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

[Minigiant]

Except in the lore, this... didn't work.

Giant lost everything pretending being big and strong and being bullies was enough. They used to be an empire. They used to rule the world. now they are the losers and everyone kills them for fun and profit. One might argue that Hill Giants, with their dumb Invader Zim style reverence to the Fattest (haha fat jokes!) might be okay with this, but other giant should be smarter than this by now.

Well that's why only hill giants and giantkin attack indiscriminately and without preconceived planning. Frost and Fire giants plan out their raids to prove STR= King. Stone, Cloud, and Storm giants sit back and mope.

Note none of them think their ideologies are wrong. Because 99.9% of the time it's right. A fire giant can't stomp a village flat if attrition and luck dont get them. And the village loses a lot stopping a higher ording giant. It's just that their pantheon got it's butts kicked.

Okay, so this is a group issue. I don't think playing halflings as joke is really prevalent in the large zeitgeist. D&D tends to make them darker and edgier; Dark Sun cannibals, BoVD nebulous evils, Dragonlance kleptomaniacs and then sad boring kleptomaniacs... I guess the movies gave them all a weed habit, but that makes them more relatable based on current legislative trends, not less

But why have the base assumption not fit and have every setting swerve of halflings to make them more realistic.

Why not make the baseline halfling realistic so people wouldn't feel obligated to break the stereotype or run them as jokes?

A portion community also hates strange races, traditional races, magic items, magic, dungeons, dragons, and combat, so I wouldn't put much thought into that.

But why do they fight to include halflings then go out their way to keep halflings sucky or silly and argue if you call them out on it?

 

[Oofta]

Yeah but those are MM humans, not PCs.

Nah, just level 10 idiots.

 

[tetrasodium]

I think somebody ought to take that and roll with it. Have that be literally what's happening. Like in They Live or Dark City or The Matrix or Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagaan some vast force is at work manipulating things to keep the multiverse static. There's definitely an epic conspiray plotline to be made out of that, likely something to do with the Regulators or the Pact Primeval or the Inevitables or all three.

That is the problem. FR is so over represented that running other settings forces some of that due to the glaring omission of those settings from core books

I mean, where does magic come from? There is no explanation, it's just there.

My personal favorite explanation I've seen in fiction? precise electromagnetic waves generated by the higher dimensional object known as a "soul" through the act of verbal somatic & sometimes material components. If you don't like that...

Spoiler: Here are some other theories

- Morgravesmisc pg84

There is forty+ years worth of halfling lore, plus the original source material. Reprinting stuff for every edition is a useless waste of paper.

Darsun was released October 1991 a little over 29 years ago. Eberron June 2004 making it just over 17 years. If the core books are still exclusively referencing 40+ year old lore they fail at being core books rather than setting specific books. That failure of the core books makes it needlessly difficult to run other wotc owned settings.

Then you should, so you at least understand what the appeal is.

I can perfectly understand why they wouldn't appeal to those who aren't fans of Tolkien - which I assume you are not since you haven't read the book. But there is no point in such people having halflings in the first place. I refer you to my first post in this thread:

"I think its fairly obvious why hobbits where included - LotR fans wanted to be like their heroes."

And that's fine for the game known as adventures in middle earth to exclusively represent that, but the d&d phb needs to provide some reasonable level of support for the various wotc owned settings. Hasbro or WotC inheriting ownership of middle earth from tolkein's estate would have been big news.

Minigiant,

I'm not saying to be snarky or mean or anything, but while you say you don't hate halflings, is it possible you harbor an unexamined bias against them?

You seem to prefer darker, more militant stories and worlds. The idea of a society of peaceful agrarians who are untroubled by war and strife, living for food and song and comfort goes against your preferred aesthetic. It may even grate at you like a thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards.

Eberron just came off a century of continent spanning civil war with quite a bit drawn from ww1 & everyone with power knows that it's sliding towards the cliff's edge of a ww2 type tinderbox so is trying their best to position themselves for good results. Darksun is living through a post apocalyptic span where everyone with power is brutally using what power they have to keep the real big bad that started the apocalypse causing genocides from getting free rather than recovering civilization
. @Paul Farquhar went into a lot of detail over more than one post about the importance of shire hobbits in the context of ww1's bleakness, which is fine to include those halflings as one of the halflings represented nonexclusively. Some settings have halflings that went through the full course of a world war (or worse) & came out the other end thriving because they weren't shire hobbits to begin with.

And rather than accept this as an affront to your personal sense of how a fantasy world should be, are you perhaps trying to rationalize that they, as written, simply shouldn't be? Cobbling together what seems to you canonical and logical arguments that you don't want to see refuted?

Maybe instead of being exclusive to "your personal sense of how a fantasy world should be" the phb should include support representing the various wotc owned settings.

 

[Vaalingrade]

But why have the base assumption not fit and have every setting swerve of halflings to make them more realistic.

1) I don't think the base assumption is that they don't fit but that they fill a particular niche that would be missed without them. No one else in D&D are agrarian goodfolk who are worthy just for being decent folk. Elves and gnomes are fey, dwarves are mythic, humans are ambitious and heroic. Halflings are... human. Like that kind of human. They have all the potential of everyone else, they just aren't 'the special' inherently. They work for it.

Why not make the baseline halfling realistic so people wouldn't feel obligated to break the stereotype or run them as jokes?

Okay, so NONE of those edgelord halflings are realistic. Humanist halflings, the ones with their shires seeking good food and comfort and family. Those ARE realistic. Modern Fantasy is so bloated and mutated and mutilated into something ugly and overbearing thanks in part to Martin but also dangerous amounts of 90's that we overlook that.

naughty words and cannibals and warmongers around every corner is not 'real'. Its the real of the pessimist and those who gave up.

And again, I don't see halflings run as jokes as much as I do gnomes and half-orcs. How many non-big, dumb half orcs do you see?

But why do they fight to include halflings then go out their way to keep halflings sucky or silly and argue if you call them out on it?

Because to a lot of us... halflings aren't sucky. Or silly.

We don't see the need to make them the same old warmonger murderhobos the other races are. We don't see the world as so inherently dangerous that agrarian farmers can't live and thrive. Our Points of Light are just that: safe and warm and beautiful. A thing to be protected that is protected. And if it starts to come crashing down... well that's where the heroes are really made. That's when the farmboys prove their mettle.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Eberron just came off a century of continent spanning civil war with quite a bit drawn from ww1 & everyone with power knows that it's sliding towards the cliff's edge of a ww2 type tinderbox so is trying their best to position themselves for good results.

1) It was WW2. the Mourning is a clear A-bomb analog.

2) I'm not sure what you're trying to prove using the setting that made agrarian orcs canon. I would have mentioned how the Sharn halflings went the full 'close knit village absorbed into a metropolis' evolution and became the mafia.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is like all those militia dudes who think having an AR-15 is going to save them from a Apache helicopter squadron when the time comes.

Like you expect sweaty farmer Owen to run out, strap into the Skyhopper and then use it to gun down a tribe of Tuskan Raiders with the saddest vehicle mounted weapon in Star Wars (the Skyhopper is playable in a number of video and tabletop games. Comparing it to a varmint rifle is... charitable. You can barely take out a probe droid in one shot).

Also, a thrown rock or stick? The thing you keep saying is all halflings have? Can also kill a man, come with the infinite ammo cheat and require no maintenance. And halflings get a bonus with them. I hear there's even a story about a short dude one-shotting a goliath with one in a sling.

And so the goal posts shift.

At first it was ridiculous that Uncle Owen and Aunt Bera might even have a blaster for personal protection.

Now it is ridiculous that they expect owning a flying car with a gun might protect them, because the video game version made them weak enough to have a hard time with military hardware.

Why? Because I proved that them having a gun wouldn't be that crazy. So now the gun has to be worthless so it is still crazy.

Also slings massively increase the power of throwing a stone. They are impressive, and the person who one-shotted that giant of a man was also blessed by a god and destined to be a great king.

And, for some reason, it is ridiculous that a halfling might use a wood axe, or skinning knife. Because everyone knows that commoners only have sticks ans rocks... even though we've established that is not the case.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Hatchets*, knives*, sickles, light hammers all do he same damage as clubs. Short bows and spears? Depends on if they're allowed to hunt and are in a region where hunting makes sense. Even then, only a small percentage of the population would be likely to have them, your world may be different but 25 GP for a shortbow is not pocket change.

But I'm just using the rules from the MM that says commoners by default use clubs. If your commoners have access to implements that are only useful as weapons in your world then halflings should have them as well.

*Hand axes and daggers are specialized weapons that would not be useful as farming implements.

I'd love to have halflings use those weapons

Too bad I have to homebrew their lore to do so. Which is the entire problem I keep talking about.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yes. A religious rite based on the tactics from their stories. A rite which only uses sticks and stones.

Which is not what they do, since they use them in actual combat to actually defend their villages.

 

[tetrasodium]

1) It was WW2. the Mourning is a clear A-bomb analog.

2) I'm not sure what you're trying to prove using the setting that made agrarian orcs canon. I would have mentioned how the Sharn halflings went the full 'close knit village absorbed into a metropolis' evolution and became the mafia.

2 On top of being off a bit from eberron orcs in oversimplification, Orc is not a core race while halfling is a core race. Darksun & Eberron are wotc owned settings no matter how much fans of tolkein & greyhawk/FR want to pretend otherwise in defense of an unreasonably setting specific phb based exclusively on what Paul called 40+ year old lore. Plus it wasn't that long ago that that wotc admitted the tightrope between early legacy & things players want to create was not effectively walked
1 the last war ended with no clear victor & everyone walked away feeling like they got robbed of their victory. Nobody knows who or what caused the day of mourning & so nobody could act like the US or allied powers to force a settled victory like happened ww2. That unclear ending is why the 5 nations are collectively playing chicken within the treaty of thronehold to prepare for the next war they all want someone else to start. Also like ww1->ww2 nationa the five nations have greatly advanced military tech they feel will help them.

 

[Chaosmancer]

But it doesn't say that. At all. It speaks to how they train as kids in a variety of tactics handed down as religious/community games. (folk religion tends to be much less somber than going to church, btw, in case anyone thinks that religious games is an odd concept. It isn't.) That section says nothing about whether or not grown halflings use actual weaponry, and indeed we know from the art in the books that halflings know how to use real weapons.

And we know from the PHB, ya know the actual core book?, that Halflings defend their homes fiercely when needed, and that they aren't all farmers, and many of them are instead nomadic, living in wagons or riverboats.

Sigh

I've posted the text so many times. I'm getting a little sick of it. Not posting all of the tactics.

From time to time, halflings must fight to defend their friends or their village. In those moments, the tales of Arvoreen come to the fore in every halfling’s memory. Every youth hears over and over again the stories of the hero’s bravery and cunning, his clever tactics in battle, and his ability to use speed and smallness to defeat a much larger foe. The elders know that the world outside is dangerous and that their kin must understand how to deal with those dangers. Stories about Arvoreen are told in such a way that youngsters are inspired to act out his epic battles. In this way, the halflings get practical experience in executing measures that are designed to help the halflings defeat kobolds and goblin raiders, or even take down an ogre. When the time comes to put those tactics to use in earnest, everyone will be ready.


Cooperation is a fundamental principle in how halflings fend off their enemies. Every community practices its own version of Arvoreen’s favored tactics:

Troll Knocker. A few halflings act as bait to lure a troll or other large creature into a clearing where the rest of the group can hurl stones at it from concealment to confuse the monster, persuading it to seek other prey.

Swarming Stickwhackers. Halflings rush an intruder in waves, swatting the enemy with sticks on all sides.

Fiddle and Crack. A halfling fiddler lures the monster into a trap, usually a net or a pit, followed by several burly halflings wielding large sticks and hitting the monster from a safe vantage.

Look at the bolded and green text. Note that it says they are getting practical expeirence in executing these tactics to fight off raiders. Note that they call these the tactics they use. Note how they specifically mention using sticks and rocks.

Note how they don't say that these are just religious rites. Note how they don't say that these are simply practice for when they fight with real weapons. Note how they don't mention using other weapons.

So, no, these tactics are not religious activities or community games, and they are specifically mentioned as being used against the raiders. Not target dummies. Not people pretending to be the enemy. The actual enemy.

What strawman? I literally replied directly to your explicit statements.

Really? So you can quote me specifically saying that Hobbits were immune to the Ring? That seemed to be a rather important part of your rebuttal, and yet I can't see where I said that.