D&D General My Problem(s) With Halflings, and How To Create Engaging/Interesting Fantasy Races

[Lycurgon]

He did it in Ptolus first. Both gnomes and halflings (loresong and quickling, respectively) are subspecies of faen (elves) and many people in the world of Pramael can't tell gnomes and halflings apart from one another at a glance, something I've used to great effect in my campaign for years.

I think it would also be fun to have a gnome wizard fulfill the Gandalf role in a halfling town. Similar, but different enough to stand out, in multiple ways.

Arcana Evolved was published first.
The original Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed was published in 2003, the updated 3.5 revised version Arcana Evolved was published 2005.
Ptolus was published in 2006.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Dwarves can see in the dark, indentify masonry, and have various resistances depending on edition that displays them being a complete race of stoney folk who live underground or in mountains, like it, and won't move by choice.

A human miner lacks these races because the mountain or hill dwarves culture is reflected in the race's very being.

Being a dwarf is telling the DM "But I have darkvision" or "Oh but I am resistant to that."

The redundant feeling some have of Halfling is that their race feels just like a culture and one that a human or gnome can easily replicate.

If elves split long ago, went underground, completely changed appearance, gained magical abilities, and even increased their ability to see in the dark....there really isn't any reason that humans couldn't have done the same...

You could literally reskin nearly every small to large sized humanoid to be "humans that changed long ago..."

 

[Tonguez]

The only thing I will say about 4E is that its Healing Surge mechanic was amazing, both as a game mechanic and as barometer of who actually tried playing the game. But this isn't an edition war thread.

In Fantasy Craft, they call them Pech (which I've taken to calling them in all my settings, halfling is a terrible name for a people to call themselves) and they lean into the Hobbit factor and make them big eaters, able to benefit from more meal buffs than other ancestries. D&D doesn't really model that aspect though, so they can't go that route very easily..

Peck comes from the Willow movie and was considered a racial slur

 

[jayoungr]

No. I am saying that seeing it as a flaw is a misperception of it being a feature.

So you're claiming it's not a flaw or hindrance, ever, for any reasonable player?

How is that different from claiming it's a superior way of playing?

 

[Lycurgon]

Peck comes from the Willow movie and was considered a racial slur

Pech (in the post you were responding to) comes from Scottish mythology and are Gnome-like creatures. They have been in D&D since at least The Monster Manual 2 for 1st Ed and are a short race with connections to the Elemental Plane of Earth.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

No, I didn't. I declared that elements of D&D do not need to be justified by verbal explanation for the correct choice to be retention. That the burden of proof for reform has to be not "This part serves no explained purpose", but rather "This part hurts D&D [with actual evidence of harm]".

Yeah, you did. I said that something exists in D&D only because of Tolkien, not really to fulfill a narrative niche (they certainly don't fulfill the ones in D&D that Tolkien intended for them in his stories, which are very specific to his stories and don't work in most D&D worlds, which IMO, is a good enough argument against Halflings being a core race of D&D).

I have also said that I have a hard time finding a narrative niche for halflings in my world, especially to find one that can't be accomplished by another race. To me, that's important. I want every part of my race and world to be important. I want everything to have the potential to be a Chekhov's Gun. If something doesn't have that potential, like "My race likes growing plants and living in burrows!", that's not narratively interesting to me, and doesn't help me build the best stories and world(s) that I possibly can. Having races where you were crafted by master artificers to serve as war machines, or the spirit of an alien-refugee bonded with your soul, or even a race where you are designed to be good at smithing has the potential to be an interesting narrative aspect of a campaign. Halflings don't have that.

Having Halflings being a core part of the game has caused me no small amount of distress/lost time, and so on. I wouldn't dislike halflings and make a thread about that just because I don't find them interesting, I dislike them and create a thread about them because I've found how disinteresting they are to be actively detrimental to my games.

If you are inventing something new, "Can I explain what purpose this part serves?" is a perfectly useful design heuristic. But if you are curating something that is already successful, in a universe where most new things fail, it is a very good way to accidentally destroy that success.

Elements of something that is successful are justified by the simple fact of the success of the whole, whether or not anyone has a good verbal explanation for them or how they contribute to the success. This is because people are not omniscient, so an inability to explain an element's contribution does not mean it does not contribute. The argument for change accordingly needs to be actively justified.

So, you're saying that things that are already a part of the game are inherently exempt from criticism/possible revision because they've been successful enough to exist this long? That doesn't sit well with me for many reasons, the main ones listed below:

1. I was literally not alive when D&D first came out. You're essentially gatekeeping people who were not alive at the time Halflings were introduced to D&D to not be allowed to criticize them/have their criticism be taken seriously.
2. Plenty of neutral/possibly detrimental traits are passed on to later generations through evolution. The bar for evolution (both genetic and cultural) is not actually "survival of the fittest", but is instead "survival of the fit enough". I'm not saying that Halflings are awful and are actively hurting D&D in general and are useless vermin that must be cleansed from the hobby. I'm instead saying that they barely qualify for a valid excuse to exist in the game (by passing the absolute lowest bar to warrant their inclusion in the game), don't fulfill an engaging storytelling niche, and only exist because of Tradition, not because of them actually being a good/inspiring storytelling tool.
3. Plenty of things that are a part of something's history get removed eventually. Racial Ability Scores Modifiers have been a part of D&D for a long time, but 5e recently had a direction change by not having them on future races and including an optional rule to basically remove them on previous races. The ancestors of dolphins had legs for millions of years, but they eventually became less and less useful for the species(es?) as they spent more and more time in water.

IMO, something isn't justified by them existing, even if they've existed a long time. Physical books have existed a long time, but more and more people are reading e-books and listening to audio books. Does that mean physical books will eventually be invalidated? Perhaps. However, the fact that paper books were so useful for centuries is not a valid argument against using e-books and audio books more and more in the future (a valid argument would be more about how physical books can't lose charge, or how some people are better at absorbing information from physical books than e-books or audio books, and so on).

Changing THAC0 easily overcomes this simple placement of the burden of proof; it demonstrably didn't work well. While mathematically clever, it's easy to demonstrate that real people, en masse find subtraction harder than addition and addition harder than counting, and that people regularly flubbed the calculation in play.

I just gave THAC0 as a specific example of something changing. You want more? Tieflings. Tieflings changed, even though there was really no need for them to do so, and they became more popular as a result. Things that sometimes change because people don't find them compelling, or just because they might be due for a change, is a valid reason to change things, and it can have good outcomes if done thoughtfully and carefully.

If you've got an argument that halflings are actually confusing to players, or cause problems at the table, like THAC0 did, then you've got a case against halflings. "I don't know of a justification for including them" is not one.

And even then, actually, your argument isn't that you don't see any justification for including them. You simply don't see the justification (supporting people who want to play hobbits from Tolkien) as personally compelling. That's an even weaker argument for excision, given Tolkien's works are popular enough they're not just still in print (in multiple editions), but actively producing spinoff media (a TV series) to boot.

Again, as stated in the OP, I'm not advocating for removing halflings from the game. I'm just explaining why I don't find them compelling, giving examples of how to actually create a compelling story for a race, and shown how halflings have been detrimental in certain scenarios to my table (I consider "not being the best they can be" to be detrimental when the alternative is "changing them to possibly making them better").

That's a theory as to what exactly went wrong with that implementation, sure.

However, in any case you're applying to halflings the exact same logic that drove 4e design, as you would see if you read the books Wizards Presents: Races and Classes (December 2007) and Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters (January 2008). I accordingly expect applying very similar logic to the same task (revising D&D) would produce similar results (commercial failure).

That's also a theory. You dismiss my claim as being a theory as a rebuttal to tote your own theory.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

So, as this relates to your OP, is it fair to say you find more value in having 10+ animal/human hybrid choices or 3+ different half this and half that's (that are distinctly different than the this or that) but cannot find one redeeming thing about halflings to put them on the "good enough to keep" list?

It is fair to say that I find "perceptive bunny-person from the feywild" and "Satyr" more compelling and beneficial to my settings/campaigns than "short human that is lucky, for some reason".

Again, I want to reiterate that I think any race that adds fun to the game is "good enough to keep on the list" of official D&D races, however, I personally don't think that halflings deserve the spotlight that they get (being a core race in D&D, practically forced into most D&D worlds, etc).

 

[Older Beholder]

To paraphrase a quote from WandaVision:

What are halflings, if not Tolkien persevering?

 

[ccs]

they are defined as not caring about such things so they have no wizards or monks, rangers or barbarians are unlikely.
certainly no warlocks or most rogue subclasses as why would they want to assassinate people?
bard I have no idea, sorcerers could work for a caster, would they ever be sufficiently devoted to make clerics or paladins.
rangers and druids means sacrificing comfort so they would not naturally produce them.
not seeing a lot of class variety other than forcing them into it at which point why play a halfling.

You are confusing NPC halflings with PC halflings. Sure, most halflings (the NPCs) don't pursue such careers - but this can also be said of most NPC humans, dwarves, elves, etc .
But the PCs? They're a different breed.... You'd have to ask the players "Why is your 1/2ling a _____?"

6 of my own:

• Warlock (pact of the Chain, Fey Patron, familiar: pseudo-dragon) - as a child she befriended an ancient pseudo-dragon who began teaching her simple, non-harmful, magic. The P.Dragons goal was to train her & once she was old enough send her out adventuring to acquire loot for him. She jumped the gun by a few years. Nothing unwilling about this adventurer.
• Barbarian (Ancestral Guardian) - the warlocks older sister. Very much the reluctant adventurer. It was her own poor choices that set both her & her warlock sister on the adventuring path. She's a barbarian because she fights in a completely untrained manner (rage) & this was the class that best represented that.
• Fighter 1/Druid +(Circle of the Land) - Before becoming a Druid he was an ordinary hobbit working as a baker & doing his duty serving part time in the towns reserve militia. Until he came into contact with a bad batch of gnomish potions, got transformed into a dog, & at the end of the adventure failed the save vs the effect becoming permanent. So he set off to seek help from the regions Druids. He's now a dog who can wildshape back to his original 1/2ling form. The only way for him to spend more time in his original form is to advance as a druid so as to increase his wildshape duration. It's more of a career change than being an unwilling adventurer. In either form though he helped defend the region during the Tyranny of Dragons.

Ranger/Gunslinger (Pathfinder) - This guy is a big game hunter. He comes complete with an elephant gun, plenty of ammo, a 1/2ling assistant (via leadership feat) & is often found in the wilds of Varisia on Safari. His goal: bag a sphinx.
* Garth, poor Garth.... He's a 1980s redbox basic edition 1/2ling (translates as "fighter with smaller HD & lv cap".). His claim to fame? Well, he doesn't have a negative modifier to his con..... And he's somehow still alive.
Other than that? Yeah, he's pretty special with negative mods on 5/6 ability scores.
* Uno - My very 1st D&D character. He started off as an '80s era Basic edition 1/2ling. So essentially a fighter - though his inspiration was Bilbo. But he's been remade as a rogue type in every edition save 4e, including via house rules in Basic.
Somewhere along the line he definitely turned evil. If memory serves he fell victim to the altar in the Caves of Chaos.
And sometime after that he became an assassin (1st as houserules in 1e) - because he's a sneaky & now evil git + nobody would ever suspect the halfling.... (because the chart in the book tells you that there are no 1/2ling assassins )

I am not saying no small folk or halflings but why are they so common in world-building other than because we are told they should be there?

They aren't there in worlds I build/run because I'm told they should be. They're there because as the DM I like them.
And I'm the DM, so my whim is reality.

Now if I'm a player & the DM says "There's no 1/2lings in my game"? That's cool. I've got about a million other character ideas. I'm sure I can come up with something that fits.

we could put something better in its place and move it to say a forgotten realms book.

1) You do know they aren't unique to the FR, right?
2) Or you could just add another page to the PHB with your "better" thing. Then you're happy & everyone else is as well.

 

[Aldarc]

To paraphrase a quote from WandaVision:

What are halflings, if not Tolkien persevering?

Meanwhile in the Snyderverse: "We halflings live in a society."