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

[Chaosmancer]

So here's how I handle my halflings:

There are three types: the wanderers who roll around in wagons, the homesteaders, who are the typical rural folk halflings, and then the city halflings. No one else considers them different types, but each of the three groups thinks it's unfortunate that their cousins chose poorly.

Keep in mind that mine is a genuine Death World not just full of predators and bandits, but elemental leakage, magic pollution, and the chance any random organic being (including grandma and her little dog) might digi-volve to ultimate thanks to the afterlife being broken by dumbass dragons and become a living engine of confused magical destructions.

The wagoneers deal with it thusly:
1) back in the day the original halflings were humans transformed by the god of revelry, luck and adventure into tiny badasses to show off to his brother. He traveled with them for decades as a halfling himself and occasionally hurls himself and his wife into the world to find and fall in love with one another again as halflings. The world knows that is always a non-zero chance that messing with a halfling means messing with the god of luck and making you look stupid before you die. At this point even animals kind of understand this.

2) failing that, they were wolf-riders with kusari-gami and spears backed by honest to god snipers and at least a couple of clerics. Sadness is the best outcome for those messing with them. In the book series, they also hire mercenaries to reduce their own casualty risk.

The homesteaders do what everyone else does: build a wall, raise every kid to at least know the murder end of a pitchfork and then if trouble's a'comin', send someone out to bring samurai... I mean adventurers... before the stalks of rice bend. Because this is a Death World and not an ongoing apocalypse, this works well enough. Sometimes the monsters win and they have to scatter.

The city folk are city folk and are safe from the Death World. They sleep at night comfortable in the knowledge that they won't be eaten by the ogre that just punched down their door. Because they have his boss's money or at least he know's their good for it.

See and this is all great. You had to consider how to deal with the monsters that were in the world, how do they defend themselves.

Why is that a wrong thing to consider? Why is it wrong to look at the lore we are given and say "Luck, sticks and rocks wouldn't be enough to survive the typical DnD world"?

 

[tetrasodium]

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.

I'm talking about things like trade & roads. That's being dismissed as unreasonable to make halflings into some super paranoid group of persecuted refugees being hunted by the people who drove them from their last home in order to dismiss other problems as unreasonable

 

[Maxperson]

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

No paranoia at all. The lore says that their settlement have paths, not roads, that are hard to find. And they are in out of the way places. Combine those two and you have Halflings that are not going to be treading large, clear paths to home. They are going to avoid that.

 

[Chaosmancer]

No. Not really. The Halflings can journey overland to the road if they want, carrying the goods on pack animals. There is no requirement whatsoever for the roads to go to the Halfling villages.

Cool, but there is no "said road" to follow. Halflings as written simply don't work like that. They live in out of the way places with trails that are hard to locate, even by Rangers.

If they aren't using wagons, they really are not engaging in meaningful trade. You can't carry enough goods for that to be worthwhile without a lot of people.

It is sort of why one of the biggest inventions of history is the wheel.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

None of that is relevant. Your argument is basically that Paladins don't make sense, because no other class can smite to the same degree. So what. All classes get things that they can do that others can't. Same with the races and their gods. It doesn't matter if no other race is protected cough gnomes cough to the same degree. What matters is that lots of races get gifts from their gods.

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.

We don't need them to tell us simple and obvious truths. At least we should not need it.

 

[tetrasodium]

No paranoia at all. The lore says that their settlement have paths, not roads, that are hard to find. And they are in out of the way places. Combine those two and you have Halflings that are not going to be treading large, clear paths to home. They are going to avoid that.

If they are engaging in trade to any meaningful degree those "paths" are more are better established than a deer path & following a deer path isn't all that difficult or people wouldn't follow those rather than clearing a new path. It strains credibility to suggest that halfling farmers wouldn't use a cart or wagon to bring their excess crops to another town where they plan to trade for other people' excess stuff being sold to bring back in that cart or wagon. It's just not reasonable to think that halflings would actively go through extreme effort to avoid things like roads because they are not described as refugees hiding from ethnic cleansing or criminals being hunted.

 

[Maxperson]

"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.

Yeah. Cool. So the rare of the rare of the rare. Monsters themselves are rare. Then you'd have to have one of the rare monsters of the type that would ignore it happen to be there. Then you'd have to have one of the rare ones who wouldn't care actually ignore the plentiful food in front of it and go inland to die. I expect that happens once a generation or so.

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.

They are active............within their portfolios and behaviors. The Orcs gods aren't helpful scouts. They aren't going to lead the Orcs past the Halfling protections. The Orc gods ARE violent warlords. They will give the Orcs good smashing ability should they ever find Halflings. You're trying to make apples into oranges and that simply doesn't work.

I think what you are missing is that gods have less free will than mortals do. They're more like super powerful intelligent ants. They are awesomely powerful, within the narrow confines of their portfolios. The whole Time of Troubles is all about that.

 

[Maxperson]

If they are engaging in trade to any meaningful degree those "paths" are more are better established than a deer path & following a deer path isn't all that difficult or people wouldn't follow those rather than clearing a new path.

You're ascribing more trade to them than the lore indicates. They don't care about wealth, so they aren't going to keep trading just to acquire more. They like to trade, but it's not as if trade will be bustling.

 

[tetrasodium]

You're ascribing more trade to them than the lore indicates. They don't care about wealth, so they aren't going to keep trading just to acquire more. They like to trade, but it's not as if trade will be bustling.

Not at all

Both of those things involve trade. exotic spices involved in a generous meal & fine drink not from the local well involves a footprint not hard to stumble across or a level of trade needed to afford them. oh yea, apparently they use wagons since you couldn't believe it unless explicitly called out. A reasonable level of trade for farmers leaves a mark

 

[Oofta]

I'm talking about things like trade & roads. That's being dismissed as unreasonable to make halflings into some super paranoid group of persecuted refugees being hunted by the people who drove them from their last home in order to dismiss other problems as unreasonable

They just need to be more difficult to find and less worth the effort. The books are also silent on how humans protect themselves, so how are they surviving? Please explain how any race survives in monster world without farming communities and villages.

I mean, here's a map of Bremen, one of the villages in FR Ten Towns. Notice anything missing? Like a super tall wall surrounding the village?

How about Easthaven?

Nope. No wall indicated there. How do these places even survive with the near constant raiding parties?