How would Humans be the most numerous race?

[Kotenkiri]

Trying to create a homebrew D&D5e world where gods either didn't interfere or just started the evolution process then left to run.

How would humans become the most numerous and/or dominate race when you have dwarves, elves, dragonborn and similar races around evolving alongside them as well as many "monsters" that populate the world considering some monsters are on average just as smart humans and even in some creatures like dragons predating them.

[LibraryOgre]

Birthrate, combined with a lower rate of infant mortality and violent death.

So, most races in traditional fantasy live a lot longer than humans. They often mature later, and space their children out over their long lives... even if elves reach maturity at 20, a human woman might have had 4 kids by then. The elf might then go on to have a child every century, while humans will be pumping out generations in the meantime.

That leads us to infant mortality and violent death. Orcs and hobgoblins often have higher birthrates (KoK hobgoblins are an example, with multiple births being the norm). But they have a higher infant mortality rate (i.e. kids die young) and a higher rate of violent death (both from internal and external conflicts). Humans hit a sweet spot... lots of kids that they don't try to kill, and usually enough community support to make parenthood viable.

This gets even bigger when you throw magic into the mix, and the fact that it is hard to contain (especially with regards to clerical magic and sorcerers; you can limit the access to wizardry, but limiting sorcery is pretty much genocide). Even cantrip-level magic can do amazing things for longevity. "Oh, no, Bob is bleeding out!" "Stabilize". "Ok, let's let him rest and heal, then."

Once you start getting into higher level magic, you can do things like fix broken bones, or cure diseases, or, possibly, even major conditions (the 2e spell "Cure Blindness" would fix blindness from any source, even your eyes being gouged out; this says nothing of things like Restoration or Regenerate). In the Guardians of the Flame series by Joel Rosenberg, this is commented on a few times. One of the characters, an adventurer, realizes that all the healing potions he's taken over the years have actively restored the minor damage that would add up over time. Did you once strain your ankle a bit? That healing spell says you never did, so you don't keep feeling it when you're 40.

TL;DR: There are lots of humans because we make lots of babies, work to make sure those babies live, and try to keep people from dying.

[ReaderAt2046]

I'd say "adaptability". Where all the other races have bonuses to certain defined skillsets and have certain environments they do best in, humans are competent at everything and can thrive anywhere. So you may find more elves than humans in the forests, and more dwarves than humans in the mountains, and more halflings than humans in the countryside, and more gnomes than humans in the hills; but if you total up all the humans from all the different biomes, there are more humans than anything else in the world as a whole.

[Rynjin]

In addition to what Mark Hall said (which is generally the canon answer in most fantasy settings), humans have the good survival instincts to be relatively diplomatic with their expansionist tendencies. After all, goblinoids and other races could easily outbreed humans...if they didn't form their societies around raiding and pillaging other races.

Since humans tend to at least attempt diplomacy before declaring war, they weren't shoved back into their stinking holes when they started expanding into territory held by the elder races.

[Kane0]

Birthrate, combined with a lower rate of infant mortality and violent death.

TL;DR: There are lots of humans because we make lots of babies, work to make sure those babies live, and try to keep people from dying.

Also general disregard for boundaries where other races might have much stronger inhibitions.

[Mechalich]

I'd say "adaptability". Where all the other races have bonuses to certain defined skillsets and have certain environments they do best in, humans are competent at everything and can thrive anywhere. So you may find more elves than humans in the forests, and more dwarves than humans in the mountains, and more halflings than humans in the countryside, and more gnomes than humans in the hills; but if you total up all the humans from all the different biomes, there are more humans than anything else in the world as a whole.

It's also that humans are attached to a biome that is more effective for traditional agricultural outputs. Dwarves and gnomes live in rugged or alpine environments with marginal soils, limited water retention, and short growing seasons. Elves live in forests, and while crops can be grown in forests, this is tricky and comes with limits on outputs. Humans, by contrast, claim mixed forest/grassland territories that are prime agricultural land. They can simply feed more people than other societies.

And this extends to the meta argument. All the other 'races' in D&D style worlds proxy different kinds of human societal structures found at the edges of major states: hill tribes, mountain valley dwellers, forest mixed use societies, nomadic raiders, etc. History makes it quite clear that these groups cannot match the numbers of an agricultural society on tilled land.

The exception is halflings, for which you may thank Tolkien. Halflings, who manage to have full human intelligence in a body with drastically reduced caloric demands (and magically powerful brains), are poised to overrun the earth. And of course, in the one D&D setting that gives the assumptions some rope - Dark Sun - that's what happened.

[brian 333]

Humanity can also lay claim to being the most aggressive and territorial species of them all. The only surving hominid DNA exists in humans because we were meaner than the rest. Every other species, even apex predators, are hunted by humans, often for no better reason than to kill them before they needed killing.

[Devils_Advocate]

Humans are the most commonly encountered humanoid species in most campaigns because most campaigns are human-centric and thus take place mostly in locations primarily inhabited by humans.

To illustrate, contrast that state of affairs to the opposite: If you run a campaign set on the ocean bottom, then you're dealing with an environment where humans are unlikely to show up, and the most commonly encountered humanoids will probably be aquatic races less familiar to the typical player. And that could be a fun departure from the norm!

Global demographics have no direct relevance to this, because games focus on things because they're interesting, not because they're statistically representative of anything. The Great Sahuagin Empire can have a population of ten times the number of humans in the world, and if the sahuagin barely interact with the surface, then that's just an interesting little bit of setting trivial that doesn't actually matter to a typical campaign most of the time.

Whether humans are the most numerous race in the world hardly matters. The world is flipping huge, and the player characters aren't going to deal with a randomly selected portion of it. But are humans the most numerous race in the part(s) of the world where the campaign takes place? Well, a typical campaign is set in a sort of area that humans live in. Humans are likely going to be relatively common in a sort of area that humans live in.


In addition to what Mark Hall said (which is generally the canon answer in most fantasy settings), humans have the good survival instincts to be relatively diplomatic with their expansionist tendencies. After all, goblinoids and other races could easily outbreed humans...if they didn't form their societies around raiding and pillaging other races.

Since humans tend to at least attempt diplomacy before declaring war, they weren't shoved back into their stinking holes when they started expanding into territory held by the elder races.
It's not even only that elves and dwarves will peacefully trade with humans and not with orcs and goblinoids because the humans are the ones who aren't attacking the elves and dwarves while the orcs and goblinoids are. It's also that the humans are the ones who attack the orcs and goblinoids. Which really needs to be done in order to keep them in check, and which the elves and dwarves would really prefer not to have to do personally. Because while they have superior equipment and martial skill, they're seriously lacking in numbers. Super-elite warriors with centuries of experience are a great thing to have, but every time one of them goes down they lose an asset far more valuable than the average human soldier in absolute terms, and even moreso as a percentage of total military power!

This represents an excellent opportunity for humans. Elves and dwarves have valuable resources, but those very resources make them harder to fight, making it difficult to seize said resources by force. If you can get elves and dwarves to give you magic items, mineral wealth, etc. in order to fight other people, that's probably a way better deal.

Kill Smarter, Not Harder.

This isn't to say that humans necessarily have the biggest direct role in maintaining the status quo. Elves keep watch for powerful magical threats and planar incursions, while dwarves battle all sorts of things that would otherwise make their way up from the Underdark. There's a general "keep threats form your area of expertise confined to your own sphere of influence" sort of arrangement, if you will.

[Laserlight]

Humans are most numerous now, sure, but it wasn't always so. The elves (and dragons) never recovered from the War of the Egg. The dwarvish empire fragmented due to the losses of the Rune War against the giants, and several dwarfism kingdoms paid a heavy price to break the orcish horde. Of the halfling legions, all that remains is the famous war kazoo of Fred the Stout, but they destroyed the Necromancer and his skeletal armies. Humans are numerous, because they haven't faced their own challenge...

[brian 333]

Humans are most numerous now, sure, but it wasn't always so. The elves (and dragons) never recovered from the War of the Egg. The dwarvish empire fragmented due to the losses of the Rune War against the giants, and several dwarfism kingdoms paid a heavy price to break the orcish horde. Of the halfling legions, all that remains is the famous war kazoo of Fred the Stout, but they destroyed the Necromancer and his skeletal armies. Humans are numerous, because they haven't faced their own challenge...

Interesting! I may steal this. Also, war kazoo! My new favorite WMD ...

[Excession]

Humans build cities. Real cities. The high elves may build their shining towers in the forests of faerie, but they house no more than a few tens of thousands. And the woods elves build only pale imitations of that. The dwarves amass only as many as they need to mine the current resource, then move on to the next. The Drow come close, but a slow motion disaster isn't a real city.

Humans put a million people in one place, and somehow manage to thrive without going mad with the noise and crowds. As it goes, quantity has a quality all it's own. It's hard to kill a million people, harder still to compete with them. Even if you do, they have so *many* cities, and seem to keep making more.

[Anonymouswizard]

An idea I've considered but not developed is that humans are the only race to have really domesticated animals (I've considered adding 'and plants', but it feels wrong). Sure other races have rangers with animal companions and tame animals on occasion, but humans are the ones who took wolves and turned them into dogs. Eventually this caused humans to thrive because their animals helped make them more efficient, they could rely on them for certain tasks and devote more attention to others.

It's a stereotype among other races that humans will look at the Tarrasque and decide they want ten of them to pet. Considering the fact that in this setting's 2000 years of recorded human history they've begun breeding wyverns six separate times it certainly has as much truth as 'elves are tree huggers'.

[Mechalich]

An idea I've considered but not developed is that humans are the only race to have really domesticated animals (I've considered adding 'and plants', but it feels wrong). Sure other races have rangers with animal companions and tame animals on occasion, but humans are the ones who took wolves and turned them into dogs. Eventually this caused humans to thrive because their animals helped make them more efficient, they could rely on them for certain tasks and devote more attention to others.

It's a stereotype among other races that humans will look at the Tarrasque and decide they want ten of them to pet. Considering the fact that in this setting's 2000 years of recorded human history they've begun breeding wyverns six separate times it certainly has as much truth as 'elves are tree huggers'.

This actually makes sense in that Humans are the most grassland/savannah oriented of the classical D&D races and most of the important domesticated animals are grassland/savannah ungulates - though some like sheep are derived from upland-dwelling ancestors suitable for domestication by dwarves/gnomes. Elves might domesticate wolves and horses, elven hunting dogs and elvish cavalry are a thing in several settings, but not cattle, pigs, or chickens. Halflings might be too small to successfully handle large ungulates like cattle and horses, which is a significant limit on their crop production (imagine having to try and plow fields using donkeys). On the plant side, humans probably do still have advantages, being the most suitable for wheat cultivation as opposed to dwarves/gnomes growing barely and elves reliant on fruits/nuts.

[brian 333]

Cattle, horses, chickens, sheep, goats, dogs, cats... All the animals associated with humans have been altered so that they are no longer the animals from which they were originally bred. Domestic turkeys, for example, cannot fly but their wild ancestors have an incredible ability to take off.

[Cluedrew]

Reproduction rate, adaptability and environment are good reasons, I got one more: They have been around a lot longer than you expect. Humans tend to be very widespread in these settings and that took a VERY long time in real life. Instead of doing it many faster, I like the idea that all happened at a slower rate while the elves (and any other "old races on the decline") had their big civilizations, but then they collapsed and humans rose to fill the space, which pushed their surprisingly high population up even further.

Also if you are trying to create D&D styled world with little to know divine influence I have so many other questions.

[Quizatzhaderac]

Higher birth rate than elves/dwarves/halflings. The longer lives and increased knowledge/skill that allows is nice, but prior to civilization there wasn't really enough to learn in any one skill that places a hundred years of knowledge far above twenty. These older people were also far less innovative, preferring to do thing the way that has always worked.

Better social organization than monstrous humanoids. Even the most primitive human societies consist of nested social groups; so at a minimum your group is in a group of groups. With goblins, you're a member of their group or not. So when humans and goblins have a war, the goblins are typically fighting a tribe of ~5,000 or a few hundred of a kingdom's professional knights.

Everyone gangs up on dragons. Dragons are the strongest, longest lived, and with clutches having multiple eggs, have a birth rate competitive with humans. Indeed the god Bofnop'enfe created dragons to subdue all other races. The problem for dragons is that everyone knows this, which causes everyone to coordinate to keep dragons in check.

Humans can eat a lot of things. The flexibility in human diets is rather exceptional among animals. If a species can't eat grain heavy diets, they can't get nearly as manly calories out of farmland. If they can eat dairy, they can't get nearly as many calories out of livestock. Even if they can eat the same food categories, maybe they get poisoned by potatoes/chocolate/garlic/caffeine, or the many other things we eat the are definitely trying to poison animals, but just aren't very good at poisoning humans.

Also, someone else on this forum (I forget who) had the neat idea that humans are what you get from mixing the other races.

[Anonymouswizard]

This actually makes sense in that Humans are the most grassland/savannah oriented of the classical D&D races and most of the important domesticated animals are grassland/savannah ungulates - though some like sheep are derived from upland-dwelling ancestors suitable for domestication by dwarves/gnomes. Elves might domesticate wolves and horses, elven hunting dogs and elvish cavalry are a thing in several settings, but not cattle, pigs, or chickens. Halflings might be too small to successfully handle large ungulates like cattle and horses, which is a significant limit on their crop production (imagine having to try and plow fields using donkeys). On the plant side, humans probably do still have advantages, being the most suitable for wheat cultivation as opposed to dwarves/gnomes growing barely and elves reliant on fruits/nuts.

I like the idea of dwarves being vegetarians. Stubborn farmers on the surface tilling fields by hand, the proper way, not this cheating oxen business, and looking funny at this 'pork' stuff.

Elves meanwhile don't have dogs in this setting, they have tamed wolves. They certainly could selectively breed them, but they don't want to. There's also the possibility that cross-species trade has led to elves adopting dogs and breeding their own hunting breeds (including some wolf in there to increase genetic diversity). But the dog is, in the setting I'm building, very much associated with humans. They also rely on magic to help wild plants provide more bountiful harvest.

As for halflings, you can always go Tolkienian and make them a close cousin to humans. I'm seriously considering having them be a younger cousin, having inherited some domesticated species and helped in the shaping of others.


Cattle, horses, chickens, sheep, goats, dogs, cats... All the animals associated with humans have been altered so that they are no longer the animals from which they were originally bred. Domestic turkeys, for example, cannot fly but their wild ancestors have an incredible ability to take off.

Yep, if you're breeding meatier chickens when the other races are hunting game you're going to get a long term advantage. Pretty much every animal we've domesticated has been shaped to fill at least one task we need doing (such as providing tasty meat and eggs), with dogs as possibly the species bred for the most tasks.

It just seems like a more satisfying reason to me than 'humans have just the right birth rate and just about the right amount of ambition, but those orcs have too many children and are too ambitious'.


Orcs, of course, tend to live in more barren regions as hunter-gatherers, lizardfolk have no desire to begin an agricultural society, and goblinoids have the same issues as orcs while trying to mesh together three cultures. I think that covers most of the common species.

Of course orcs are basically to humans as drow are to elves, which helps explain the war-pigs

[jjordan]

An idea I've considered but not developed is that humans are the only race to have really domesticated animals (I've considered adding 'and plants', but it feels wrong). Sure other races have rangers with animal companions and tame animals on occasion, but humans are the ones who took wolves and turned them into dogs. Eventually this caused humans to thrive because their animals helped make them more efficient, they could rely on them for certain tasks and devote more attention to others.
No, plants is right. Grain-based diets are less expensive than meat-based diets. If orcs are primarily subsisting on meat then they are going to have less access to food and be more closely tied to seasonal cycles of plenty and famine. If elves are engaging in a permaculture solution rather than surplus-production agriculture then they aren't going to have a lot of exposure to plenty and famine cycles but they are going to have less food overall because they aren't maximizing production. Humans engaging in surplus-oriented production of food-stuffs may be what makes them super numerous. Of course, that begs the question: Why aren't halflings the most numerous race? They have less caloric requirements due to their size, they're generally portrayed as being agrarian, and if they're engaging in surplus-oriented production they ought to be more numerous than humans.

[Metastachydium]

Why aren't halflings the most numerous race? They have less caloric requirements due to their size, they're generally portrayed as being agrarian, and if they're engaging in surplus-oriented production they ought to be more numerous than humans.

Why, that's simple! Because of this British chap called Tolkien. They might produce much; however, they are both gourmands and gourmets: they like to eat a lot, but they won't just eat anything, thank you very much!

[brian 333]

Halflings have the same caloric requirements as humans, possibly even more. The reason for this is brain size and work output.

Brains are extremely calorie-dependent. Reducing the size of a brain but getting the same output is a negligible difference in caloric requirement. Supplying that caloric requirement with a smaller digestive tract is going to increase the operating time required, so the smaller system works harder and longer to achieve the same energy output. This requires more energy than a larger digestive system requires.

Halflings and humans, therefore, have very nearly equal food requirements, but humans get theirs in fewer, larger meals. Which means that if both are using the same technology to acquire food, they both have to have the same work output in a day to produce the food they need. A halfling actually has to work harder, because a larger engine and a smaller one use the same amount of energy to do the same task. Imagine a crane that must lift a one-ton load. Now imagine a smaller crane that lifts the same load. Both require the same amount of effort to lift the load, both expend the same amount of energy. If both engines use the same fuel and both are of similar efficiency in use of the fuel, then both require the same amount of fuel to perform the task.

[Mechalich]

One of the tricky bits of using the agricultural production matrix of a civilization as a demographic determinant is that it is highly geographically dependent. Different crops and different domestication-ready animals are available in different parts of the world and this has a massive influence on development patterns. Wet rice agriculture, for example, is simply more efficient than tilled cereal grain cropping, and therefore ever since the domestication of rice there has always been greater population density in the areas suited to rice production than everywhere else on the planet. A fantasy scenario is not bound to organize the continents and their vegetation patterns in the same fashion as Earth, and therefore could unfold a distinctly different pattern than elsewhere. Human abundance could be something as simple as 'they began where the rice was.'

[LibraryOgre]

An idea I've considered but not developed is that humans are the only race to have really domesticated animals (I've considered adding 'and plants', but it feels wrong). Sure other races have rangers with animal companions and tame animals on occasion, but humans are the ones who took wolves and turned them into dogs. Eventually this caused humans to thrive because their animals helped make them more efficient, they could rely on them for certain tasks and devote more attention to others.


I've flirted with the same thing; I have the grunge elves simply not using any animals at all, for example.

[Metastachydium]

I've flirted with the same thing; I have the grunge elves simply not using any animals at all, for example.

You know, I have a soft spot for hypercarnivorous, wouldn't-hurt-a-plant wood elves. (It can also help with keeping the population low, since they'll have to subsist mostly on game.)

[Anonymouswizard]

An idea I've considered but not developed is that humans are the only race to have really domesticated animals (I've considered adding 'and plants', but it feels wrong).

Well this thread has convinced me to start developing the setting this idea was for, and as such the idea. Dwarves are strict vegetarians, and elves have been struck from the setting for unrelated reasons (they're potentially being thematically replaced with tabaxi and lizardfolk).

Humans are the most numerous race in the region because they donesticate, and I'm going for the orcs=dark humans idea. They're the only race that is about as numerous as humans, also domesticate animals and plants, and are the only race that can interbreed with humans. However for a as yet to be defined reason their strongest presence is in a barren region, with their cities in river valleys and the like.

Other races vary in number based on how easy it was for them to access food. Lizardfolk are of course the least populous.

[Rynjin]

You know, I have a soft spot for hypercarnivorous, wouldn't-hurt-a-plant wood elves. (It can also help with keeping the population low, since they'll have to subsist mostly on game.)

Ah, a true dwarf of culture I see.

[brian 333]

May I suggest fungus-farmer as a high status occupation in dwarf culture? In my campaign, dwarves make a very potent and slightly hallucinogenic whiskey from mushrooms that gnomes and halflings enjoy, humans find addictive, and elves and half-elves find toxic.

[Grim Portent]

Well one of the classics for elder races in fiction is that they were the more powerful and numerous group compared to humans in the past, then things changed and they suffered a massive collapse that they have never recovered from.

Say the elves had a vast and powerful empire powered by lush farmland created by an extensive irrigation network constructed over millennia by multiple generations of elves. Something akin to the real life Fertile Crescent, a conflux of naturally suitable terrain and lots of hard work creating the perfect conditions for a vast set of farms with which to power the creation of empires.

Then the winds change, not even necessarily over the elven lands themselves, but somewhere else there's an ecological catastrophe, which causes a mass migration of other humanoids, orcs or goblins or what have you. They wind up in conflict with the elves while fleeing from famine and mass social strife in their own homelands, bringing with them new diseases, lots of disparate raider groups and so on. The ensuing conlict damages the infrastructure that keeps the elven farmland fertile, the elves, being slow to reproduce and slow to adapt to changing circumstances are unable or unwilling to devote the manpower to repair the infrastructure properly. Then another war happens, and another, then a plague, and a famine and so on, the farmland becomes less and less fertile over thousands of years and the elven empire slowly dwindles into a mere shadow of what it once was, never to recover because by the time the elves try to fix things it's already gone too far.

Humans are not particularly special, they're just better at recovering from total societal collapse than the elves or dwarves, while still being civilisation builders in a way that orcs and goblins aren't.

Halflings struggle because their small stature makes them less suited to a number of jobs than humans. They can carry less, struggle more with construction, can't use tools of the same size resulting in leverage issues, can't properly utilise some domestic animals and are less suited to fighting, all while having a similar need for food as humans.

[Rockphed]

The exception is halflings, for which you may thank Tolkien. Halflings, who manage to have full human intelligence in a body with drastically reduced caloric demands (and magically powerful brains), are poised to overrun the earth. And of course, in the one D&D setting that gives the assumptions some rope - Dark Sun - that's what happened.

Tolkien's Hobbits ate frequently and voraciously. I'm not sure that they would have much less in the way of caloric requirements per work hour than humans.


This actually makes sense in that Humans are the most grassland/savannah oriented of the classical D&D races and most of the important domesticated animals are grassland/savannah ungulates - though some like sheep are derived from upland-dwelling ancestors suitable for domestication by dwarves/gnomes. Elves might domesticate wolves and horses, elven hunting dogs and elvish cavalry are a thing in several settings, but not cattle, pigs, or chickens. Halflings might be too small to successfully handle large ungulates like cattle and horses, which is a significant limit on their crop production (imagine having to try and plow fields using donkeys). On the plant side, humans probably do still have advantages, being the most suitable for wheat cultivation as opposed to dwarves/gnomes growing barely and elves reliant on fruits/nuts.

Elves do not domesticate animals. They tame animals. Elves who want hunting partners go meditate on a tree until a pack of wolves comes to investigate and then they offer, in the speech of the wolves, to share the bounty of the hunt if the wolves will help them track their prey. If they need a mount they go find the biggest moose in the forest and ask nicely. They might give the moose a place to sleep in their home, but the moose is still an animal of the wilds and will return thence in before the year is out.

[Cluedrew]

On Aggression: One explanation I have a problem with the "monstrous" races basically fighting there way out of population growth basically says that they are suicidally aggressive on a racial level. I'm sure there could be some racism problems with that, but in a more straightforward way there is another issue: How did they reach their current population? Why aren't they dying out?

I think you have to mix it was some other issues why they aren't growing. The simplest is that they are a young race who is actually growing but has much less time to do so. And are coming into conflict with the other, more established races, as they try to carve out a place for themselves.

[Yanagi]

Trying to create a homebrew D&D5e world where gods either didn't interfere or just started the evolution process then left to run.

How would humans become the most numerous and/or dominate race when you have dwarves, elves, dragonborn and similar races around evolving alongside them as well as many "monsters" that populate the world considering some monsters are on average just as smart humans and even in some creatures like dragons predating them.


It's less of a singular trait, more of an in Goldilocks zone.

Population density at it's flattest is just available calorie density. Live in better foraging territory and you'll have more people than poor foraging; grow calorie dense food and you'll have even more. Sedentarism and agriculture is a starting point for how to afford more people, but it's the kick off point not the totality.

What's really required is a whole system, a vision of how the world functions and why more people is necessary, and that's not just agriculture or domestication but the development of the idea of ownership, exclusive rights to subsistence resources, and subsequently a system in which people exchange non-subsiistence labor for subsistence...all of which generally hinges on the guy(s) claiming ownership having some kind of force to back their claim. It's not humans that are the most numerous kind of sapient being because of some some essential quality, it's that there's a kind of human institution that can use more people than strictly necessary and "spends" the surplus at a nice steady rate to get long-term benefit. Every place there's a human kingdom it's the end point of enclosing other humans in a system that punishes them for not being a functional widget but doesn't kill them outright. A border on a human map is a zone of control in which land has been enclosed--transformed for use, held by an individual permitted to use violence to keep it from being used by other people. In most cases, this process of enclosure means either expelling who was already there or forcing them to operate inside the new system.

If you were a human in a culture that slid into a mode of existence that didn't require growth and didn't require more and more labor to feed infrastructure that facilitates resource movement that creates a non-subsistence economy that allows those with power to amass more control...like a forager or a pastoralist...you're one of those weird groups that lives on the fringes, has low population density, and only gets fleshed out in a late-in-the-edition splatbook. Population might not be perfectly equilibratedd with calorie availability, but you're likley not the source of continuous growth.

But if you're in a sedentary society with land ownership and trade, then more expansion, more enclosure, then more people is more labor to put towards more expansion...some of which you might individually be able to profit from...and your fellow humans matter enough that they're not allowed to die for no reason, but still matter so little that people can die on the regular but do so after or during work that creates surplus resources. It's therefore always good to have more people, and controlling more people--by supplying or alleviating violence--is a great way to accumulate more value. Since this arrangement requires both a hierarchy that controls violence and urban centers full of skilled labor that facilitate the take stuff/control people/extract labor cycle, this creates a constant need for geographic expansion and a complementary need for constant population growth.

Other fantasy races should have more than one culture because culture is adaptations to prevailing conditions and the cross-generation creation of a pool of skills and explanations for how be in the world successfully, and some of those cultures should find their way to "the hierarchy needs more people, forever, until everything collapses , because more stuff is good in the short term," but fantasy races are whisps of allegory not coherent assemblies of the low-order aspects of society that make it function like food production and waste management and the high order societal mechanisms like monetary exchange. Dwarves that need to eat normal food and pay for it in coin should have the same societal pressures as humans doing the same acts and thus have similar incentives for, say, population growth, but fantasy is about themes not realism. Elves and dwarves are few because they are remnant to be mourned and a cautionary tale; they are sylvan and cthonic because of thematicity not because those are coherent survival niches. And orcs and goblins are many because they are threatening depersonalized mass outside of civilization, somehow always a myriad in the wasteland. You can add socio-biology on top of this to give it some sense of realist population dynamics, but ultimately it's an acquired taste, like extra virgin olive oil on vanilla ice cream.

With that in mind:

Dwarves are generally presented as clannish and shame-driven, and individuals are not casually discarded: larger political entities still use the basic model of familial connection (note: that is what a clan is, an familial structure with actual power to exert force) and social ritual. For reasons relating to religion and core culture identity, dwarves have a cultural focus on the creation of specific kinds of finished goods such that most people are skilled laborers of some variety and cannot be cast away or used for necessary but menial labor, but also the value system that elevates work as collective uplift means that no labor is viewed as a lesser part of what society needs to function. Dwarves in the past have tried expansion find that clan politics tends to remain personal politics, so the process of enclosing and owning land disrupts the delicate balance of proximate familial political systems--suddenly there's individuals with enough capital to operate outside the system of hospitality, intermarriage, and kinship that keeps things stable, but there's also clans that now have enough amassed capital that they can consider escalating rather than defusing old grudges. This produces a pretty consistent pattern--a dwarven kingdom expands and then experiences civil war before having it's territory eroded by opportunists. The duergar are notable exceptions in that they expand and acquire surplus through the enslavement of non-duergar while maintaining the core value that all duergar labor is vital and irreplaceable...but this rarely results in whole kingdoms because slavery is inefficient, volatile, and wack.

Both nomad and sedentary Halflings have loose collectivism and very little hierarchy with family and feasting are used as social glue and the basis of conflict resolution, and conflict that cannot be resolved through negotiation and friendly intermediary leads to the offending party being sent away to another community. Since most relations are non-hierarchical and nobody really has the ability to monopolize force, nobody can really control a community or amass more land such that they need un-free labor like serfs or peasants. This loose-woven system means that halflings can appear to "assimilate" the values of other societies but also maintain their own internal systems of mutual aid a support. This also explains the ubiquity of halflings in the urban demimonde: they are apathetic to the larger understanding of stigmatized and shameful kinds of work

Elves are so long lived that individual versus collective identity becomes something dialectical and nuanced--there is time enough to be wholly oneself and aid collective goals--but individuals are rarely required to perform an economic function for the sake of subsisting in the status quo. Over an extended period of time elves have created their own version of enclosure--kingdoms exist to standardize social norms, provide minimum enforcement for dire transgressions of norms, and coordinate exterior defense--but they differ from human enclosures in that the population is so low that each individual is not seen as replaceable. The benefit of this is that the kinds of abuses of power that run on interchangeability and disposability of people are met with great resistance, so there's less institutional problems...but it also means that if you're up against an encroaching force that's willing to do things fast and dirty by throwing bodies at a problem, you're at a disadvantage. But it also creates a deeper structural problems in that critical individuals--whether that's purely functional or a matter of social esteem--become enormous points of failure. If someone with social esteem and granted decision making abilities pushes society in some dark directions, there's really no systemic counter or form of accountability to impede it. Furthermore, the line between impersonal and personal goals can blur rapidly...a thing that should have precise limited objectives instead escalates and warps with heightened emotion and sunk cost fallacy...a detail that goes very poorly with the aforementioned problem of key individuals as points of failure.

On the other hand, there's the "monstrous" races where individuals are perfectly devalued. More often than not they are what they are because they are custom-built by a deity and the deity has dictated that most individuals don't matter all, are perfectly replaceable in a system that services a very narrow set of ends. Orcs, for example, are defined by their creator's grudge to the point that their society cannot help but break, cannot form long-term stable structures because the only meaningful objective is the next raid where the goals are not strategic but cathartic. Sometimes an orc can set themselves and try and create a stable structure, but it can only exist to the extent that it can service the impractical objective of retaliatory violence. Institutions don't have time to take root, individuals with power have no incentive to distribute or delegate power, very little can be built in one generation and passed to the next.

Goblinoids are the closest to the Goldilocks-zone that humans occupy, where suffering is accepted as normal but also seen as part of a larger impersonal thing that is necessary and must grow...but theirs is a more centralized, militaristic vision and they focus on a single strategy of enclosure, conquest. It's an unsustainable cycle that requires more labor and resources that is similar to humans, but the goblinoids are latercomers trying to capture and enclose land occupied by societies with infrastructure and logistical lines just as large and complex as the goblinoids if not moreso because the former estalbished states have mutual interests and the latter goblinoids are viewed as complete outsiders, a disruption to the normal operation of the status quo. But in the long term there is a more nuanced problem in that their society is bent around militarism: the only way to be a goblinoid is to contribute to the war effort in keeping with your hierarchical role, but the ideal is the sublimation of the self through death in war. As a consequence, their pattern is over-investment in direct conflict and a failure to consolidate holdings by creating an administrative state that uses...less extreme forms of coercion. They use up too many bodies winning and don't have enough bodies to do the ruling.

[SpoonR]

I’ll offer two rather more unusual possibilities.

1. For a jungle-dwelling group, like some sorts of lizardfolk. If you know what is and isn’t safe to eat, and how to avoid predators, everything you need is available in the jungle with little effort. You’ve adapted to the environment, and somehow reached a stable equilibrium. Expanding would require large groups leaving the jungle, but who would want to go out into all that hardship-infested non jungle?

2. Halflings, with some inspiration from Birthright, and various other sources. Some entity is a humanoiditarian, and thinks halflings taste good. Halflings survive by blending into other less tasty societies. Any place halflings come to dominate shortly becomes noms.

3. Dwarf fortress. Dwarves are obsessed with digging. They go through boom/bust cycles of found new city, prosper and increase population, dig too deep and awaken demon, lose most of population, start city somewhere else.

[Metastachydium]

Hm. How about something like this:
1. orcs and goblinoids are (sub)species within the same genus. This genus is plagued by, well, a plague, an infectious disease with high mortality rates that other mammalian humanoid races/species can carry asymptomatically or without severe symptoms and a serious risk of death, which makes the orcs and goblinoids incredibly paranoid towards each other and especially strangers from other races. They live in inhospitable lands and in nomadic societies of relatively small size incredibly hostile towards much everyone (except, say, avian and reptilian people) they encounter or that encounters them in an attempt to stay safe. Occasional raiding is generally a desperate last ditch attempt to avoid starving to death while at it or to drive off especially stubborn would-be neighbours who come in numbers.

2. Lizardfolk have two factors limiting their spread: 2.1. they have slow metabolisms, which makes it possible for themselves to live longer than any other race barring elves – unless they get themselves killed by doing something stupid, that is. This makes most of them patient, slow, risk-averse and very conservative.
2.2 They are kind of cold-blooded. High altitudes and cold climates are not kind to them and instead of trying (and likely failing) to adapt, they simply tend to avoid such unfavourable environments.

3. Beyond the issues that result from maturing slower than any other species, eelves have the opposite problem: they are too "perfect" for their own benefit. Less enigmatically put, they cannot and do not sweat. The most potent tool for thermoregulation they have are those oversized ears, and in very warm climates those simply won't do, and so, volens-nolens they must stick to environments that don't get very hot for prolonged amounts of time.

4. For halflings, SpoonR's suggestion is to good for me not to steal it. Halflings eat a lot (mostly gourmet food), work little, and age slower than humans. This makes their flash tender, juicy and wonderfully aromatic. Carnivorous beasts and monsters of all sorts are attracted to it. Heck, it's not uncommon for less scrupulous halflings to indulge in occasional acts of cannibalism. Halfling meat is just that delicious.

5. Half-whatevers simply don't breed true.

6. Kobolds are small, vulnerable and they don't like sunlight. No one really knows how many of them there are, because they stick to their tunnels and burrows, too small for anyone other than them to exist comfortably in. Everyone kind of just leaves them alone, because they are unobtrusive and more than willing to barter the salt, ores and coal they mine away to anyone who offers a price they like.

7. The largest gnome polity went all bonkers at some point and started a large scale Liberation War on everyone they shared borders with (and with some more they didn't) to elevate them from the "state of oppressing themselves" (whatever that means). This led to massive military caualties and a general distrust of gnomes everywhere, leading to the persecution of gnome communities largely everywhere, few of which had anything to do with the actual aggressor or its agenda. Currently, most gnomes linger on the fringes of other societies, have gone underground (and not just literally) or have thrown their lot with the Liberators who warmly welcome these refugees more often than not receptive to their attempts at indoctrinating and radicalising them behind their borders, now sealed tight by their enemies.

8. There were never many dwarves, but then some of them had to dig too deep and too greedily. Incidentally, you might not want to go anywhere near those mountains.

[Scalenex]

Maybe it's a bit hand wavy but in my fantasy world, humans are dominant because of the will of the gods.

I got nine deities, aka the Nine. The Nine made dragons by committee and let the dragons rule the world. A few gods and goddesses made new races, but they were less powerful because they had less divine might behind them.

Thousands of years later, a foolish dragon queen accidentally triggered an apocalyptic event and killed 95% of everyone. The surviving dragons went from members of great empires to xenophobic and miserly loners sitting on piles of treasure and talking about lost glories.

The Nine formed a new committee and sought to create a new race to inherit the world. The elves. The elven lifespan maxes out at about 500 years rather than 2000 years and they have less innate power than dragons. The Nine hoped this would prevent any elf from acquiring enough power to destroy the world.

Thousands of years later, a foolish elven king accidentally triggered an apocalyptic event and killed 95% of everyone.

The Nine decided to try their luck with humans, figuring no single human can gain enough power in one life time to accidentally destroy the world, but they can still acquire enough power in their lifetimes to create positive works of civilization.

Anyway, humans are dominant because they indirectly have all the gods behind them. Dragons and elves do too, but they are still recovering from a near extinction event.

Originally most of the other races were created by one god or goddess who wanted a race to embody their ideal (or in the case of my NE goddess, she wanted a cannon fodder race to throw at her enemies), but these one divine parent races tend to die off quickly. So most newer races are created with two, three, or four gods or goddesses involved.

Dwarves (with four divine parents) claim they are superior to humans because none of the evil deities helped make them, but they are still less wide spread and politically powerful than humans.

My NE goddess still makes the most new races but now she usually works to bribe, bully, or trick another deity into contributing.

I also wrote that half-whatevers are nearly always sterile unless they are elf-human, elf-dragon, or human-dragon. Other half breeds are often derogatorily called mules (borrowed that from Dark Sun but I expanded it to more than dwarf-human hybrids).

Half-extra planar beings are not sterile but their grand children and great grand children gradually revert back to normal members of their base mortal race.

[Damon_Tor]

For most of the same reasons that humans tend to dominate fantasy worlds, I don't see a strong reason why Half-Elves wouldn't supplant them and eventually replace both parent species simply on the weight of demographics. They get an extended lifespan from their elf ancestors with no reduction in maturation rate. If they also breed at even 75% the rate of full-blooded humans, the demographics would quickly shift toward a half-elf world. Also, +2 Cha: Half-Elves are going to be quite a bit better at competing with both elves and humans for mates, and at finding positions high in the social hierarchy.

(Aside: a half-elf dominated world is an element a setting I'm working on here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?646894-A-World-where-Order-vs-Chaos-is-more-important-than-Good-vs-Evil))

[brian 333]

I'm not certain that that follows. Certain factors may affect half-elf rate of live birth, such as cultural inhibitions on cross breeding, (partner won't grow old with you, you'll see them die while still young, etc.,) or interspecies fertility/viability issues, (male elves are only fertile on the night of the full moon every twenty-four months, female elves often die in childbirth due to overly large half-human babies or the robust baby cannot be sustained by the much slower elf metabolism.

There may be a lack of fertility between half-elves so that either is more likely to successfully breed with a parent-species mate than with another half elf, thus allowing the half elf genes to disperse into the gene pool. In this scenario, there is no half-elf race, only a handful of characters per region who can claim half-elf parentage.

[Rockphed]

A while ago there was a subforum of homebrew dedicated to a community campaign setting project titled "Tear of Blood". The most politically powerful race was half-elves, though I think the lore outlawed interbreeding between humans, elves, and half-elves.

[Damon_Tor]

I'm not certain that that follows. Certain factors may affect half-elf rate of live birth, such as cultural inhibitions on cross breeding, (partner won't grow old with you, you'll see them die while still young, etc.,) or interspecies fertility/viability issues, (male elves are only fertile on the night of the full moon every twenty-four months, female elves often die in childbirth due to overly large half-human babies or the robust baby cannot be sustained by the much slower elf metabolism.

There may be a lack of fertility between half-elves so that either is more likely to successfully breed with a parent-species mate than with another half elf, thus allowing the half elf genes to disperse into the gene pool. In this scenario, there is no half-elf race, only a handful of characters per region who can claim half-elf parentage.

Sure, all of that is possible.

Any biological barriers would seem to be new details added to the setting. Unlike muls, who are canonically sterile, there's no indication that half-elves have any similar challenges.

Culturally, sure, those are good points, but culture can change to accommodate biology. If one civilization with uninhibited hybridization grows faster than another civilization with cultural barriers against it, the faster growing civilization would overwhelm and outcompete the slower one.

[The Patterner]

Ok, so this might be one of the most interesting discussions I've seen here in a long time :smallbiggrin:

I'd like to add some ideas as to why humans can outcompete halflings eventough they are very similar to us and share many of our advantages.

Firstly, halflings, like a lot of small warm blooded animals have to eat a lot for their size. Sure a human might eat more in total per day. But we can go longer without food, so during times of hardship we can simply outlast them (this could also work to explain why we outcompete orcs, goblins etc).

Secondly, climate resistance, humans can survive in most types of climate zones easier than haflings. Fact is I could see humans being better at surviving in most types of climates than all other races and that is one of out true strengths.

I could see the above leading to halflings gravitating towards humans since we have an easy time of getting along. For halflings the upside would be that their population can piggyback on humans during times of famine harsh winters. The downside would be that halfling culture has gone all but extinct, they eat, talk, drink, dress and act like humans. Fact is to most other species a halfling is just a short and unusually hungry human.

Added bonus, if you want half-elves but without, well, the elf part. Just have humans and halflings being capable of interbreeding and you have a much more realistic (relatively speaking) mix.

[Metastachydium]

Also, +2 Cha: Half-Elves are going to be quite a bit better at competing with both elves and humans for mates, and at finding positions high in the social hierarchy.

(Incidentally, though 3.5 half-elves are infamous for being useless garbage under normal circumstances, they have one trick up their sleeve that makes them ridiculously good at this: with a racial bonus to Diplomacy and access to both Human and Half-Elf Paragon (the latter directly increasing said racial bonus) they can get a +4 to CHA in a mere six levels, while making Diplomacy a class skill for every class they have. At around 8th level, they can easily hit a +50 modifier or more and 3.5 Diplomacy is so broken it's stupid.)

Anyhow, wouldn't sharing a dating pool with humans and elves work against half-elves on the long run?


partner won't grow old with you, you'll see them die while still young, etc.

That's not even a cultural thing, it's just good old psychology!


female elves often die in childbirth due to overly large half-human babies or the robust baby cannot be sustained by the much slower elf metabolism.

Let's not even think about half-orcs, then.


Culturally, sure, those are good points, but culture can change to accommodate biology. If one civilization with uninhibited hybridization grows faster than another civilization with cultural barriers against it, the faster growing civilization would overwhelm and outcompete the slower one.

But why would a half-elven civilization grow faster (demographically or technologically)?

[Damon_Tor]

But why would a half-elven civilization grow faster (demographically or technologically)?

Well let's test my assumptions with some research and math.

5e lacks an official "aging effects" table, so most of what I'm about to say uses earlier sources. This actually changes this a bit in favor of full-blooded humans because I had based previous assumptions off the 5e half-elf which it says "matures at the same rate humans do". 5e also nebulously tells us that humans reach adulthood in the "late teens" while in earlier editions humans were adult at 15 while half-elves are adult at 20. In any case, I'll use the older material even if that 5-year headstart might force me to walk back my assumptions.

EDIT: Yes, after applying the math this 5 year headstart on each generation does absolutely negate the extra kids per generation effect, for pureblooded humans beating out the half-elves after all. Math is as follows:

Humans hit adulthood at age 15 and enter middle age at 35, about 20 years of childbearing. A quick google search of medieval and renaissance fertility rates tells us a typical human woman will have around 6 children during this time, or 1 child every 3.33 years. I'm not going to include infant mortality here. We're also going to assume that the average individual dies at the start of "old" age, which means humans live to 53, helfs to 93.

A half-elf reaches adulthood at the age of 20 and enters middle age at 62, 42 years of childbearing, more than double. If we assume that half-elf gestation is longer than humans by the same 133% rate, then a half-elf pregnancy would take about a year, up from a human's 9 months, and applying that same variable to the average amount of time between pregnancies, half-elves would have 1 child on average every 4.44 years. Over 42 years of a half-elf female being at childbearing age, that gives us 9.45 children for each half-elf woman over the course of her life.

So after 100 years, an average human woman will have produced 6 children, 18 grandchildren, 54 great grandchildren, 162 great great grandchildren, 486 ggggrandchildren, and around 510 gggggrandchildren (this generation is still only about 1/3 done being born). The woman, her children, most of her grandchildren and some of her great grandchildren are dead. The population of her descendants after 100 years is about 1206

In those same 100 years, an average half-elf woman will have produced 9.45 children, 44.65 grandchildren, 210.98 greatgrandchildren, and 498.45 gggrandchildren (this generation is about halfway done being born). All of these individuals are still alive except for the starting woman herself, for a total population of her ancestor standing at 763.53

In other words, breeding at 15 instead of 20 makes a HUGE difference. Yes, the half-elf will individually keep breeding for much longer, each one producing ~3 extra kids, but in those 5 years extra it takes her children to start having kids of their own, the human's children have already started producing their own offspring! This results in the humans getting to the next generation faster, which matters more in terms of demographics.

Of course these traits don't exist in a vaccuum. Take our society for example: women in Europe and the USA don't start having kids until their late 20s and usually only have about 2. The age of procreation is getting pushed back sociologically, not biologically. If that trend holds true for other urbanized, egalitarian societies, then the half-elf could still manage to outcompete humans, simply because an urban civilization aligns better with their biology in terms of childbearing. A half-elf woman could establish herself professionally in her 20s and 30s then still have her 40s and 50s to have 4-5 children, while human women would struggle with that paradigm.

[Damon_Tor]

Relevant Table Here (http://dmreference.com/SRD/Characters/Description/Vital_Statistics/Age.htm)

Keeping in mind the importance of early childbearing, this explains a human's relative dominance quite well. Halflings, for example, don't reach adulthood until age 20 either. Of the common races only half-orcs can compete with pure-blooded humans. Dwarves, gnomes and especially elves are SERIOUSLY disadvantaged in this way.

[brian 333]

Where do goblins and kobolds fit in this? Both may be quicker to achieve adulthood and longer lived than humans. Plus, kobolds lay clutches of eggs unless the 1ed MM has been corrected in later editions.

[Rynjin]

A while ago there was a subforum of homebrew dedicated to a community campaign setting project titled "Tear of Blood". The most politically powerful race was half-elves, though I think the lore outlawed interbreeding between humans, elves, and half-elves.

Reminds me a bit of Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey's Halfblood Chronicles. Elves use their powerful magic to enslave humans with magic obedience collars. Turns out they're also suppressor devices for humans' natural psionic potential.

Half-elves, naturally, are considered abominations not just because the idea of an elf breeding with what they view as cattle is repulsive, but also because they have the potential to develop the full abilities of both races.

[Damon_Tor]

Where do goblins and kobolds fit in this? Both may be quicker to achieve adulthood and longer lived than humans. Plus, kobolds lay clutches of eggs unless the 1ed MM has been corrected in later editions.

Unsure: the information easily available from legitimate sources online doesn't include them. But keep in mind that we've got to be comparing apples to apples here: all the species we've discussed are pro-social species with what seems like strong family structure and high investment in offspring. These are what are called k-selective species. If goblins or kobolds represent r-selective species then their reproductive rate might be off the charts compared to humans, but without any investment to speak of in their well-being on the part of the parents. Once the children of r-selective parents are born, they're on their own. This leads to massive infant mortality and very few individuals make it to adulthood and even fewer ever get to breed. So while there are potentially massive advantages to rapid breeding, at some point the benefits would begin to outweigh the drawbacks. It may be that humans hit that perfect sweet spot between the two extremes.

[Scalenex]

Unsure: the information easily available from legitimate sources online doesn't include them. But keep in mind that we've got to be comparing apples to apples here: all the species we've discussed are pro-social species with what seems like strong family structure and high investment in offspring. These are what are called k-selective species. If goblins or kobolds represent r-selective species then their reproductive rate might be off the charts compared to humans, but without any investment to speak of in their well-being on the part of the parents. Once the children of r-selective parents are born, they're on their own. This leads to massive infant mortality and very few individuals make it to adulthood and even fewer ever get to breed. So while there are potentially massive advantages to rapid breeding, at some point the benefits would begin to outweigh the drawbacks. It may be that humans hit that perfect sweet spot between the two extremes.

For my kobolds, I invented a ritual called birthing treks. Kobold clans bury their eggs in a shallow dirt nest and then move their camp a couple miles from the nest leaving a pheromonal trail for the hatchling kobolds to follow back to the adults.

Those that make the journey to successfully are adopted into the tribe, those that didn't are not mourned for they were too weak.

This also means kobolds lose track of whose eggs/hatchlings came from which parents but this is deliberate. Kobold children belong to entire clan.

If the kobold clan's numbers are low, they will move their nest closer to their camp, so more hatchlings survive the birthing trek but clans that make a habit of this are looked down on by other clans.

I haven't given much thought to goblins.

[Metastachydium]

Well let's test my assumptions with some research and math.

5e lacks an official "aging effects" table, so most of what I'm about to say uses earlier sources. This actually changes this a bit in favor of full-blooded humans because I had based previous assumptions off the 5e half-elf which it says "matures at the same rate humans do". 5e also nebulously tells us that humans reach adulthood in the "late teens" while in earlier editions humans were adult at 15 while half-elves are adult at 20. In any case, I'll use the older material even if that 5-year headstart might force me to walk back my assumptions.

EDIT: Yes, after applying the math this 5 year headstart on each generation does absolutely negate the extra kids per generation effect, for pureblooded humans beating out the half-elves after all. Math is as follows:

Humans hit adulthood at age 15 and enter middle age at 35, about 20 years of childbearing. A quick google search of medieval and renaissance fertility rates tells us a typical human woman will have around 6 children during this time, or 1 child every 3.33 years. I'm not going to include infant mortality here. We're also going to assume that the average individual dies at the start of "old" age, which means humans live to 53, helfs to 93.

A half-elf reaches adulthood at the age of 20 and enters middle age at 62, 42 years of childbearing, more than double. If we assume that half-elf gestation is longer than humans by the same 133% rate, then a half-elf pregnancy would take about a year, up from a human's 9 months, and applying that same variable to the average amount of time between pregnancies, half-elves would have 1 child on average every 4.44 years. Over 42 years of a half-elf female being at childbearing age, that gives us 9.45 children for each half-elf woman over the course of her life.

So after 100 years, an average human woman will have produced 6 children, 18 grandchildren, 54 great grandchildren, 162 great great grandchildren, 486 ggggrandchildren, and around 510 gggggrandchildren (this generation is still only about 1/3 done being born). The woman, her children, most of her grandchildren and some of her great grandchildren are dead. The population of her descendants after 100 years is about 1206

In those same 100 years, an average half-elf woman will have produced 9.45 children, 44.65 grandchildren, 210.98 greatgrandchildren, and 498.45 gggrandchildren (this generation is about halfway done being born). All of these individuals are still alive except for the starting woman herself, for a total population of her ancestor standing at 763.53

In other words, breeding at 15 instead of 20 makes a HUGE difference. Yes, the half-elf will individually keep breeding for much longer, each one producing ~3 extra kids, but in those 5 years extra it takes her children to start having kids of their own, the human's children have already started producing their own offspring! This results in the humans getting to the next generation faster, which matters more in terms of demographics.

Of course these traits don't exist in a vaccuum. Take our society for example: women in Europe and the USA don't start having kids until their late 20s and usually only have about 2. The age of procreation is getting pushed back sociologically, not biologically. If that trend holds true for other urbanized, egalitarian societies, then the half-elf could still manage to outcompete humans, simply because an urban civilization aligns better with their biology in terms of childbearing. A half-elf woman could establish herself professionally in her 20s and 30s then still have her 40s and 50s to have 4-5 children, while human women would struggle with that paradigm.


Relevant Table Here (http://dmreference.com/SRD/Characters/Description/Vital_Statistics/Age.htm)

Keeping in mind the importance of early childbearing, this explains a human's relative dominance quite well. Halflings, for example, don't reach adulthood until age 20 either. Of the common races only half-orcs can compete with pure-blooded humans. Dwarves, gnomes and especially elves are SERIOUSLY disadvantaged in this way.

Nice math there.

[Damon_Tor]

For my kobolds, I invented a ritual called birthing treks. Kobold clans bury their eggs in a shallow dirt nest and then move their camp a couple miles from the nest leaving a pheromonal trail for the hatchling kobolds to follow back to the adults.

Those that make the journey to successfully are adopted into the tribe, those that didn't are not mourned for they were too weak.

This also means kobolds lose track of whose eggs/hatchlings came from which parents but this is deliberate. Kobold children belong to entire clan.

If the kobold clan's numbers are low, they will move their nest closer to their camp, so more hatchlings survive the birthing trek but clans that make a habit of this are looked down on by other clans.

I haven't given much thought to goblins.

Fitness tests are a neat evolutionary gimmick.

In one of my settings (Not half-elf urban world, a different one) dwarves have one pretty similar: in it, dwarves are an all-male species whose young grow in fungal cysts deep beneath the holdfast (there's a symbiosis between the dwarves and their "ale" at work here. The ale is, in an almost literal way, the dwarves' wife.) The infant dwarves are birthed from these cysts and then have to climb up sheer, wet, stony surfaces to the holdfast to join their people. Fathers know their sons based on timing of certain urges within them: the same hormonal cycles which caused him to release his gametes in his urine to the fungal pools below will cause in him a very particular lonely melancholy as his son is being birthed from the fungus below, one that causes him to yearn for a son (and many pray to a deity for a son during this time, though this varies from culture to culture) and so when an infant dwarf crawls up to the holdfast it's whichever dwarf just then happened to be longing for a son who claims him as his own. If his son never arrives (either because the "pregnancy" never took or because the son died making the climb) the melancholy will eventually pass until such time comes his cycles come around again and releases his gametes again.

Goblinoids in this world are a single, eusocial species. The goblins themselves are goblinoid females, the "workers" of a warren, kept perpetually preadolescent until their maturation is triggered externally by pheromones. Hobgoblins are the "soldiers", prepubescent males. Bugbears are the sexually mature males (analogous to "drones" in a beehive: their purpose is really only to mate), while rarely-seen Goblin Queens are the sexually mature females, usually only one per warren at once. Infants are well cared for by the Goblins: the fitness test occurs when a virgin Queen first comes of age and flees the warren, bugbears in pursuit. The Queen tests the bugbears mercilessly during this "mating flight", mating with those who impress her by passing her (usually lethal) tests. A Goblin Queen gives birth only once, to about 100 Goblings sired by dozens of different fathers (many from different warrens, which keeps genes flowing), then usually dies after the extreme toll such a pregnancy puts on her body. The rare Goblin Queen who survives her childbirth is called a Matriarch, and a Goblin Warren led by a Matriarch is a terrible and fighting political force in a region because only a Matriarch has the capability to knowingly manipulate the pheromonal cycles which drive Goblinoid society. A Matriarch can use this pheromone manipulation to cause multiple Goblins to become Queens at once for a massive population boom, or put the normally lazy and selfish Bugbears back into the community-centered soldier mindset they held as adolescents.

I use these things to explain certain behaviors in a more interesting way. Dwarves' preoccupation with ale and deep connection to their home is due to their lifecycle. Even their beards reflect this: the yeast that shares their lifecycle uses the beards of infant dwarves to migrate from the cysts below up to holdfasts and into the brewing pools the dwarves use to make their ale. Goblins' typically anti-social behavior is the result of life outside the warren. In particular, their kleptomania is actually a cleaning/resource gathering instinct which functions poorly in other environments. They are HIGHLY prosocial among their own people.

[Herbert_W]

Maybe it's a bit hand wavy but in my fantasy world, humans are dominant because of the will of the gods. [...] Anyway, humans are dominant because they indirectly have all the gods behind them. [...] Originally most of the other races were created by one god or goddess who wanted a race to embody their ideal (or in the case of my NE goddess, she wanted a cannon fodder race to throw at her enemies), but these one divine parent races tend to die off quickly. So most newer races are created with two, three, or four gods or goddesses involved.


I've had a similar idea, but in the other direction: humans could be the dominant race becasue there weren't any gods involved in their creation - or at least none of the currently-living gods. This means that humans are completely free of the overspecialization in design from which other races suffer. (Humans may have be the creations of a long-dead forgotten precursor god, a naturally-occurring species, or taken from another world in a campaign that uses this idea.) There's a list of things that a race needs to do in order to become numerous: to survive with a low population, to establish a high population density, and to avoid societal collapse. Humans ar egood enough at all of these things.

Those other races that were created by currently-living gods would have "improvements" according to their creator's ideals, which may make them exceptionally excellent at some of the things of the list but which make them fail at others. (I imagine that many of these races would be based on humans, because designing a whole race from scratch is hard and most gods don't have the skill even if they have the power.) Much like a whiteroom "optimized" character build, they are hindered by their overspecilization.

For example:

Dragons cannot sustain a high population density due to their caloric needs. They also wouldn't want to, due to their territorial instincts. Dragons instinctively avoid conflict by establishing clear hierarchies of power. They can tolerate the presence of 'lesser' beings in their territory (defined as a being who absolutely could not kill the dragon if they even dared to try) because those beings are no threat. They can likewise live under the wing of a 'greater' being who will never see them as a threat. Equals, however, are beings that might want to start a fight - and dragons have a strong instinct for what might be charitably described as proactive self-defense.

Elves are individually self-sufficient, mobile, and adept enough with various form of magic that an individual who wants to leave an area and set up a new life elsewhere almost always can. An elf who does not wish to be found generally cannot be, even by other elves. This makes large-scale civilization a non-starter. Humans developed civilization for the sake of protection against beasts and brigands and then large-scale civilization for the sake of protection against other civilizations. Elves never had that need in the first place. Elves still usually live together in groups, of course, but that's purely by choice - and they choose to cluster and spread themselves so that they're not lonely, but nowhere near crowded either. Elves may also have some form of immortality (say, reincarnation without loosing their memories) which makes them uncomfortable associating with 'mortal' races - having a friend die permanently is an alien and uniquely unpleasant experience for them.

Dwarves are literally carved from stone; when two dwarves make a baby dwarf, they do it with a hammer and chisel. This makes even infant dwarves extremely hardy and ensures that only excellent craftsmen can reproduce. As a side-effect, this limits dwarves to environments where suitable stone can be mined or imported.

Orcs are excellent fighters, but they're too eager to fight. They have been "gifted" by their creator with a metaphysical dependency on violence. Orcs need violence as plants need light and vampires need blood. An orc can stay alive just by being near a bar fight now and then, but to stay strong they need to participate - and in order to stay at full strength, they need to either deal or take significant injuries. The amount of "vitamin V" that orcs get when they fight each other is not enough to allow them to sustain a population over the long-term given the injuries that they will also incur. Orcs are designed for fighting non-orcs, but when they win too much their population collapses becasue there are no non-orcs left to fight.

Halflings are optimized for creating pleasant and peaceful societies. As such, they're far too friendly and diplomatic for their own good. It's a common joke that a halfling army would consist entirely of trained diplomats with nary a weapon in sight, and that's not far from the truth. Halflings survive because they are welcomed in places that other races have rendered secure.

Gnomes are tinkerers and inventors, and seem constitutionally incapable of learning from the mistakes of the past. That's a good thing for adventuring artificers, who need to innovate and often have no past body of work to learn from - but it's a terrible thing when you want to build multistory buildings close to each other. Smart gnomes space themselves out to minimize the damage that an accidental collapse or explosion could cause.

Goblins are immune to most diseases and as a result can get away with horrible hygiene habits and live in places that other races would find intolerable, but when a rare disease that can affect goblins comes along it can be absolutely devastating. Goblin populations can go through boom and bust cycles, with busts being caused by disease and booms occurring after a disease has died out due to having no-one left to infect.

Kobolds are paranoid which makes them masterful tacticians and trapsmiths, but also instinctively distrustful of anyone that they do not personally know. This places an upper limit on the size of a group of kobolds that can live together - it's the number of other kobolds that one kobold can learn to trust. That's usually a few dozen. Exceptional leaders can sometimes convince a larger number of kobolds to trust each other based on shared loyalty - the key is to make sure that "how do I know that guy is really a fellow follower?" has an answer that a paranoid kobold will find satisfying. Kobold eggs will occasionally take many decades to hatch instead of the usual few months and many kobolds hide their eggs. This, combined with the fact that infant kobolds can be somewhat self-sufficient (with a low but still significant survival rate), makes kobolds hard to eliminate even though they are individually easy to kill.

Here, dragons and elves are individually powerful but do not organize into large groups. Dwarves are dependent on a limited resource. Orcs and halflings depend on an abstract resource which only other races can provide. Gnomes and goblins are capable of surviving and establishing large populations, but those populations collapse. Kobolds can survive in small groups but those groups cannot grow beyond a certain size.

Each nonhuman race is excessively excellent at something that would make their race numerous, but the very same traits that enable this also make them fail at something else.

[Kazyan]

It may be worth selecting an answer that ties into the theme of the specific fantasy story being told. There are basic anthropological and ecological reasons you could pick, sure, but how about picking an interesting reason instead?

[Damon_Tor]

It may be worth selecting an answer that ties into the theme of the specific fantasy story being told. There are basic anthropological and ecological reasons you could pick, sure, but how about picking an interesting reason instead?

Anthropology and and ecology are interesting AF though.

[LibraryOgre]

Reminds me a bit of Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey's Halfblood Chronicles. Elves use their powerful magic to enslave humans with magic obedience collars. Turns out they're also suppressor devices for humans' natural psionic potential.

Half-elves, naturally, are considered abominations not just because the idea of an elf breeding with what they view as cattle is repulsive, but also because they have the potential to develop the full abilities of both races.

And can use the one to boost the other. And are often unschooled in traditional elven magic, so can come up with unique solutions with relatively little magic.

[Rynjin]

I'd forgotten they could amplify each other like that. I should make a campaign setting similar to that at some point; one of my regular players likes to play Taninim anyway so working the dragons in is easy too.

It's a shame the series will never be concluded.

[LibraryOgre]

I'd forgotten they could amplify each other like that. I should make a campaign setting similar to that at some point; one of my regular players likes to play Taninim anyway so working the dragons in is easy too.

It's a shame the series will never be concluded.

That and Guardians of the Flame.

[Jervis]

For the forgotten realms at least there’s a finite number of elf souls that get reincarnated, so there’s a limited number of elves that can exist at a time. This can be reasonable extrapolated out to any number of demihumans if magic and souls and creator deities are a thing.

As for my settings I try to include stop gaps that others have to deal with if I want humans to be number one. Elves and Dwarves have too long a life cycle and humans just have kids faster. They also predate the other races besides dragons by quite a bit, humans were actually around before most things and your typical fantasy races showed up after new gods appeared and started changing things.

Long story short the dragon goddess, who wasn’t Tiamat which causes a lot of problems between dragons and this settings version of Tiamat and Bahamut, killed or trapped all the original gods this setting had a very very long time ago. She ruled the world for a few thousand years and erased history, a spelljammer piloted by epic level characters showed up, some other stuff happened and dnd gods basically invaded the setting. The dragon goddess died and got replaced so the new gods started reshaping the place, this elves and dwarves and assorted etc. came to the world.