangerous..you can get things from them in trade for materials that YOU have better access to than they do.



Anyone watch Avatar? I haven't. I hear it's about humans coming into contact with an alien race on a planet they want resources from. From what I hear everything goes to ****. That's probably fairly accurate, including the few people who want to save the aliens for whatever reasons.

I saw bits of it, as far as I can tell part of the reason they're fighting in the first place is because the people they sent in to find out about the resources they want didn't bother actually TELLING the natives that they needed resources...so they didn't discuss if there were non invasive ways to get it in the first place..then on top of that instead of subtle or careful attempts to gather said material the military leader involved fell back on "lol giant invasion cause I somehow have lead on a mining operation".

SiuiS
2014-01-14, 03:03 AM
In DnD, at least for 3.X, humans are statistically superior to Elves all around. Only Grey Elves are even considered as a viable option alongside humans and that's for wizards.


Your average elf is slightly easier to kill but in a way that doesn't matter (both die in one sword stroke on average), but has superior perceptive skills and ranged capacity, would be able to conduct warfare for far longer stretches than the opposition (well into the twilight hours) and naturally avoids the most commonplace low level SoL magic.

Your average human has an extra skill and feat, both likely devoted to work.



What I'm not seeing much of is explanations for when they're not of the same species. When each race is completely alien in mind set and, in some ways, biology to one another. When they literally look at each other and can feel unsettled that something so completely incomprehensible to their way of life happens to look just like them and mirror how their society works (think how most of the races react to Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy or how even Humans react to Dwarves).

Really? Because I pointed out exactly that.

Elves are small time fey. Dwarves are birthed from stone. Humans have no place in the greater order of things. Gnomes are fey-esque wardens of the sales and valleys. No one cares about halflings.

The dwarves go where men cannot. The elves are detached and just don't care in the same way the humans do. The gnomes are almost untouchable and much better friends than enemies. The humans are everywhere and often war themselves to death before touching another race. No one cares about halflings.



Anyone watch Avatar? I haven't. I hear it's about humans coming into contact with an alien race on a planet they want resources from. From what I hear everything goes to ****. That's probably fairly accurate, including the few people who want to save the aliens for whatever reasons.

Avatar is the movie of a guy who was made into the perfect diplomat so he could explain in detail why the humans wanted something to happen and how to benefit everyone equally. Instead, he falls in love with the chieftain's daughter and never tells or asks them anything because it would be awkward to be impregnating the chieftains daughter and imply it's just cuz he wanted to talk to them about their location.

Add to this the native americans alien species were outright hostile and xenophobic, strictly avoiding the three sentences that would have fixed everything; the command lead was a sociopath who valued his machismo ideals above pragmatism; the company that decided it would be more cost effective to mine a large ore deposit rather than thoroughly reinvent human technology on a level never before seen or even postulated while also mining other, smaller ore deposits; and you get a movie that would have been 100% different if you replaced three people with three, more emotionally intelligent and mature people.


That is to say, it's a terrible movie if you try to use it as a documentary.

DeadMech
2014-01-14, 03:19 AM
Something that I occasionally do in my settings is have at least some of the species created after the fact. Wizards are odd fellows who spent far too many hours locked away in their towers doing magical research and study for no other reason than because they can.

It's only a matter of time before a wizard without enough oversight from his college or order tries to play god.

Maybe his research is about trying to find the ultimate form of life so that he can transcend human mortality. Maybe he has need of relatively unintelligent but brutish thugs to keep order. Maybe he's just a furry and wants an "animal companion".

Maybe the wizard succeeds and creates a new race, becoming a part of it. Maybe he thinks he's failed and rather than destroy the subjects he just lets them loose. Maybe in the end the created life has desires and motivations of it's own and through oversight escapes.

Kelb_Panthera
2014-01-14, 04:36 AM
Anyone watch Avatar? I haven't. I hear it's about humans coming into contact with an alien race on a planet they want resources from. From what I hear everything goes to ****. That's probably fairly accurate, including the few people who want to save the aliens for whatever reasons.


I saw bits of it, as far as I can tell part of the reason they're fighting in the first place is because the people they sent in to find out about the resources they want didn't bother actually TELLING the natives that they needed resources...so they didn't discuss if there were non invasive ways to get it in the first place..then on top of that instead of subtle or careful attempts to gather said material the military leader involved fell back on "lol giant invasion cause I somehow have lead on a mining operation".

On top of this and SiuiS's completely valid points on the matter there's also the tiny fact that the whole freakin' planet that the movie takes place on is, in essence, a single super-organism not unlike a colony of ants or bees.

BTW SiuiS, what three sentences did you have in mind there?

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-14, 04:49 AM
Wow, that movie sounds pretty awful. Kind of glad I sat that one out.

SiuiS
2014-01-14, 05:03 AM
BTW SiuiS, what three sentences did you have in mind there?

"We connect our minds and nervous systems to our flora and fauna. All flora and fauna are connected – literally – by this phenomenon. This system of interconnections and hubs is literally shepherded by our ancestors and gods."

So wait, you guys are post singularity beings who grow and share a monoculture, until you earn the right to have your consciousness embedded forever in a gestalt over mind that laces the entire planet? Those clones we made and this avatar system of putting someone's mind into a new body pales in comparison to that! If we were to examine these functions, we could abolish computers as we know them and turn all of technology as we understand it into an extension of the human nervous system! World peace! Mindfulness, openness and an end to all suffering as understanding and compassion floods through our race, possibly all races! It will be a new DNA, a fusion of synthetic and organic!

"We don't care. Instead of revolutionizing all human existence, you need to dig up some rock for us. Burn them out and salt the land too. Just because 'Murica they deserve it."


Bonus points: the n'Avi are feline, have poor and yet nuanced language skills, are always interconnected and value that connection above any individual, form flash mobs and respond to any change with disapproval.

They are a stealth LOLcat species satirizing Internet culture.

Kelb_Panthera
2014-01-14, 05:15 AM
Wow, that movie sounds pretty awful. Kind of glad I sat that one out.

It's actually an alright movie if you just sit back and watch it as the science fiction themed cowboys and indians movie that it is. It doesn't hurt that the CG effects are absolutely gorgeous.

Tvtyrant
2014-01-14, 05:18 AM
It's actually an alright movie if you just sit back and watch it as the science fiction themed cowboys and indians movie that it is. It doesn't hurt that the CG effects are absolutely gorgeous.

More like Gun-gulley the movie IMO. Beautiful scenery, hamfisted moral and lots of stereotypes.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 05:47 AM
It's the plot from Disney's Pocahontas with more violence and clichés.

Driderman
2014-01-14, 06:19 AM
All other things aside and regardless of whether the mindsets of the fantasy races are alien to each other or not, why would the default assumption be that the races are intent on wiping each out completel, just because they are in competition with each other for territory and/or resources?

SiuiS
2014-01-14, 06:19 AM
It's actually an alright movie if you just sit back and watch it as the science fiction themed cowboys and indians movie that it is. It doesn't hurt that the CG effects are absolutely gorgeous.

Except that weird ritual part. That was awkward.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 06:53 AM
Drider: It's part of the line of thinking that people used to be illogical savages who couldn't go two minutes without a murder (the idea being that humans still have some of this in them). As was mentioned, it used to be the mainstream school of thought that humans wiped out other similar beings till they were the only ones.


SiuS: That and other parts were quite awkward. I liked the film better when I missed the first ten minutes, and it started with him arriving on the planet (I was able to pretend it was a much more even piece).

Driderman
2014-01-14, 07:25 AM
Drider: It's part of the line of thinking that people used to be illogical savages who couldn't go two minutes without a murder (the idea being that humans still have some of this in them). As was mentioned, it used to be the mainstream school of thought that humans wiped out other similar beings till they were the only ones.


Even if we assume that to be true, there's still a world of difference between "violent competition that leads to war" to "eradication of another, sentient race on a complete scale".

NichG
2014-01-14, 08:09 AM
Even sets of species in a constant state of all-out war tend not to drive one or the other to extinction on average (though these systems are more sensitive to extinctions since a strong push on any one species in the network causes all the populations to vary wildly). This is basically every predator-prey relationship ever.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 08:29 AM
Drider: Few societies in history have had that capability. Even the Romans couldn't have achieved it, because despite having physical capability, their politics weren't in favour of genocide (they were satisfied with killing everyone within an enemy city, or crucifying an army).

There have been some cases, generally with a small sub-ethnicities being wiped out by a larger group mixing with them or genociding them. I don't know of any ethnicity which has been wiped out. The closest I've heard of being what very, very little is actually known about the fate of that second humanoid group which gets talked about.

DigoDragon
2014-01-14, 08:56 AM
So, I ask all of you, how do you make it make internal sense in your games without resorting to literal Divine Intervention (the gods made everything and make it so) or having one race being dominant and the rest enslaved?

My answer: Aliens.


My main homebrew campaign world is Dracadia, which mixes elements from Fallout into D&D.
The short, short version of the world's history:

Earth was the site of an interstellar battle that decimated the planet and stranded several alien species from all sides. Many dungeon were vaults and shelters that protected folks and treasures for the future. Much of history was lost, so the decendant generations forgot what exactly occured that led to the current world where several sapient races live and interact. Only adventurers crazy enough to delve into the dungeons learn bits of history and find lost treasures.

In Dracadia, Elves are genetic descendants of Humans and Orcs are mutated human/elves from badlands. Non-human species like the "half-dragon" and "mindflayers" are descendants of alien species. Wizards created the Warforged, inspired from old diagrams and artifacts of the original battle droids from the ancient war.

The gods themselves are actually giant super computers hidden in various places around the world (some in orbit). They're capable of manipulating matter and energy, thus giving the illusion of performing miracles at times.

GybeMark
2014-01-14, 09:06 AM
My campaigns tend to have small towns comprised of one race (and by "town" I mean "human farming village" or "dwarven mining colony" or "elven forest temple of the sacred spring" or whatever). Larger cities, especially those based on trade, tend to be more cosmopolitan and mixed (although often there are groups within the cities that have some sort of tension between them).

One thing that I try to do is consider non-human lands in the "larger city" context. I've seen a lot of campaigns where the "city in human lands is also home to lots of elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings..." but the "city in elven lands is 99.999% elf" and the "city in the mountains is 99.999% dwarf". I try to remember to include a bigger mix in the non-human cities.

I suppose that my default small-town vs big-city "thing" comes from my upbringing. The population 2400 town that I grew up in had one Vietnamese family, and that was it for ethnic diversity. When I moved to "The Big City" after high school I was blown away by the mix of languages, cultures, food, music, and all that other stuff that I was never exposed to growing up. Anyway, getting off topic...

Kalmageddon
2014-01-14, 09:25 AM
I think there's a fallacy in assuming that what happened on our planet must be the norm and not possibly an exception.
After all how and why other "Homo something" didn't survive to the present day is not well understood and what we have is just some clever guessing, which if you don't mind me saying, is what paleontology is all about. There's very little that can be deduced with absolute certanty from what's left of creatures that lived such a long time ago.

So, I'll go ahead and propose the answer: "they tried to kill eachother but failed".
Why should one race be able to wipe out all the others? What makes us assume that there would be enough of a coordinated effort and number disparity to make this possibile? To put it briefly, why would the history of a different world need to be justified just because it's not the same as our world? If all races are well adapted to the world they live in, some sort of balance would be reached where all the races would keep eachother's numbers in check, until societies evolved to the point where inter-racial communication and possibly peace would be an option.

And if you really want to put the whole "genocide" thing in your world, well, say that there were indeed a lot more races in the past and they got killed off by the races that exist today in your setting.

Red Fel
2014-01-14, 10:00 AM
I think the bottom line is this:

A large amount of this thread has discussed "Why aren't they killing each other?" My current favorite answers are "no need due to ecological niches," "no cultural imperative," and "the threat of mutually assured destruction."

But I think another, more relevant question is this: Why should they kill each other? Where's the gain? Where's the incentive? Even assuming that the races do not all descend from a single source, and that they are completely alien in mentality and culture, that does not create a murder-imperative. I don't sit and think, "Man, I just don't get kangaroos. I should kill them all." I'd need a reason, like "Kangaroos killed my parents" or something.

So before we dispute why the races shouldn't kill each other, perhaps we should be more clear on why they would want to in the first place?

Aside: The Avatar movie wasn't Fern Gully or Pocahontas. It was the Smurfs. An evil madman becomes aware of a culture of blue, nature-dwelling creatures with access to a fortune, artificially creates one to infiltrate their culture, but the artificial blue-creature ultimately finds acceptance and turns against its creator? That's Smurfette.

Scow2
2014-01-14, 10:11 AM
Aside: The Avatar movie wasn't Fern Gully or Pocahontas. It was the Smurfs. An evil madman becomes aware of a culture of blue, nature-dwelling creatures with access to a fortune, artificially creates one to infiltrate their culture, but the artificial blue-creature ultimately finds acceptance and turns against its creator? That's Smurfette.Except Gargamel hadn't spent years trying to negotiate with the smurfs to gain access to the fortune he needs to secure his survival, and see dozens if not hundreds of his apprentices slain by Smurfs in the process of trying to find ways to acquire the resources (Which the Smurfs were ignorant of) in an equitable manner despite getting killed.

Kalmageddon
2014-01-14, 10:17 AM
Except Gargamel hadn't spent years trying to negotiate with the smurfs to gain access to the fortune he needs to secure his survival, and see dozens if not hundreds of his apprentices slain by Smurfs in the process of trying to find ways to acquire the resources (Which the Smurfs were ignorant of) in an equitable manner despite getting killed.

He actually did. You didn't see the Director's Cut edition. Explains lots of things and it's quit dramatic.

Red Fel
2014-01-14, 10:18 AM
Except Gargamel hadn't spent years trying to negotiate with the smurfs to gain access to the fortune he needs to secure his survival, and see dozens if not hundreds of his apprentices slain by Smurfs in the process of trying to find ways to acquire the resources (Which the Smurfs were ignorant of) in an equitable manner despite getting killed.

Have you seen how many times Azrael got his tail pulled, or ran headfirst into a tree, or any other number of antics that would cripple or outright kill a non-cartoon cat?

Clearly, Gargamel has an army of Azrael clones he employs to get the gold. Or Smurfs. Or Smurf-gold. Or whichever explanation we're going with this season.

Blarmb
2014-01-14, 10:24 AM
The idea that if there were 2 more sapient species in any given world they'd wipe each other out is such a certainty that unless otherwise thoroughly addressed it hurts the credibility of the setting strikes me as overly cynical.

I'm not really convinced that genocide-as-default is as self-evident as the OP seems to think i is.

Driderman
2014-01-14, 11:05 AM
I think the bottom line is this:

A large amount of this thread has discussed "Why aren't they killing each other?" My current favorite answers are "no need due to ecological niches," "no cultural imperative," and "the threat of mutually assured destruction."

But I think another, more relevant question is this: Why should they kill each other? Where's the gain? Where's the incentive? Even assuming that the races do not all descend from a single source, and that they are completely alien in mentality and culture, that does not create a murder-imperative. I don't sit and think, "Man, I just don't get kangaroos. I should kill them all." I'd need a reason, like "Kangaroos killed my parents" or something.

Even with the premise that kangaroos, or beta centaurians, or whatever, killed your parents, I still find it a stretch to assume that your entire nation/culture/species would strive to eradicate them completely on what would have to border an industrial scale.

In the end though, I think the OP assumes that all sentient races work as risk players: There can only be victory through total domination and every color singularly strives towards the goal of complete world domination.

GungHo
2014-01-14, 11:42 AM
I was just curious if there were answers other than "keep them away from each other till they can play nice" or "don't have them compete for the same resources".
Alternatively, they could be in conflict, and often, but simply incapable of really stamping each other out. You can beat the hell out of the elves in the fields, but they'll beat you back from the forests. Same with the dwarves in the caves and mountains. And, the orcs in the badlands are a constant problem... and then you have monsters and spiders and snakes. You can't concentrate on genocide if you never get the upper-hand. Or maybe they get close, but somehow the dwarves/elves/orcs/humans/monsters/spiders/snakes keep coming back. Maybe that's why the elves "disappeared into the fey" but are now returning. Or why the dwarves closed their mountains. Maybe they were beaten, and severely, and now they're on the recovery, and they're pissed off and prepared.


Magic as a killing tool is also something that hasn't been addressed. Nukes haven't caused genocides (I only mentioned Neanderthals being killed off as the popular theory, not my personal belief) because they tend to also be bad for the ones using them. If they suddenly had a way to kill massive amounts of creatures, cleanly, with no seeming repercussions to them for using it, why wouldn't they think about using such an option?
Mutually assured destruction is the easy explaination. Depending on the world set up, displays of those kinds of magic on that grand of a scale could be either impossible or could attract some very bad things.


What I'm not seeing much of is explanations for when they're not of the same species. When each race is completely alien in mind set and, in some ways, biology to one another. When they literally look at each other and can feel unsettled that something so completely incomprehensible to their way of life happens to look just like them and mirror how their society works (think how most of the races react to Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy or how even Humans react to Dwarves).
Well, if you're gonna use Warhammer... first as CombatOwl notes, Warhammer exists specifically to run a perpetual war. That's the schtick. Everyone is designed to hate each other. Secondly, back to your magic example... use "magic nukes" or actually succeeding in genocide, and Chaos will come eat your damn planet and everything on it. That's how you get Death Worlds for your guys to scratch their heads over later when you're playing 40k.

Jay R
2014-01-14, 12:06 PM
If you don't like the observed fact of different ecological niches (nobody else can wipe out the dwarves in caves; nobody else can wipe out the elves in forests), then here's a nice, simple rationalization:

Slave-holding societies do not wipe out their neighbors for the same reason that farmers don't eat the last of the corn. Non-slave-holding societies do not wipe out their neighbors because they consider them equals. Therefore, no sapient society has a motivation to wipe out their neighbors.

Some individuals may want to do so, but the society as a whole will eventually stop them from succeeding.

SiuiS
2014-01-14, 01:17 PM
Aside: The Avatar movie wasn't Fern Gully or Pocahontas. It was the Smurfs. An evil madman becomes aware of a culture of blue, nature-dwelling creatures with access to a fortune, artificially creates one to infiltrate their culture, but the artificial blue-creature ultimately finds acceptance and turns against its creator? That's Smurfette.

Nah, no one wants to eat the n'Avi. Except maybe main character guy.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 01:26 PM
SiuiS: I wouldn't put it past him.


Jar R: There have been a number of societies who don't keep slaves who see their opponents as far less than equal, sometimes wiping them out. Let me draw attention to that: Wiping them out, not genociding them.

Genocide implies that a group wipes out another group on the basis of their genome, their ethnicity, colour coding. That's a modern concept. Most genocide occurred within an ethnic group incidentally, where a sub-ethnicity was wiped out because they ended up being mixed with or killed by a larger group.

Kalmageddon
2014-01-14, 01:35 PM
Nah, no one wants to eat the n'Avi. Except maybe main character guy.

*chuckles like an idiot*
I'm far too childish. :smalltongue:
By the way, it's "Na'vi"

123456789blaaa
2014-01-14, 01:46 PM
Nah, no one wants to eat the n'Avi. Except maybe main character guy.

Ba-zing!

Aside: Dat new avatar SiuiS dat new avatar.

Anyways, alternative answer for the OP: Because their racial patrons (Yeenoghu for the gnolls, Baphomet for the minotaurs etc) prevent them from doing so. Technically they aren't gods :smalltongue:.

warty goblin
2014-01-14, 02:22 PM
Avatar is the movie of a guy who was made into the perfect diplomat so he could explain in detail why the humans wanted something to happen and how to benefit everyone equally. Instead, he falls in love with the chieftain's daughter and never tells or asks them anything because it would be awkward to be impregnating the chieftains daughter and imply it's just cuz he wanted to talk to them about their location.

Maybe I've missed something in the six times I've watched Avatar, but I never saw any indication the Navi would benefit from relocating, aside from not getting shot. Trade requires both parties to be willing to sell and wanting to buy, the Navi weren't willing to sell their home and didn't want to buy anything the humans had to offer. If somebody shows up at my door and offers to give me a box full of rat anuses in exchange for my house, I'm hardly under any obligation to make the exchange simply because they're offering a trade. After all I like my place and have no need for a box of rat sphincters, even if the other person says they're the greatest things ever. It certainly does not legitimate the other party threatening my life and setting fire to my house.


Add to this the native americans alien species were outright hostile and xenophobic, strictly avoiding the three sentences that would have fixed everything; the command lead was a sociopath who valued his machismo ideals above pragmatism; the company that decided it would be more cost effective to mine a large ore deposit rather than thoroughly reinvent human technology on a level never before seen or even postulated while also mining other, smaller ore deposits; and you get a movie that would have been 100% different if you replaced three people with three, more emotionally intelligent and mature people.
Again, maybe I missed something, but deciding the people who are ruining your land are at best useless and burning the bulldozers they're using to wreck more of your land hardly seems hostile and xenophobic. It seems a completely sensible reaction. I'm pretty sure that if Mexico drove a backhoe through the Lincoln Memorial because they wanted to dig up the White House most Americans would figure that as an act of overt aggression, and probably worth a bit of armed resistance. I would, and I tend fairly strongly towards pacifism.

And really, if your criticism boils down to 'people were stupid' than try opening a newspaper. Or a history book. It's full of stupid people.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 03:31 PM
It's fair enough for Goblin to defend the film he likes, which we were discussing very off-topic. Still might want to make a thread somewhere if we're going to discuss it further.

SiuiS
2014-01-14, 03:44 PM
*chuckles like an idiot*
I'm far too childish. :smalltongue:

No, that's exactly correct. :smalltongue:



By the way, it's "Na'vi"

Hmm. I could have sworn the apostrophe was in the middle, though I fully admit my capitalization is because it pleases me. :smallredface:



Anyways, alternative answer for the OP: Because their racial patrons (Yeenoghu for the gnolls, Baphomet for the minotaurs etc) prevent them from doing so. Technically they aren't gods :smalltongue:.

Pfffff~


Maybe I've missed something in the six times I've watched Avatar, but I never saw any indication the Navi would benefit from relocating, aside from not getting shot.

Relocate hell. "They want to tear down your tree and steal your shinies" would have been useful earlier, too. Or even just a breakdown on what would happen and why. Instead of a people making a choice, one dude sort of forgets to give them the option Until the other side is nuclear.



Again, maybe I missed something, but deciding the people who are ruining your land are at best useless and burning the bulldozers they're using to wreck more of your land hardly seems hostile and xenophobic.

Another thing solved by intelligence and discussion before it gets that far!


And really, if your criticism boils down to 'people were stupid' than try opening a newspaper. Or a history book. It's full of stupid people.

Yeah. XD

warty goblin
2014-01-14, 04:06 PM
Relocate hell. "They want to tear down your tree and steal your shinies" would have been useful earlier, too. Or even just a breakdown on what would happen and why. Instead of a people making a choice, one dude sort of forgets to give them the option Until the other side is nuclear.

Jake's job was to gain their trust, and figure out either how to get them to peacefully relocate or how to force them out. The first takes time, until he was accepted as one of the Na'vi he didn't have the right to address the tribe, and the tribe had no reason to believe him. Which happens pretty much right when the bulldozers arrive. And by that point I'd argue he's at least as obligated to aid the Na'vi as he is to toe the corporate line, although he still tries to get them to evacuate. The second he figured there wasn't anything that would work - which pretty much everybody already knew - and he certainly managed the third, pretty early on.


Another thing solved by intelligence and discussion before it gets that far!
I'm not really sure what there is to discuss. "Hey! We want to wreck your land. In exchange we'll give you nothing you actually want." It's not like the Na'vi owe the humans jack, and it's pretty clear the humans don't really have anything to offer in return. They aren't even there to offer anything in the first place, they just want a good quarterly report.

Knaight
2014-01-14, 04:54 PM
What I'm not seeing much of is explanations for when they're not of the same species. When each race is completely alien in mind set and, in some ways, biology to one another. When they literally look at each other and can feel unsettled that something so completely incomprehensible to their way of life happens to look just like them and mirror how their society works (think how most of the races react to Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy or how even Humans react to Dwarves).

This seems like more difference than I'd actually expect though. The classical fantasy races could all easily be in the same genus, even if you assume that they can't generally produce sterile offspring. I'd expect much more of a "these things are kind of weird, we don't necessarily want to associate with them" over "these things are horrific and I am perfectly willing to go risk life and limb to eradicate them" for most individuals of all the species.

Add in subtle differences regarding capabilities and how they don't all have exactly the same niche as Jacob.Tyr (Post #78) and NichG (post #82) illustrated, and things work out reasonably well.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 06:06 PM
Goblin: The humans had plenty which the Smurfs would want. Except they're faithful to a fictional stereotype.

What the soldier really should have told the Smurfs about, was human orbital weapons.


Knight: What you've said has been a clear opinion in the thread for a while now. Understandably the OP has left the discussion, so it's uncertain whether they're satisfied with the ideas expressed (not sure if there are many solutions left).

Knaight
2014-01-14, 06:32 PM
Knight: What you've said has been a clear opinion in the thread for a while now. Understandably the OP has left the discussion, so it's uncertain whether they're satisfied with the ideas expressed (not sure if there are many solutions left).

I figured I might as well add one more voice to it.

Also, you missed an a in the name.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 06:46 PM
Which is fair enough. There isn't really anything left to discuss, unless we want to go really left-field, or keeping talking about Avatar.

We could talk about the qualities of specific groups' survival.


I'll make sure to keep the, "a," in in future.

warty goblin
2014-01-14, 07:02 PM
Goblin: The humans had plenty which the Smurfs would want. Except they're faithful to a fictional stereotype.

What the soldier really should have told the Smurfs about, was human orbital weapons.
It's a science fiction movie. Things happen in science fiction movies according to the established tropes and conventions of science fiction movies*, which often run contrary to what happens in reality. This is about as sensible a criticism as hating on Star Wars because you can't actually program a missile guidance system by using the mystical energy that flows through the universe. There's plenty of things I'll happily hate on Star Wars for, like the horrid script and acting, before I'll get to silly stuff like that.


*And Avatar is very much playing with some longstanding sci-fi themes, although most of the ones that I can call out are from (relatively old) written sources.




Knight: What you've said has been a clear opinion in the thread for a while now. Understandably the OP has left the discussion, so it's uncertain whether they're satisfied with the ideas expressed (not sure if there are many solutions left).
There's also the possibility of giving different species different magical or quasi-magical skills. For instance in Lord of the Rings the dwarves simply do better stonework and metalwork than humans. Trying to kill them all is probably a non-starter of an idea, since not only does that cut off your access to all that really good metal, but they've got a very good incentive to start arming your rivals with it. They also would sit squarely on top of the gold and iron markets, which has the unfortunate side-effect of them being able to buy your ass and/or leave your economy a smoking ruin if they so feel...

Knaight
2014-01-14, 07:43 PM
Trying to kill them all is probably a non-starter of an idea, since not only does that cut off your access to all that really good metal, but they've got a very good incentive to start arming your rivals with it. They also would sit squarely on top of the gold and iron markets, which has the unfortunate side-effect of them being able to buy your ass and/or leave your economy a smoking ruin if they so feel...

It's similar the other direction. If dwarves went on a genocidal campaign against humans, well, food imports that direction are suddenly a pretty bad idea. Time to find out how well you can support an extensive underground civilizations off of the resources of a few hill sides. Given that the answer is some variety of "not very well", it's also an illustrative example of what happens to those who cut off food access when their population starts starving because of them.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 07:48 PM
I understand that point of view, and sometimes take it.

More likely they would enslave the dwarves for that reason.

If the dwarves can arm and hire or ally with your enemies and other neighbours, you could be in a position of serious trouble. Of course, no one is going to attack without a decent chance of success (unless they're very delusional, which is possible).

Them sitting on a lot of wealth and having control of the market is actually a reason to conquer the dwarves, unless they're making you rich. If they're making someone else rich through that, then it gives them incentive to attack you if you attack their cash cow.

warty goblin
2014-01-14, 08:04 PM
More likely they would enslave the dwarves for that reason.

If the dwarves can arm and hire or ally with your enemies and other neighbours, you could be in a position of serious trouble. Of course, no one is going to attack without a decent chance of success (unless they're very delusional, which is possible).

Them sitting on a lot of wealth and having control of the market is actually a reason to conquer the dwarves, unless they're making you rich. If they're making someone else rich through that, then it gives them incentive to attack you if you attack their cash cow.
So if they can hire your existing enemies to attack you, how exactly are you going to conquer them? It's not like most nations generally sit around with enough military force to protect the homeland from their nearest and least dearest while waging a foreign war of conquest against an entrenched enemy who's also cutting their economy off at the knees. Particularly when all the folks suddenly looking to repurpose your homeland for the Great Conquest Commemorative Statue and Waterpark are probably getting substantially better weapons in the bargain. Germany kinda sorta came close to attempting something this insane twice in the twentieth century, and it didn't work out so well for them.

If anything, you'd expect the dwarves to use their superior armaments and vast capital reserves to keep a couple human states in a condition of perpetual poverty in order to ensure a decent food supply.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-14, 08:30 PM
It would only happen under the right conditions. Unless desperate, no one goes to war if they will obviously lose. If the Roman empire decided to take a dwarf settlement during the height of their power and stability, there isn't a lot the dwarves could do. But that once again would only happen under certain conditions which may never arise.

It's funny you mention Germany, since they match what you describe. After the Great War, harsh laws and restrictions were placed on Germany, resulting in a poor economy and outlook. The royal family was also removed from power. This lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler, who promised the German people a revived Germany, more rich and powerful than before. The situation was perfect for massing recruits, a mixture of desperation, unemployment, and hope for a better life after the war, along with a distaste for the opposing powers that placed them in that situation. Germany of WWII went on to become possibly the greatest military force the world has seen, in all areas excepting size and morality.

Not to say that it isn't a good idea keeping some human states under your thumb, and impoverishing them might be a good way to do this. While great military powers have risen from states of impoverishment, it's not a rule.

Thrudd
2014-01-14, 09:12 PM
So, I ask all of you, how do you make it make internal sense in your games without resorting to literal Divine Intervention (the gods made everything and make it so) or having one race being dominant and the rest enslaved? I had read on one site that this could occur if the races didn't fill the same ecological niche, didn't fight for the same resources and were kept separate until they were sufficiently advanced enough to not just automatically try to wipe each other out.

I'm not interested in "don't worry about" or "you're thinking too deep" or any other handwaving ways to make it work.

Thank you in advance for any weighing in anyone does! :smallsmile:

My world is a far future post technological earth or parallel earth dimension. In the distant past (millions of years at least), humanity developed magic-level technology and self-evolved to a post physical state. The beings now living on the planet have multiple origins.
1. Descendants of genetically engineered people designed to work in specific environments or for specific jobs.
2. Naturally evolved from homo sapiens or diverged from a shared ancestor of homo sapiens in a parallel earth dimension.
3. Descendants of extra-terrestrial or extra-dimensional species that visited or colonized perhaps millions or tens of thousands of years ago (or maybe even more recently in some cases).
4. Descendants of genetic experiments and engineering of various animal species and hybrid species - intelligent animals, human animal hybrids, artificially created species based on different types of DNA.

In this world, explaining the presence of baseline humans is the more difficult part. They are actually a mystery. How could homo-sapiens have remained unaltered over hundreds of millions of years? Were they recreated from ancestral DNA by their post-physical descendants and seeded on this version of earth for some reason? Are they colonists or transplants from a parallel dimension who have forgotten their roots? The answers may lie buried amongst the ruins and hidden caches of ancient civilizations.

The Oni
2014-01-14, 11:11 PM
In this world, explaining the presence of baseline humans is the more difficult part. They are actually a mystery. How could homo-sapiens have remained unaltered over hundreds of millions of years? Were they recreated from ancestral DNA by their post-physical descendants and seeded on this version of earth for some reason? Are they colonists or transplants from a parallel dimension who have forgotten their roots? The answers may lie buried amongst the ruins and hidden caches of ancient civilizations.

I'd go with the "recreated" bit. Only, maybe they were recreated from distorted data, with the idea that they were some kind of legendary precursor that the more modern races could only dream of being.

russdm
2014-01-14, 11:22 PM
I rationalize it in my games that its the orders of the feline overlords and so gnomes get the axe ( I seriously dislike them and they provide nothing to the setting already covered by elves/dwarves/halflings besides jokes unless they are dragonlance like gnomes or warcraft like gnomes, otherwise they are stupid in my opinion and frankly kobolds rule!) with a few other races getting kicked out. I prefer using a few races plus outsiders since you don't have to have a lot of races to have a fully working setting and it lessens the book work by removing races allowing for more space and time to spend on the remaining ones by fluffing them out more.

Honest Tiefling
2014-01-15, 12:11 AM
Wolves and various other canines share space, and wolves will kill foxes or coyotes. Hyenas and lions are competitors, and frequently quarrel over kills. So why not kill each other? Because animals in the wild, are frequently starving and desperate and don't have time or resources to do such.

Of course, in human history plenty of empires waged war for decades and even gotten themselves destroyed or crippled by waging war on the wrong empire. Maybe a few races perished this way, but others are smart enough not to declare war on their neighbors, when they have ten others looking for a sign of weakness. With teleportation, flying fortresses and underground kingdoms, it could be amazingly easy to have enough contact that this could become a serious problem.

Could also be a fantastical caste system, with elven wizards, orc blooded fighters, etc. Sure, in history castes have been destroyed, but in many cases people don't want to kill off the guys who maintain the sewers or know how to make a dang fork.

I guess you could go the other way, given the amount of non-homo sapien DNA in people and say that the races tolerate each other because of bow chika bow wow.

Jachywalcott
2014-01-15, 04:02 AM
It occurs to me that even if you think it is inevitable that two or more competing sapient species should result in the extinction of one or the other, that there's no reason you can't set your game during the time where that hasn't happened yet and still have a fairly huge window.

Consider: H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis coexisted in Europe for some 40,000 years-- that's like... eight to ten times the entire length of recorded history. Plenty of time for both races to happen to develop culture.

Scow2
2014-01-15, 04:07 AM
It would only happen under the right conditions. Unless desperate, no one goes to war if they will obviously lose. If the Roman empire decided to take a dwarf settlement during the height of their power and stability, there isn't a lot the dwarves could do.Dwarf Settlement? If we're talking more than 20 or so dwarves (100 is WAY more than enough, as long as they're not all Migrant Children), there's no way any number of Roman Legions could take it out... unless they manage to siege it, kill the dwarves coming out for socks, and waiting for the settlement to fall to a Tantrum Spiral.

Dwarves are their own worst enemy. If the settlement is operating at an optimal condition, all the mightiest armies in the world just die against it - whether it's from Magma Cannons, or Superdwarfen soldiers with Cotton Candy armor and weapons, or funnelled Hazards of the Deep.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-15, 04:17 AM
I don't think the current version of Dwarf Fortress is our best answer for this.

SiuiS
2014-01-15, 04:24 AM
Jake's job was to gain their trust, and figure out either how to get them to peacefully relocate or how to force them out.

The parameters of the job would have changed drastically if the earth folk knew what they were about to attack. If any one person was inquisitive and talkative, this would have been fine. And isn't exposition on tech or changed parameters a scifi trope too~?

Jay R
2014-01-15, 08:59 AM
It suddenly occurs to me that Tolkien more-or-less agrees with the OP. The world was created by the Valar only a few thousand years ago, with one dominant race (elves) in mind/. One god decides to make dwarves, which do pretty well on their own. These elves wake up a race of intelligent trees (ents). Eventually orcs and trolls are created as a corrupt version of elves and ents. But another race (humans), with shorter lives and greater fecundity, will eventually supplant them all, and are on the verge of doing so.

So here's another model that works: whichever race will eventually be dominant hasn't yet had time to dominate.

Driderman
2014-01-15, 10:13 AM
It suddenly occurs to me that Tolkien more-or-less agrees with the OP. The world was created by the Valar only a few thousand years ago, with one dominant race (elves) in mind/. One god decides to make dwarves, which do pretty well on their own. These elves wake up a race of intelligent trees (ents). Eventually orcs and trolls are created as a corrupt version of elves and ents. But another race (humans), with shorter lives and greater fecundity, will eventually supplant them all, and are on the verge of doing so.

So here's another model that works: whichever race will eventually be dominant hasn't yet had time to dominate.

This scenario doesn't eradicate the other races either, though. The elves diminish and go into the west and although that is for all intents and purposes not part of setting, it is hardly eradicated and the dwarves are still hanging around lamenting their lost greatness.
The Hobbits are unchanged, the Ents unchanged (unless they manage to find the Entwives). Not sure about Orcs and Trolls, though. I guess the Orcs just kinda linger, much like the Dwarves, with no real purpose left, and the trolls continue being not much more than wild beasts, now with less purpose.

Raimun
2014-01-15, 10:51 AM
There are all kinds of different animals living in our forrests and this is not strange to you?

Perhaps none of the races were able to exterminate those that exist to present day? They might have been willing to but just didn't have what it takes? According to the common theory the homo sapiens were just superior to homo neanderthalensis and won because they were more developed, having better tools, communication and skills. Perhaps in a fantasy world none of the races were ultimately so superior they could destroy the others? And if there was one that was able to? Well, that sounds like a start of a campaign.

Of course, in a fantasy world it is equally valid that the gods just made the world as it is and there never was a primordial fight for survival between almost animal, almost sapient beings.

Scow2
2014-01-15, 02:42 PM
This scenario doesn't eradicate the other races either, though. The elves diminish and go into the west and although that is for all intents and purposes not part of setting, it is hardly eradicated and the dwarves are still hanging around lamenting their lost greatness.
The Hobbits are unchanged, the Ents unchanged (unless they manage to find the Entwives). Not sure about Orcs and Trolls, though. I guess the Orcs just kinda linger, much like the Dwarves, with no real purpose left, and the trolls continue being not much more than wild beasts, now with less purpose.
And according to The Hobbit (Who invented the game of Golf), Hobbits are still alive today - they're just good at hiding from us. And humans eventually did supplant and replace them all (Otherwise, they'd be around today) - after all, "Middle Earth" is a mytho-historical version of Great Britain. Tolkien wasn't making "His own universe" - he was making up a mythological history for his own country.

warty goblin
2014-01-15, 02:54 PM
The parameters of the job would have changed drastically if the earth folk knew what they were about to attack. If any one person was inquisitive and talkative, this would have been fine. And isn't exposition on tech or changed parameters a scifi trope too~?

They did know. Dr. Augustine laid it all out plain as day before they went all Ride of the Valkeries. Not just in 'the natives say this crazy stuff' but in terms of measurable science. This is also the experiment she's shown doing in the first jungle sequence. That seems both inquisitive and talkative to me.

Kaveman26
2014-01-15, 03:25 PM
Why haven't they wiped each other out without hand waving or divine intervention?


Too many random factors to successfully wipe someone out. Elves crowding the orcs forest...so the orcs decide to wipe out the elves. Only when they come back the trolls took their village. The trolls try to wipe out the orcs who returned, but a red dragon toasts them all.

Eventually the constant back and forth reaches a stalemate where full scale invasion is moot. You hold onto what you can, you trade and interbreed when convenient and hope like hell nothing super nasty decides it likes your real estate.

Sure dwarves hate orcs, but they probably fear giants and dragons more.