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In most fantasy works with multiple species, we tend to have racial niches. Traditionally in fantasy, we have Elves, Dwarves, Orcs and humans as the primary races, with elves often divided into high, dark and wood varieties, but we often have many other variations. This is similarly true in sci-fi worlds, but it's easier to focus on fantasy for the sake of their conversation because 1. that's what I'm thinking about now, and 2. there's more traditional races there thanks to Tolkein's taking over of the genre.

In fantasy realms, elves are often the magical, long-lived, intelligent species, with high elves being more moral and full of themselves, dark elves being sadistic and wood elves being hippy fucks. Orcs are dim-witted, strong, tribalistic warriors. Dwarves are honorable, mining, bearded blacksmiths. The races are always clearly defined in certain roles, and while they might have subversions or characters breaking out of these roles, the races still have generalized characteristics. 

However, humans for the most part don't have any traits. They tend to be the everyman, the jack of all trades or something equally boring. They're pretty much the blandest of all races, despite the fact they're usually the most populous because despite being outpaced by every other species, tend to be the most successful.

So, I was looking for your guys ideas on traits that would be unique to humans, or at least areas in which humans would be advantageous, like elves' magic or dwarves' blacksmithing, or anything, really. Sometimes they get bullshit ones like "the best leaders" or "the most heroic" or bland, generic goodness. But fuck that, never mind. I think it'd be really cool to try break the mold of humans being so bland, so I'd love any ideas you have.

Here's two I was thinking of, to get the ball rolling or to more likely be the only suggestions in this thread when no one responds...

-Humans as breeders: Normally in fantasy, humans have relatively short lifespans compared to other creatures. Humans are also less stern and shrouded in honor than dwarves and elves, and possibly orcs, depending on whether they're the savage warriors or the honorable tribal warriors. Either way, humans having short lives and just fucking way more like rabbits would suit them as a trait, would explain why there's so many of them in most fantasy works, and would give them an edge in battle, namely throwing men.

-Humans as dominators of animals: With elves being magical, orcs traditional warriors, dwarves the tech edge, calvary in terms of war often gets left out as a racialized thing. I can't think of any examples of traditional fantasy races from ogres to lizardmen to kobolds to whatever else. Thus, it seems like a reasonable spot for humans to have. Humans as masters of animals. The more monstrous races are too violent to tame creatures while the higher races would think of themselves as above dealing with beasts, humans could be masters of animals, with the power to bind them to their will. This could extend to other animals, with humans mastering the use of war dogs, other beasts of battle and any animals. The other races could have tame animals like other races have magics, but it'd be man's specialty.

Annyhow, those are my ideas, let's hear yours. This is primarily geared towards fantasy, but ideas for unique traits for humans in sci-fi would also be very interesting. Technically, humans could have ANY unique trait, but I'm looking for ones that would more easily fit with the generic fantasy world that's usually dealt with.

Humans being breeders is sort of always touched upon whenever they’re compared to elves or dwarves. Usually it’s mentioned how they just breed faster than both races which is why they’re always eventually outpacing said races. The only time it isn’t is when you’ve got “greenskin” races like goblins who seem to breed even faster or at least just as much as humans.

Animal domination tends to fall to the elves or at least the wood/forest focused ones due to all the “one with nature” stuff. Though I suppose it could be a case that humans are willing to go that extra mile to tame animals by doing shit like gathering griffin eggs and taming them to be mounts as soon as they hatch whereas an elf might see that as an offense to nature.

One major human trait that usually pops up when compared to other races would be adaptability. You tend to find humans making their homes all over the fucking place. Combined with their breeding, its why they tend to dominate whatever fantasy world they’re in.

Humans usually also get saddled with traits like willing to take more risks, more willing to embrace new ideas/tech or just generally being more curious/exploration driven than other races.

That's a fair point with breeders, whilst I knew elves and dwarves not fucking was a thing, and orcs wasn't the biggest, goblins and things with even shorter lives like kobolds or whatever the fuck did tend to have even more fucking, so humans don't really have it as a specialty. 

The difference I was thinking between the more nature elves like wood elves and humans in working with animals would be the nature element. Elves would have a specialty in dealing with nature, and that would give them an advantage with animals. They could call upon the help of a noble eagle, sure, or have a friendship-style bond of mutual respect with animals. However, how humans would triumph this is not in having the animals like them more, but better dominating their will. The humans would force these animals into more of a master-slave relationship, and go the extra mile. Unlike the elves who'd find it evil to permanently force animals into lives of servitude with no freedom, humans wouldn't give a shit. They' not only tame and break horses, but they'd breed them for certain traits and get subspecies in an act elves would find to be like rape. The same would be of dogs, who only humans would specialize in for having breeded them and created an absolute servant race, unlike elves who could just call some friendly wolves that are still untrained, wild animals.

Adaptability is boring though, boo, that's just jack of all trades averageness meaning they're not as specialized as other races and can be more adaptable through generality. 

1. JESUS! Or, to be more precise, they have the favor of God and/or the gods of their world (if they're real in the fantasy setting). Either the deity is racist and favors humans, humans just have more Jesus freaks, or whatever.

2. Survivability in other climates. Dwarves live in caves. Elves live in tress of fancy as Hell cities. Orcs run around and pillage. Humans can live in deserts, tundras, swamps, or just about anything (because we have and thrived). Maybe the humans are up and kicking just because elves don't feel like freezing their asses off trying to hunt down some fantasy Eskimo-Vikings.

3. Boats. Again, the other species aren't commonly associated with seafaring. If humanity has a monopoly on the seas, then they'd have fishing, trading, and quick traveling down pretty well. That's a nice edge.

Ooh, the favor of the gods is an interesting one. Humans do tend to be the most religious of the races in most settings, or at least close. Having the favor of the gods would be interesting.

Survivability is boring, it's just an extension of humans are bland. Elves are there people, dwarves are underground, humans are middle-ground and bland, they can just go anywhere. Boo, boo, Wibbons.

Boats is a very cool one I hadn't thought of. I can't actually think of much fantasy with regard to naval activities, but it does seem like an area humans would excel at. Well, now I'm going to look in fantasy navies for the next few hours, cheers, Wibbons.

For my stories, I generally plan to have humans compensate for their normality with industry and manufacturing the best weapons and defenses.  So for example, the orcs in my story are strong and tough, and do not use any other armor than some padded leather.  The orcs at this point in time, do not use the large stereotypical large weapons such as huge double bladed axes and large hammers.  They just use swords and axes at a size that anyone could use it, and make up for it with raw strength to a certain point.  But also armor isn't really a huge thing at this point so there is no need for huge weapons.

The humans create slightly heavier and sturdy weapons to get through the padded "armors" of the orcs and elves.  They create chainmail armor and metal helmets so they can protect themselves better.  This leads the orcs to adopt chainmail as they want to have equal or better armor than the humans.  They also develop heavier and stronger weapons to pierce or break the humans armor.  This goes on in a number of stages throughout the years, until you get orcs with much larger muscles from using heavy plated armor and huge weapons, leading to your stereotypical orcs.

(Only the orcs intelligence varies by individuals, so there are complete dumb asses and then orcs with average intelligence).

The elves have magic, which the humans suck at for the most part.  To make up for this, the humans develop better bows (and eventually crossbows) to match the distance of the elves magic bolts.  As picking off fighters in their enemies ranks takes too long, the humans come up with another solution.  Large metal machines, with track tires, and the set up for the future designs for cannons mounted on top (think like a medieval fantasy tank).  Only instead it uses a magically charged crystal to fire large magic bolts at their foes.  They eventually will make the same with magic rods that also use crytals (an early form of a fantasy musket).  So now they pretty much have the orcs matched and bested with armor and weapons.  As well as the elves with their own magical devices to make up for their short comings.

Then after years, as some shit goes down and magic slowly wanes from the land.  The magic crystals become useless, so the humans have to ditch their magic rifles, cannons, and tanks.  Using the same idea, they just start using metal balls and explosives to crush their foes.  This leads to all the races adopting these weapons to fight against the humans.  Although by now it is too late and the elves are already pretty much fully annexed into the Mannate Empire.

As for the orcs, the decades of battle with the humans have split them up, and now they mostly roam the lands as raiders and mercenaries.  Going from the unified orc tribes to just....well probably what would seem like stereotypical orcs.

 

Enough about me.  I like your ideas for the humans as using and breeding and animal taming to suit their needs.  The animal taming is interesting as it shows that the humans are somewhere in the middle (between brutes and snobs).

 

 

Interesting. Does your setting have dwarves? Because with the technological advantage, great blacksmithing and lack of serious magic, we do seem a lot like dwarves. Interesting though, good luck with the story.

Thanks man!

Yeah my story has dwarves, so far they are the least involved race in the events of the story.  I was thinking they either could have invented the magical siege tanks and shared it with their human allies, or that the humans made the designs but hired out the dwarves for their technical knowledge and expertise.  I haven't quite decided on it yet.

My original idea was more of the second, but more if in the sense that dwarves had long been annexed (and now have gained enough independence to govern themselves while still remaining loyal to the Empire).  And that the humans have them operate the siege tanks due to their smaller size, and the fact that the machines would naturally be smaller and would need a smaller race to operate it.  

But my idea was to make them similar to the dwarves when it comes to technology and sucking at magic, only the humans learn how to make the tanks and such themselves, so when it becomes time to make the magic guns, and eventually cannons and real guns, they do it without the dwarves help.

It's still an aspect that needs some work for my world building.

I question the whole idea of dwarves as hardy mountain folk. They're pasty cave dwellers. They'd look more like Gollum than anything.

Similar feelings about the dark skinned elves living underground.

It seems like that would be most likely.  Unless instead of living in caves they just live on the mountains themselves.  Or they could have some that live in caves or others that don't.  I guess they could always use their ingenuity to try to make large skylights in their caves in anything, if they could do it without killing themselves.  

I would imagine that the dark skinned elves living underground could be possible, depending on how long they've been there.  A couple generations wouldn't make a difference, but after multiple they would start to become pale and maybe even blind.  Same thing for the dwarves I suppose.  I think it can really just be explained away as being how recently or not they moved into living in the caves.  

For example, the goblins in my story used to live in the mountains and caves before the dwarves came through and kicked them out.  The goblins were not pale or blind, because they only spent 2-3 generations in there, and spent plenty of time outside regardless.  Before that they had actually lived in the swamplands in the orc territory, before moving out for some plot reasons. 

So it all depends on the history and lore of the races that the author spins up.  

Edit: Also going back to elves living underground, there is the fact that elves live unnaturally long lives, so evolution and adaptions would take many times longer for them than other species.

I think goblins just tend to live anywhere they can find that no one else wants.

When I was running a tabletop game in high school, I had my goblins form settlements in the desert.

Adaptability, curiosity, inventiveness, and a drive to do things that common sense would say is unnecessary or impossible are some of the big ones that made us stand out even on this planet full of other species faster and stronger than us, a fantasy world isn't necessarily going to be any different.

Or maybe do away with the usual focus on some races being inherently better or worse at things altogether and have it come down to individuals. Nothing saying a dwarf can't be the best wizard ever or that an elf can't be a blacksmith, or that a human can't be either, the only obstacles would be cultural ones and availability of knowledge.

That said, humans having shorter lifespans probably would make them more likely to be willing to take risks or want to have a bunch of kids than the other races.

Interesting. Is there something that would separate short-lived humans having these things due to their short lives but shorter-lived species not having it? Perhaps humans would be the first of these species to have hit some technological milestone and they've rapidly expanded onto the scene?

That idea's been played with in other works in cool ways, but always sci-fi. In Mass Effect humans advance super fast and terrify the other species, and when being told they can't build more than three destroyers, build an entirely new class of spacecraft carrier that shocks everyone else (or vice versa, maybe). In X-Com, humans are pretty sick at this too, stealing enemy tech mid-invasion and improving it to the point within a few months they're beating back the invaders.  

I'd see that as tying into adaptability though, which you think is boring.

But then I've always seen the jack of all trades approach as the most realistic. Individual humans in a fantasy setting can fail or excel just like any individual in any other story, but as a race adaptability is kind of our thing and we KNOW how we've succeeded with that on our world.

If anything it's the other races that get the short stick in traditional fantasy settings, they're always, 'humans, but with pointy ears and magic' or 'humans, but short and good at blacksmithing' or else directly ripping off the stereotypes of a specific human culture. It's the planet of hats trope or whatever; we get all the cultures, that just get one and maybe at best get to be defined by rebelling against it (to be more like humans).

Oh and the human 'drive' I think mostly just comes from being contrary and never content with the status quo, whether it's good or bad we want to change shit and shake things up.

Eh, I don't think it's inherently boring, but it's what's always done. Humans are adaptable because we're generic, we can do everything but we're not the best at anything. We're just the jack of all trades, and that's approachable.

We don't REALLY know whether we've succeed at adaptability at all, though. We have nothing to compare us to. Sure, compared to other species we could be incredibly slow at advancing. There's no reason humans couldn't be by far the least adaptable of all species, taking ten thousand years to do something as simple as develop flight from our first civilization. 

But dwarves and elves live for hundreds or thousands of years. There's none of the loss of knowledge or upheaval of culture that comes with it all having to completely change hands every half century or so, and they don't spend a large portion of their lives getting yanked around by hormones and then struggling to raise a family only to get old and die right after. What do they have to do with their time but figure out ways to improve their lives? And yet they're still riding horses and hitting each other with sharp things and using torches as a light source. It's pretty clear they don't really think outside the box much.

The idea usually looked at is that humans, as having short-lives means that humans have more of a drive to work harder and do something before they die, while a Dwarf would think he could get around to it in a decade or so with plenty of time. The constant reforming due to new generations means that science will constantly be improving, while dwarvish and elvish science quickly becomes seeped in tradition and dogmatism. These races are usually portrayed as slow to change, like old men who think the ways of the past is best and this new "Magic-Bazooka-Plane" is just a passing fad, while humans jump on that shit immediately.

Optionality is the best approach to chaos.

That, and the Metaman: an emergent property that arises from billions of humans exchanging information with one another [contemporaneously or through writing] -- analogous to the mind emerging from billions of neurons communicating with one another. Dwarves and shit (i.e. other species) kinda suck at generating that emergent property; they have too restricted a range of interests (and, therefore, information sharing) and/or they are too few in number.

How are billions of humans going to be sharing information with other?

Do billions of humans even exist? It seems unlikely.

By the middle ages (c1000, the approximate technology level of most fantasy settings) it is estimated that 200 million humans were alive at any one time and that 46 billion humans had ever been born. Information sharing is via verbal, cultural, and technological transmission initially (i.e. ways that past humans communicate information to present humans), but gets a huge increase in fidelity and volume once writing is introduced.  This seems to be the outstanding feature distinguishing us from the animals (i.e. our ability to stand on the shoulders of our predecessors by developing, exchanging and preserving information). Usually, trolls and orcs and such don't seem to be as interested in investigating and exchanging such a broad range of topics as humans do. Ditto for Elves and Dwarves who, though usually considered more ancient than us, are also only roughly at a middle-age level of technology and seem more set in their ways/less interested in exploring and sharing new ideas. 

It is an interesting coincidence that it takes 100 billion neurons to give rise to a mind, and that approximately 100 billion humans have ever existed (giving rise to the current level of "human culture"/the "meta-man") 

One solution might just be to have a fantasy world where the only sentient race is Humanity. Most Sword and Sorcery mostly limits stories to humans (and occasionally demons, gods, and sometimes even space aliens-- think "Tower of the Elephant" by Robert E. Howard). Game of Thrones has mostly been about humans, even with the presence of White Walkers, giants, and some fairies. Anyway, I sometimes think High Fantasy overplays fairy races from Norse and Teutonic Mythology. Of course, Tolkien got on C.S. Lewis's case for populating Narnia with both Centaurs AND Dwarves...disregarding the fact that all these races are just made-up, anyway. The best thing to do with humans is to have different cultures and then unique individuals from all those cultures.

But...but then there can't be elves. :(

Even though I do dislike the way they've been watered down so much through generations of people ripping off Tolkien. The only setting I have left that treats them like just another D&D race casually mingling with humans is a result of them being sort of grandfathered in since it's a reboot of something I came up with in junior high.

Elder Scrolls lore has the right idea of making other species properly weird and alien (although the games mostly ignore this) and I try to do something similar, or at least do my ripping off directly from Tolkien rather than rip offs of Tolkien twice removed. I like non-humans in general to be something special and unsettling and perhaps dangerous to encounter, just like magic itself should be.

Although in a short story, use of the typical fantasy races (or sci-fi aliens that strangely resemble them...) can be a convenient way to imply a set of personality traits that readers will instantly pick up on. And sometimes you just want to write something that deliberately invokes a classic fantasy adventure feel, so even the most clichéd of the clichéd still have their place.

Well I know it ties in with breeding, but there always seems to be a lot of half human - half whatever roaming about in fantasy settings. Someone is either half elf, half dwarf, half orc, half ogre, half giant, half demon, etc and the other half is always human.

I guess fucking other races and diluting their bloodlines is another human strategy of world domination.

Yeah I deliberately kept half whatevers out of even my junior high school setting because even back then I realized how stupid stuff like Star Trek was about that, they are entirely different species.

I wish I could remember the name of it, but I've seen a fantasy web comic before where some characters in a bar are going on about what sluts humans are, listing all the different varieties of halfbreeds. The punchline of course was, 'Centaurs'.

Or you can always do what L. Frank Baum did in his Oz books and make up your own fairy races. He actually invented quite a few: Munchkins, Quadlings, Winkies, Hammerheads, Wheelers, Loons... It should be noted that in different cultures around the world, they always seem to have their own distinct fairy races. Russians had a ton of different fairy species.

How about the most adaptable? Elves tend to shun technology, and dwarves tend to not be the best at magic, so maybe humans are the only ones who can combine magic and technology?

I'm pretty sure that the bit about humans being adaptable has already been covered in this thread. However, I do not believe that humans  being the only race crazy to come up with magi-tech has not been touched on.

That still kind of falls into the "humans are average" idea. Dwarves are the tech guys, elves are the magic guys, humans are average, so we have both. I'm looking for more areas where humans would specialize rather than being a "We can do everything, but not be the best at anything".

Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhm...

*Contemplates options*

Maybe humans are the best at something comically small? Like they can stay the longest underwater, or are the most lucky?

It's been four days, but I guess we're still doing this. Anyway, in the DnD game I'm now running somehow, I gave them a few small weird things, like being the best chefs, having ironically small appetites and making the best clothes through their extravagant use of dyes.

Humans could have a special type of magic.

Like binding themselves to objects, spirits, or other people. Whatever that means.