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.