D&D General why do we have halflings and gnomes?

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Gnomes are basically elves that are actually interested in the world around them.

(Seriously, when you think of a normal day in the life of an elf, what do you imagine them doing beyond staring moodily into the middle distance? Or humming gently while staring wistfully into the middle distance?)

I've always seen elves and gnomes as a sort of opposites in their mood/opinion of the world.

Elves don't like the world, as they were all exiled there as a punishment. They see themselves as superior to other races because they literally originate from their Heaven, and basically stuck in Purgatory until Papa Corellon decides to forgive them. Basically, they're entitled because they were spoiled and see the world as trash.

Gnomes love the world, because they were originally slaves to other races (Fomorians, Kobolds/Dragons, etc). They see the world as a vast and amazing place in need of exploring because they were enslaved. Their lives used to be awful and restrictive, but ever since they got free they loved learning more about the world they worked so hard to escape to. They're the literal ideological opposites of the elves. They don't want to go back to where they came from, because they had nothing then. They're just super grateful for being in the world, making them positive and happy all of the time.

Gnomes are great. They're my favorite "fleshy humanoid" race in all of D&D. Everyone should want to be a gnome, not just in D&D, but also in real life.

 

[Blue]

My point is that halflings is the one of the 2 races in D&D that lorewise in 3 out of 5 editions has a culture of "we stay at home because it's nice and safe".

We are well aware of your point, you have done a good job communicating it. However, you seem to keep ignoring the fact that every single adventurer is an unusual individual. We have repeatedly rejected your Planet of Hats theory. Look at any real-world culture, and you will find plenty of people of that culture that defy the expectations of it. Your attempts to tar them all with the same brush doesn't hold water. Adventurers are such a small perentage of any population, and they dont' follwo the mainstream mores. At the best you could be calling out that it's a smaller percentage of halflings. But that logic has that smaller populations, like half-elves, should be equally off the list as adventurers as there's fewer absolute number of them.

Basically, we understand your point, but do not feel it compelling. It attempts to define a monoculture without individualism and use that to "disprove" halfling adventurers. That logic does not hold up.

 

[Minigiant]

We are well aware of your point, you have done a good job communicating it. However, you seem to keep ignoring the fact that every single adventurer is an unusual individual. We have repeatedly rejected your Planet of Hats theory. Look at any real-world culture, and you will find plenty of people of that culture that defy the expectations of it. Your attempts to tar them all with the same brush doesn't hold water. Adventurers are such a small perentage of any population, and they dont' follwo the mainstream mores. At the best you could be calling out that it's a smaller percentage of halflings. But that logic has that smaller populations, like half-elves, should be equally off the list as adventurers as there's fewer absolute number of them.

Basically, we understand your point, but do not feel it compelling. It attempts to define a monoculture without individualism and use that to "disprove" halfling adventurers. That logic does not hold up.

You are fundamentaly misunderstanding my point.

I am not saying that a halfling cannot have their own individuality.

I am saying that a halfling has to mostly abandon the priorities and ideals of their racial culture in order to be an adventurer. A halfling has to sacrifice a great deal their halflingness to adventure. This is because the race mostly converges to a few simplistic archetypes and the race is known for its lack of ambition, vainglory, showiness, and industriousness.

Not a bad race but it is written like NPCs. So a PC halfling has to be a weirdo or tragedy to justify itself

 

[Mind of tempest]

I saw some people mistaken great nation for empire I most likely need to clear up my language.

I meant a nation with real presence that they had a history, that they are not just forgotten folk, the guy with the book who looks like ming the merciless says the have tales of folk heroes but gave no example that I can remember the little folk come of as blandly cute and good I want something with complexity to it not bland to have at least a scaffolding to build from rather than the dry river bed of idea which does not involve just adding dinosaurs to them as if I add dinosaurs to a setting every one gets some.

 

[Blue]

Ah, so we're not talking percentages so much as Venn diagrams, then.

Johnathan

I think it was also an homage to the old project management joke: The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, the remaining 10% of the work takes the remaining 90% of the time.

 

[Michael Linke]

I think it was also an homage to the old project management joke: The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, the remaining 10% of the work takes the remaining 90% of the time.

It's not much of a joke. The pareto distribution, and pareto analysis is a thing I do pretty often at work.

 

[Marc_C]

Simply because some people have fun playing them.

One of my favourite AD&D character was a gnome thief-illusionist. Makes me want to resurrect him in my current campaign.

 

[Blue]

You are fundamentaly misunderstanding my point.

I am not saying that a halfling cannot have their own individuality.

I am saying that a halfling has to mostly abandon the priorities and ideals of their racial culture in order to be an adventurer. A halfling has to sacrifice a great deal their halflingness to adventure. This is because the race mostly converges to a few simplistic archetypes and the race is known for its lack of ambition, vainglory, showiness, and industriousness.

Not a bad race but it is written like NPCs. So a PC halfling has to be a weirdo or tragedy to justify itself

You are the one fundamentally wrong. You are taking part of the description from the PHB but then actively denying another part from the same source that explicitly calls out that they adventure and gives reasons within their culture and make-up why they do so.

So, either the PHB is right - and Halflings adventure, or the PHB is irrelevant - and Halflings adventure. I'd say take your pick, except your pick seems to try to cherry pick parts of the PHB that supports your point and deny the rest - and that is an non-factual argument I won't continue to entertain.

 

[Blue]

It's not much of a joke. The pareto distribution, and pareto analysis is a thing I do pretty often at work.

In the phrasing of the 90% + 90% it is meant as a joke. Jokes are usually based on real things, that's why they resonate.

Pareto is slightly different - it is that 20% causes 80%, without the trailing "and the other 80% also causes 80%" of the joke. I deal with that often in enterprise disk skew, where 20% of our data is 80% of our I/O - what is hot and what isn't definitely tiers, and how to build back-end storage to deal with that in a cost effective manner. While the 90%+90% I deal with mostly in project planning.

 

[Haffrung]

I don’t know if it has been mentioned yet, but the English version of the Gnomes coffee table book was released in 1977 and became a big best-seller. It wouldn’t surprise me if that played into the inclusion of gnomes as a playable race in AD&D. Gygax was throwing all sorts of stuff from the popular zeitgeist into D&D.