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

[Bohandas]

I don't think there's a limit on how many threads you can have open

 

[Mind of tempest]

I don't think there's a limit on how many threads you can have open

I know that but at this point, people are just achieving nothing so unless someone breaks the argument is now eternal.
thus I want to end it so something new can be born

 

[Charlaquin]

I know that but at this point, people are just achieving nothing so unless someone breaks the argument is now eternal.

Welcome to ENWorld

thus I want to end it so something new can be born

This conversation is going to keep going until everyone is too bored or frustrated to continue, or until people start attacking each other and it gets locked. If you want to start a new discussion, start it now and let this one fizzle out on its own time. Heck, doing so would probably help accelerate this thread’s death, by giving the people in it something more interesting to spend their energy on.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I know that but at this point, people are just achieving nothing so unless someone breaks the argument is now eternal.
thus I want to end it so something new can be born

Sure, it's all opinion, there won't be any conclusion, you wouldn't expect there to be. It ends when people get bored with it.

Start a new thread, if people find it interesting they will discuss that. But one thing to be sure of - it won't reach a conclusion.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That would be the post-Sharkey Shire. Pre-War of the Rings Shire mostly gets by on obscurity and the fact that a wizard is very fond of it.

Both are accurate depictions of the race, of course -- the hobbits could have taken care of themselves all along, whether or not they knew it.

Shire hobbits have always been able to defend themselves:

Battle of Greenfields: In Third Age 2747, a band of Goblins from Mount Gram led by their King Golfimbul invaded the Shire. The hobbits were prepared and met them with a force led by Bandobras Took in the Northfarthing.

Any anecdotes about the invention of golf are likely apocryphal...

 

[Chaosmancer]

If it’s the one with David Bowie in the revealing tights, then yes

Yeah, such goblins aren’t for everyone.

Yeah, David Bowie is amazing

 

[Chaosmancer]

Nawp! Still didn't say that they were safe because adventurers. They're mostly safe because not able to be found and being able to easily hide when they are found. The adventurers just make it likely that if need be, they can beat back the raid.

Nawp! No amount of defenses will make them safe. There's always risk in a fight. They fight when necessary, but prefer to run and hide. If they're found, something has gone very wrong. If they have to stand and fight, something else has gone very wrong. But at least they have adventurers with weapons if they do.

1) I've covered how insane this idea of them being hard to find is. Large Farmlands and Orchards are not so easily hidden. I know the books claim they are, because Luck, but Luck doesn't apply to everything. "Walk towards the smoke" doesn't require luckily finding the tiny path that no wagon can fit on in the underbrush.

2) If we are going by the books... the books never say anything about them running and hiding away. In fact, it says quite a few times they will "fiercely defend their homes". IF they did often run, that could work, but nothing indicates that is the case.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Well there ya go. Each hex on that scale is 10 miles across, easily enough room for a moderate population of a halfling town. Just pick one and you have somewhere not known for having monsters.

Did you actually count the hexes? I did.

The biggest areas with no red nearby, the center of those is between 40 and 60 miles away from the red. Meaning they are 2 or 3 days travel. Remember when I mentioned the vikings had to travel multiple weeks by boat, across a sea? A raiding party or wandering monster walking two days through a fertile valley isn't exactly hard.

Sure, those few places would be have the least number of monster attacks, but the point was to show how difficult it was to find areas that had such a large inner lands that would not house monsters.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Luck doesn't apply to everything.

This is a philosophical position. And sure, in real life there is no such thing as luck, just random chance. But if luck is an actual thing, that you can have more of or less of, then yes, it does apply to everything. I already mentioned the Ringworld books, where luck is definitely a thing, and aliens created a birth lottery in order to bread the luckiest humans possible, ending up with someone who is almost invincible. Try to shoot them and your weapon jams. Try to punch them and you slip on a banana skin and fall.

It's worth noting that some RPGs have a Luck stat. Kirk had a super-high one in FASA Star Trek RPG.

Back when I was playing the Golden Heroes RPG in the 1980s one of the PCs had Unconscious Probability Manipulation, which was almost certainly the strongest superpower in the game.

 

[tetrasodium]

Maybe. Perhaps we can get the same area mapped with the population centers marked with a dot and the hexes colored to indicate their general terrain type.

That implies a level of planning & cohesion not present in FR. Pretty much all of it is going to be default generic human monoculture with a few exceptions for things like silvermoon & other one off cities that some adventure needed a place populated by a nonhuman monoculture that's basically identical to every other town/city that race had their nonhuman monoculture tossed onto the map.