By my reckoning about 80% of this reply is based on your personal setting assumptions that you take to be facts..for some reason that hasn't yet been made clear.
1. How taxes are collected.
2. How much of people's income is taken in taxes.
3. Halflings pay taxes.
4. Halfling commercial interest, even so far as it exists, must exist in equal proportion as it does in other races.
5. D&D settings must mirror a particular time period's economic structures
6. There is no safe place to have a community.
7. A community cannot be made safe without force of arms.
8. Halflings shouldn't feel dissociated from the world.
There is not one of these assumptions that must be true for any given setting.
Then there are the misunderstandings or misreadings of my response and misrememberings of the discussion to date.
Prestidigitation is but one difference and a relatively small one meant to illustrate how different a D&D setting and the Ye Olde times you keep insisting should be the guiding setting principles can be.
I was told in this thread that we were dealing with the medieval times. That was the basis for much of what we were talking about. Between 900 and 1300 AD. I didn't insist on that by myself, it was a consensus of the debate.
1 - 3: Taxes have come up repeatedly.
@tetrasodium is usually the one who brings them up.
@Oofta has repeatedly taken him to task for assuming that halflings don't pay taxes, so, clearly there is a consensus that they should or do pay taxes. And
@Maxperson has said that Halflings don't sell things for coin, because that would make them greedy, so it doesn't matter what percentage of income is taken as taxes, it would likely be in food stuffs. Both because of a lack of coin and because that was the style of taxation during the time period.
Now, I might disagree with some of that, but it hardly matters. I've been told I'm wrong and making stuff up by people constantly. Therefore, your arguments should at least fall in line with everyone else's assumptions. Otherwise, I'm engaging in half a dozen different realities and premises.
6: I showed a map of Faerun earlier. I colored in red every location reported to have populations of gnolls, orcs, goblins, trolls, hill giants, or ect. This map being a surface map, did not include any threats from below the surface, which includes multiple slaver races. The "safest" part of the map were tiny areas that were within 3 days travel of those monster borders. Sure, it is possible that an entire race of people could live and farm in those areas without fear of attack, but it becomes incredibly unlikely. Especially since they would be smack in the middle of locations with a lot of humans and dwarves, and halflings are also supposed to be far away from political conflicts too.
7: The only other solution I've been shown is "the gods make them safe". And yes, in DnD, a game about monsters that you must kill to keep the people safe, I tend to assume that people use force of arms to keep themselves safe. Can diplomacy work? I like to do so in my games, but the default lore certainly doesn't allow that for any of the common raiding races.
8: And you think they should? They are one of the four most common races in the game, one of the four free races alongside human, elf and dwarf. Shouldn't they feel integrated into the world? Isn't them being somehow disconnected from the world a bad thing?
As it relates to farming practices, It's not that the halfling would choose saffron over a less valued crop. It is the reverse. They'd be more willing to sacrifice saffron for rice, so they can have a delicious yellow rice meal, and they can make that choice without feeling like they've made a sacrifice to do so.
You keep presenting the case backwards.
You said halflings could just grow crops like saffron at home.
I said that if they could grow such valuable spices easily from home, then humans could too, and this would mess with the world
You said no, humans can't do that, because they are all commercial farmers and so they couldn't grow small amounts of spices for their own use, only things they can sell for money.
Now what you are saying, which is slightly more reasonable, is that humans would grow saffron (which was my claim, so thank you for agreeing I was right) BUT they wouldn't be willing to not grow saffron in exchange for growing food to eat.
This is the commercial farm problem of the 1700's, the one I kept saying you were talking about. The one that only works if you have massive trade networks in place. Because without the ability to import food, everyone in the region starves to death for not having food.
So, if you would like to posit that humans can't grow saffron, because if they did they'd all starve because they'd stop growing food... well, that is your perogative. But if halflings can grow small amounts of saffron alongside enough food to survive... then so can humans. Human beings, despite what you and Max seem to think, aren't greedy to the point of literally choosing to starve to make money. However, that problem relies on them growing the spices, the thing I said they'd be able to do.
So again, I was right in my analysis, if halflings can grow spices, then humans can grow spices. If halflings can grow spices and food, then humans can grow spices and food, unless you assume the almighty gold piece is so powerful that humans are willing to starve to death in the pursuit of shiny metal, like they are all dragons.
I initiated the comparison to gnomes' on a subrace trait level as points of extrapolation. Now as the halfling entry doesn't actually address the subraces, here we agree that halfling lore is lacking (really weird QA failure there, perhaps the halfling thieves' guild has someone in the editing room). That said, in the same way that the minor features of the gnomes, dwarves, elves, etc. are reflective of how their more talented members serve the community, the minor feature of the lightfoots could be interpreted as similarly reflective without breaking anything. Strangely enough the PHB even describes how they avoid conflict by avoiding notice and the most common reason for adventuring is to defend their community.
As it relates to the specifics for how the rogue can help, they build the strategy and then lead the execution, with help from the community. There may be things they can build or do directly, and there may be others where they can coach another tradesman regarding what's necessary. In either case their skill at stealth can apply.
But in either case, to you did not press me on details because you were concerned about the fit with halfling lore. I know this because neither your initial question nor your response related at all to halfling lore fit. Both were actually concerned with class capabilities, which I have addressed, now multiple times, and which you have not..even once yet.
The class ability of "stealth" does not generally apply beyond the person rolling the skill. It is actually a common problem in adventuring groups. They all roll stealth to hide, the halfling rogue rolls 28, the human fighter rolls 3, and they are discovered.
So, why would I accept that the halflings stealth skill applies to an entire village of people, when it doesn't apply to their friend standing right next to them? That is the major disconnect. You want to apply stealth globally, when it has never applied globally.
That had to be a joke.
