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

[JiffyPopTart]

You seem frustrated about that while arguing to preserve the resulting starfish alien halflings. Oddly enough none of the people joining that one person on the idea that "a variety of things" amounting to literally anything one could possibly want in a thorp-hamlet of 100 or less people & nothing of value don't seem at all willing to so much as admit the logic involved in that particular dismissal through the use of stealthy mules might maybe be even a tiny bit unreasonable.

Edit: That almost suggests that you as the author of "Because BOOM I just willed it to be so as the GM" agrees with those ninja mules being used so extensively

I'm not sure what my Emeril BOOM has to do with mules and not a plant existing in the world, but OK.

Lets circle all the way back to the very beginning and discard the previous 70 pages of old arguments....

The book supposition is that halflings live in small, secretive, out-of-the-way shires and live peacefully eating themselves to a fulfilled long life. What about that does not work in YOUR (being defined by the person replying) campaign world.

The only person I can answer for here is @Chaosmancer, who has at least one problem with the description because there is no way to be "out of the way" for halflings because:
A) They aren't using magic (like gnomes)
B) Their gods can't just "make it so" that they are never bothered
C) The only places on the map that are "safe" from monsters are those protected by some greater force or physically inaccessible

While A, B, and C are all valid opinions on how the world works vis-a-vis halflings, none of those three are hard facts enforced by the RAW, since there is little RAW that refers to "shires". At that point all you can do is argue your case why your opinion holds more weight than others. I happen to agree with opinion A, as I don't view halflings as a "shire" to be magically oriented. Opinion B is really up to straight GM interpretation since god powers are not spelled out RAW. I find "the gods make us hidden" a weak but usable reasoning. Opinion C is the one I disagree with the most. I do not view my world as being as dangerous as @Chaosmancer does theirs. I do have dangerous bandits, orcs, goblins, and manticores. I also have dangerous towns and cities (on what I call the frontier) that are susceptible to attacks by those monsters. I also have peaceful "civilized" areas that would only see an orc or goblin if they formed up into a continent threatening army size and were invading. My view doesn't shape someone elses world and their view doesn't shape mine.

I have zero issue with the idea of shirebound peaceful hobbit villages because it doesn't go against how I view my world. Maybe you do, but that doesn't make the halfling trope bad overall, it just makes it bad for your world as its designed. No two-page description of any race is going to fit into everyone's campaign without some work to get it there.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Wait. Why can the halfling village enjoy greater variety, but the human village would be limited?

The desire to trade is to get things you can't otherwise get. If everyone can just grow enough to support the entire village in the first place, trade wouldn't be a thing.

Unless you are somehow taking the problem of cash crops from the 1700's, which was driven by incredibly large trade markets which generated excessive wealth, and saying that humans just naturally default to that system by nature. Which... is kind of like Max claiming that money corrupts people. No, that isn't how these things worked. Cash crops came because of massive trade networks, not the other way around.

It's pretty simple. Are your human farms operated as commercial enterprises? If so, those farmers are incentivized to grow the thing that grows the best, the easiest, that they can extract the most value from. This needs zero correlation with what the individual farmer enjoys consuming, and varying correlation with what the community enjoys consuming.

If one farmer really enjoys consuming one kind of product that has no trade value, they have to decide how much time, energy, space, and return on investment they are willing to sacrifice to produce that thing. By contrast, for the halfling who is farming for the enjoyment of what they produce, as long as they've cleared the bar for basic survival, they can choose to allocate their resources solely based on maximizing their personal enjoyment.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Let me ask you this.

How would a level 11 rogue, with expertise in stealth, hide a village?

They are stealthy, perhaps even naturally since I didn't list a race, they are incredibly good at hiding. So... how do they hide an entire village?


That is what is being proposed. Halflings are good at hiding themselves, therefore they can hide entire villages.

And this is being compared to explicitly being told that gnomes are good at at illusion magic, and use illusion magic to hide their villages. So, how do they hide them? With illusions magic.

The misstep people are making is assuming that all gnomes are limited to the cantrip, and despite being skilled illusionists, can never be, you know, actual illusionists.

A 11th level rogue with expertise in stealth, perhaps reliably talented in it, and lucky to boot, probably would employ the same principles they use for hiding themselves to hiding the village.

This may include some combination of misdirection, obfuscation, disguise, etc. Would it be as simple as waving a magic wand, no. But the good news is that they'd be working to hide a village full of lucky stealthy homebodies who like to stay out of the way rather than a group of pranksters, and reckless inventors who may occasionally detonate things for science. So perhaps the gnomes gneed more of an easy mode.

 

[Gammadoodler]

And Gnomes Illusionists are limited by Minor Illusion.

Unless you want to argue that Mythals are impossible because they can't be done with a cantrip. Or making floating cities is impossible or really the list could go on and on and on.

Gnomes have professional illusionists. We are told this. Limiting them to the cantrip just because every gnomish child can use it is like saying no one can have a movie theater because home TVs aren't that big.

You were comparing apples to oranges. Skilled gnome illusionists (you know leveled creatures of some variety) vs basic common halflings.

I was confining the points of extrapolation to the same base point. In some circles, that's called fairness.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I think that it's more pointing out the problems caused by the idea that a random shire halfling village being able to accomplish the idyllic utopia lacking for nothing without engaging in trade as some have been suggsting

It isn't idyllic because they have everything. It's idyllic because they are satisfied with less.

 

[Don Durito]

It's pretty simple. Are your human farms operated as commercial enterprises? If so, those farmers are incentivized to grow the thing that grows the best, the easiest, that they can extract the most value from. This needs zero correlation with what the individual farmer enjoys consuming, and varying correlation with what the community enjoys consuming.

If one farmer really enjoys consuming one kind of product that has no trade value, they have to decide how much time, energy, space, and return on investment they are willing to sacrifice to produce that thing. By contrast, for the halfling who is farming for the enjoyment of what they produce, as long as they've cleared the bar for basic survival, they can choose to allocate their resources solely based on maximizing their personal enjoyment.

I brought up "The Art of not being Governed" earlier. It goes into this a great deal in the case of South East Asia. Basically, a big part of having a state is taxation. Taxation means that crops needs to be able to be stored after being grown. This creates an incentive to require villagers in the state to grow a single food source that is easily stored and easily counted for tax purposes (such as grains like rice or wheat).

One of the benefits of living outside the state (which was basically about three days march by road from any major settlement - and considerably less if the ground was difficult to traverse such as mountains, forests, swamps etc) is that you don't have such constraints and can often have a healthier diet (Eg. grow sweet potatoes instead of rice).

So you'd put your halfling villages somewhere within the relative boundaries of a larger state, but in a place where the states projection of force doesn't reach very often.

Of course this could create the issue that such areas are also stereoptypically where the monsters live - but there's absolutely no reasons why this is required to be the case in all instances of marginal land. (Maybe the state was stronger 150 years back and made an organised effort to occupy the hills and wipe out all the monsters)

 

[Chaosmancer]

Nope! Don't apply your subjective opinion to me and shove words in my mouth. I don't agree with it.

I'm sorry, you said "Yes" to the idea Yondalla is more active in divine intervention than any other god in existence, and unstoppable when it comes to manipulating luck to force things to come out to protect halflings.

Is that not supposed to be ridiculous that a goddess most players couldn't even name is the most active and most powerful goddess in the multiverse?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Not at the expense of the other luxuries. In D&D they don't care about food as much as Halflings.

Right, just re-write human nature. No big deal.

I mean human empires literally waged war, twice, over a single plant. But in DnD they just don't care enough. Because Halflings don't even care that much, and humans care less than that.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Is that glass? Could also be parchment or sheep's bladder which was fairly common as far as I can tell. But, as I said most people don't have a realistic idea of how expensive plate glass was. I know I don't think about it in my own campaign very often.

I agree, fantasy seems to give it out a lot.

But, the idea is that they are fine as written. So, that would be fine.

Yes. They might have magical greenhouses because such things exist in fantasy lore. They might not. What are the odds? I don't know. What are the odds of one of the most powerful wizard in middle earth making the acquaintance of Bilbo? Just like they might make glass figurines (or windows I suppose) if they have access to the materials.

The odds of Gandalf meeting Bilbo were 100%, because J.R.R. Tolkien was writing a book with the two of them as main characters.

The odds of a single halfling village of fifty people having a magical building, crafted by an archmage, in the middle of nowhere, for the sole purpose of allowing them to have any plants growing they want.... Yeah. I'm not writing a novel where the magic greenhouse is an important plot point. I'm looking how your average halfling village handles these things. And archmages aren't just giving things worth literal kingdoms to halfling villages for the lulz.

But this is just another red herring. Halflings trade, just not as much as some of the other races.

Okay, so they do trade. Great. I've been saying they trade. A lot actually, it has kind of been my thing.

So, if they trade, then they would more than likely have a road to take goods down.

Now, I know Maxperson and the book want to insist that these roads can't be found by even skilled rangers. That it is easier to navigate the seas with cloudy skies and no land in sight than it is to find a halfling path in the woods. But let's level with each other. Does that actually make sense?

Sure, we can say that Yondalla is exerting her divine will to force these paths to be unnoticeable. But that means we have called a literal Dues Ex Machina, a literal continous divine intervention by the gods, to keep a road invisible. And if you don't have Yondalla in your world, then you need some other divine being constantly acting on the world for the sole purpose of keeping halflings safe. No other God or Goddess exerts this type of continual, unbreakable force upon the world.

And if we have a road that can be found, then those that would do the halflings harm can find them. Maybe it isn't orcs. Maybe the human king wants their magic greenhouse and so he goes to take it by force. It doesn't matter exactly who attacks them, but they are vulnerable to attack. They aren't somehow invisible to the world.

Which brings me back to the point I started this on. Halflings need to be able to defend themselves. And they need more than sticks and rocks to do it.

Now, instead of homebrewing a power archmage to go to each halfling village to give them unique magical artifacts to protect them from ever needing anything, I tend to prefer homebrewing it so.., they have guards. Outriders and hunters maybe, who keep an eye on the borders. Maybe some sort of wall, so that if an angry owlbear comes screeching out of the forest, it doesn't go straight into the pigs and kill all their livestock.

That's it.

Agrarian farmers who love good food and a warm hearth, sharing time with their family. No desires to really conquer or become wealthy, just the desire to protect what is theirs, and live a simple life. Backed up by the occasional weapon and some vigilance to protect their homes and loved ones.

Is that really and truly more ridiculous than calling on archmages to give them magical greenhouses?

 

[Maxperson]

I'm sorry, you said "Yes" to the idea Yondalla is more active in divine intervention than any other god in existence, and unstoppable when it comes to manipulating luck to force things to come out to protect halflings.

Would you get into a fight with another god over a measly village? Even the orc gods aren't that dumb. They don't do it, because it would be stupid to do it.