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

[Gammadoodler]

The other races are written with easy to pluck adventurers embedded deep into their cultures.

Dwarven have warriors, warrior-smiths, warrior-priests, warrior-enigineers, and the like front and center int their society. And greed, honor, and revenge are highly mentioned for easy motivation. So it is easy to explaina mess of highly trained dwarves roaming around killing monsters and exploring traps for money, power, and xp. Same with elves, half elves, orcs,half orcs, dragonborn, tieflings, and even gnomes.

Halflings is one of the few races that goes on at length explaining why they don't adventure. Sure it makes halfling adventurers charming and more heroic. But reasons to not adventure are literally the opposite of reasons to adventure.

Socombine that with #2 before and it feels like designers always attempt to recreate hobbits. However 80% the way through the writing realize that the race they've described doesn't fit the game. So they attempt to walk it back but don'tremove the previous statements.

Which other races have this specifically. It's not that convincing when you only mention 1. Also what are we using as our source? The 5e PHB, all PHBs, some combo of other sources?

And what are the acceptable pre-adventurer professions to make an adventurer? Because here's the thing about your dwarven examples, if you have all those things, it's actually less likely for them to be adventurers because they'd already have adventurer-equivalent jobs. If you have a set of trained warriors and warrior priests, what need do you have for a bunch of mercenary warriors and warrior priests?

Ultimately, to me, the most defining trait of adventurers is that they exist outside of their established cultures. In some ways having more room on the margins also means there is more need for those marginal characters.

 

[Minigiant]

Which other races have this specifically. It's not that convincing when you only mention 1. Also what are we using as our source? The 5e PHB, all PHBs, some combo of other sources?

Most of the PHBs and many of the racial books go deeper other the military, magic, engineering, politics, and relations. Dwarves and elves are littered with racial kits, prestge classes, and paragon paths compared to halflings. Dragonborn and tieflingswere given their own empires and magic items. Gnomes and Orcs even had popular unique racial weapons.

Halflings get "YoU cAn Be A SHeRiFf!"

And what are the acceptable pre-adventurer professions to make an adventurer? Because here's the thing about your dwarven examples, if you have all those things, it's actually less likely for them to be adventurers because they'd already have adventurer-equivalent jobs. If you have a set of trained warriors and warrior priests, what need do you have for a bunch of mercenary warriors and warrior priests?

Ultimately, to me, the most defining trait of adventurers is that they exist outside of their established cultures. In some ways having more room on the margins also means there is more need for those marginal characters.

The point is that the other races have prebuilt ideas in the base core game to build from and branch from whereas every halfling adventurer has to be a "special weirdo" or "have no home to sit around to do noting in anymore because they are banished or their family is dead."

Becauseif you leave a village with no military, no magic, and no tech to protect it, has every need supplied with no oppression, and never gets attacked and has no crime for a super dangerous world outside the village AND go into a death filled, monster saturated dungeon, your halfling is a "special weirdo".

 

[Oofta]

So the complaints seems to be that halflings are farmers that don't always live in major cities? In a world where most humans would also be farmers that don't live in major cities? Because that is one thing that bugs me about a lot of fantasy - what do the people eat? For a pre-industrial society about 70% of the population needs to be farmers.

Which means the majority of most populations is going to live outside the walls. Halflings who live in small communities aren't going make tempting targets because there's not much of value there. If the world is so dangerous that no one can live outside of city walls, no one would survive because everyone would starve to death.

I guess I don't know what people expect. There's not a lot of discussion of military might on any race in the PHB with the possible exception of dwarves.

 

[Gammadoodler]

So the complaints seems to be that halflings are farmers that don't always live in major cities? In a world where most humans would also be farmers that don't live in major cities? Because that is one thing that bugs me about a lot of fantasy - what do the people eat? For a pre-industrial society about 70% of the population needs to be farmers.

Which means the majority of most populations is going to live outside the walls. Halflings who live in small communities aren't going make tempting targets because there's not much of value there. If the world is so dangerous that no one can live outside of city walls, no one would survive because everyone would starve to death.

I guess I don't know what people expect. There's not a lot of discussion of military might on any race in the PHB with the possible exception of dwarves.

Honestly, stuff like this is where some D&D setting assumptions don't really stand up to any kind of inspection. Stuff like plant growth, create food and water, control weather, etc. really break any kind of medieval comparisons..like..hard.

 

[Oofta]

Honestly, stuff like this is where some D&D setting assumptions don't really stand up to any kind of inspection. Stuff like plant growth, create food and water, control weather, etc. really break any kind of medieval comparisons..like..hard.

Even assuming higher crop yields (which is going to vary by campaign) you still have to plant, harvest, weed, animal husbandry is all still time consuming. I think you might be able to cut back on the farmer labor force to, say, 50% of the population. Without tractors, milking machines and other aspects of our industrialized agri-business a significant portion of the populace will still be farming. Even if we just go back to 1900, 40% of the population were farmers (and they had steam powered machines) It didn't really start to drop until the 40s.

So yes, the land will be more productive. That just means bigger harvests which will require more people to harvest.

 

[tetrasodium]

I hear harpers are backed by gods or something but past that yeah something is amiss in world-building.

Even if all of those groups are backed by one or more gods

Honestly, stuff like this is where some D&D setting assumptions don't really stand up to any kind of inspection. Stuff like plant growth, create food and water, control weather, etc. really break any kind of medieval comparisons..like..hard.

The fact that there are settings that don't have people commercializing those things makes no sense from a human nature standpoint. Create food isn't too problmatic simply because people like to enjoy the experience of eating & that takes things like flavors

 

[Minigiant]

So the complaints seems to be that halflings are farmers that don't always live in major cities? In a world where most humans would also be farmers that don't live in major cities? Because that is one thing that bugs me about a lot of fantasy - what do the people eat? For a pre-industrial society about 70% of the population needs to be farmers.

If that is what you got, then you are not paying attention or purposely avoiding it.

The complaint is that halflings are all farmers with no armies, knights, magic, tech, engineering, magic items, major organizations, political power, or wealth and mostly purposely avoid all of these culturally in world littered with monsters, evil humanoids, and dark lords.

Elves could be all farmers because 75%+ of the citizens are trained archers and swordsmen and their culture vomits out wizards, magic knights, duelists, clerics, druids, and rangers.

 

[Charlaquin]

This is such a dumb, simulationist complaint. Even if we accept the premise that halfling culture as-written is averse to adventuring (which for the record I don’t), it doesn’t follow that that makes them poorly integrated into the setting or “written like NPCs”

 

[Oofta]

If that is what you got, then you are not paying attention or purposely avoiding it.

The complaint is that halflings are all farmers with no armies, knights, magic, tech, engineering, magic items, major organizations, political power, or wealth and mostly purposely avoid all of these culturally in world littered with monsters, evil humanoids, and dark lords.

Elves could be all farmers because 75%+ of the citizens are trained archers and swordsmen and their culture vomits out wizards, magic knights, duelists, clerics, druids, and rangers.

In most areas 50-70% of the population would be farmers. Probably 95% or more of humans have no significant weapon training. Halflings have little or nothing other races would value so they are not tempting targets. Raid a human city and you get gold, gems, things of value. Raid a halfling village you get some turnips. They probably don't even make very good slaves. Why raid them?

But again, the book doesn't mention military might for most races. A lot of halfling villages are probably in areas with no strategic value (not close to trade routes or resources) or in existing kingdoms where the other races provide protection. Only some elven sub-race adventurers have weapons training by default, only mountain dwarves are assumed to have weapon training.

Do whatever you want in your campaign, I don't have a problem with them. If the world were so dangerous they couldn't survive, the same would be true for most races.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So it seems there are two strains of argument here that have gotten tangled occasionally.

1. Halflings don't make good (or shouldn't be good) adventurers.
2. Halflings aren't well embedded in "the setting".

I think 1 can only be answered in headcanon. My personal take is that they're fine. #2 depends on frame of reference, what kind of embedding you want, and even whether that is a bad thing if it's true (the problem with firmly embedded races is they're more resistant to tailoring, if a race doesn't have that, it's like giving the DM a wild card.. as well as a chore)

That is fair on point two, it does make it harder to change them. But, also, it kind of forces you to change them as well. Because if you don't, then they feel unmoored.