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

[tetrasodium]

Blah blah Strawman blah. I explicitly said they would deliberately use different routes .

That's an interesting partial quote... You are describing Anne Frank on her way home from the kosher market not the halflings described. The level of paranoia & deliberate attempts at obscurity you are throwing out are the sort of thing you might expect to find from some of the Athas races wiped out by the cleansing wars at the height of those cleansing wars

 

[Vaalingrade]

@Vaalingrade I even spelled Waukeen right.

I don't play FR, so how was I supposed to know? The closest I know is Hakeem from the Spellwright series.

Also, reading this it sounds like she'd also be all about halflings. Non scumbag free traders? Considering the conceit now being pushed is that every other race is going to try to steal the halfling lands through force? Looks like another divine being on-side for Team Halfling.

She was great in Joker, too.

The halfling solution to orcish raiders then should be to pay them off as mercs to kill the billions or predators swarming the land and bring them back to the shire for processing and shipping off to a grateful world.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Oh? On what page number does it say that?

Statistics class.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Statistics class.

That is not a number.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Orcs are. They got super violence charged by their gods. Pretty sure gnolls have or had something related to their gods in their background. Gnomes were given their magical abilities by their gods and taught by them how to hide their villages.

Other races get help from their gods. Just in different ways.

Not what I said. I said "no other race is protected by their gods to this degree."

The orcs gods don't reach down and changes roads and grow thickets and waft away smoke for their people. They gave them a genetic calling, perhaps, but they are not nearly that active.

The Gnomes might have been given their illusion magic by their gods, but the gods don't come down and weave the illusions themselves, they gave their people a tool to use.

The Halfling Gods and Goddesses (according to your reading) are actively and constantly manipulating every aspect of the world to make sure that halflings are safe. Something no other god does.

Lore doesn't have to cover every common thing about a race. Do you really want a book of lore the size of War and Peace? A small, stealthy race would hide from an overwhelming force. This is just common sense and doesn't need to be in the lore. It's absence is not "poor lore writing."

We are told they are brave and will fight for their homes. You can say "but it is common sense that if the fight can't be won, they would run away and not die." But nothing tells us that, even being "stealthy" doesn't tell us that, since stealth can be used offensively.

You can keep "adding common sense" all you want, but that is what I did too. And I was told that when my conclusion came to "this doesn't work" that I was wrong, that the book held all the answers.

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't play FR, so how was I supposed to know? The closest I know is Hakeem from the Spellwright series.

Also, reading this it sounds like she'd also be all about halflings. Non scumbag free traders? Considering the conceit now being pushed is that every other race is going to try to steal the halfling lands through force? Looks like another divine being on-side for Team Halfling.

She was great in Joker, too.

The halfling solution to orcish raiders then should be to pay them off as mercs to kill the billions or predators swarming the land and bring them back to the shire for processing and shipping off to a grateful world.

I don't either & had to use google both times. If Halflings other than FR style were presented in the phb, eberron style, or darksun style for example this thread would have ended tens of pages ago just by pointing at the other halflings & saying having commoner halflings with an idyllic life too is fine... but all we have is FR style halflings

That is not a number.

That's how probability works. There are terms for it when the results of one datapoint do & do not influence the next (a coinflip vrs a wheel rolling downhill for example) but it's been a long time
edit: on your other post questioning why a god of wealth & trade would be interested in some enterprising merchants setting up trade routes that involve roads similar to what the romans did... that goes back to the whole about how roads work & form.

 

[Chaosmancer]

There are always more or there is no border and everyone is dead.

uh huh.

So a suicide run for a bit more gold is a good thing? And the vast majority of monster types don't take slaves. They just kill and/or eat people. They wouldn't go past the border for that.

"Vast majority" isn't all. Some of them would. Some of them wouldn't see the assault as a suicide run. Some wouldn't care.

All of them could make there way far enough to attack a halfling village only three days from the border.

Yes. I demand that things make sense in my game. It appears you don't, though.

Seems to me you care more about being right, because even as I give ever more specific examples of what could happen, you want to keep insisting that it couldn't happen. Or you ignore it, like you ignored the idea that the gods of the raiders might have guided them. Kind of funny how the Halfling gods can be so active, but the gods of the other races couldn't lead them on a route that is a few days into civilized lands without it being suicide.

You'd find individual Halflings living in the border towns.

Individual halflings make up entire villages called shires? Dang, that changes everything.

Because, talking about individual halflings when I was talking about halfling communities is... kind of beside the point.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yes, and the counter is that "The lore is written well enough for its goals." Sure, there's holes. For some people, plot holes ruin movies, and some people don't care. Same thing here.

Sure, some people don't care.

Some of us do care. And it is frustrating to care and then be told "but there aren't any problems, you are just making it up."

 

[Oofta]

Sure, some people don't care.

Some of us do care. And it is frustrating to care and then be told "but there aren't any problems, you are just making it up."

The problem is that you and @tetrasodium posit a world where no one would survive. If all halflings everywhere are going to be wiped out by roving bands that roam the countryside deep inside settled lands, there's no reason most human farm villages (not to mention individual farmsteads) would not also be obliterated. There's no reason to believe that halflings are inherently any worse at defending themselves or escaping harm than humans.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Which is patiently untrue in basleine DnD, so they started inventing this fantastical murder world where even 40K's Chaos demons are like 'dude, chill'.

I love how I invented the world, when I literally got a map and marked it. And used historical raiding patterns to say "those populations attacking once every 20 to 50 years is highly unrealisitic"

But nope, I totally invented everything. All me, and I have the royalty checks to prove it'