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

[Hussar]

A house built into or covered in earth, providing natural insulation.

So, sod houses that people in paleolithic times built?

 

[Cadence]

Which, at the end, fails utterly as the Shire is pretty much destroyed by the end. Perhaps if they spent a bit more time engaging with the world and a bit less time sitting around doing nothing, they wouldn't have been harrowed.

And then a less-than-a-handful of hobbits out on adventure come back and save it.

 

[Hussar]

Firbolgs have almost no culture. They don't even name themselves. They use their disguise self to blend in with other people and turn invisible so as not to interact with others.

Why do you like them and not halflings?

Not @Chaosmancer, but, I think I can field this.

Because Firbolgs ACTUALLY have a hook. And, Firbolgs aren't eating up several pages in the PHB when virtually no one is playing them. And they haven't eaten up the PHB for 50 years with virtually no one playing them and never actually mattering.

 

[Oofta]

Who's saying the lore is bad?

What's ACTUALLY being said is the lore is non-existent.

There's a difference here.

Huh. My PHB has about as much lore as the other races. My MToF has a section on them which includes wording similar to your sainted firbolgs about people simply not finding their settlements that you ranted about the last time.

Maybe a troll ate those pages?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

In my experience, no one reads the lore in the PHB anyway.

 

[Hussar]

I always thought that sooner or later everyone played in a game when the Halflings filled the main civilised culture niche of the game and humans were the crude barbaric beings living in skins in the wilderness that occasionally wandered into civilised lands.

I thought it was pretty much a rite of passage. Like the setting where the elves are the main race and have a big empire that everyone comes up with at some point. (Eg see Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels for a version of this that turned into a novel series).

Or is everyone too obsessed with lore and Canon these days to do this kind of thing?

LOL. To be honest, I never even bothered adding halflings to any setting I homebrewed because no one ever wanted to play them. Heck, we played Scarred Lands for nearly two years before anyone noticed that there were no gnomes in the setting.

Then again, usually the first race to get the axe when I homebrew is elves, since I actually DO dislike them. Halflings? I have zero feelings about halflings because, well, frankly, they're so unimportant to the game that I would never have a chance to have feelings about it. They're kind of like Flumphs. Sure, they're funny and all, but, I'm never actually going to use them.

 

[Hussar]

I don't know. I just know that it is by far the most popular player race in my game (having just overtaken human).

Really? Wow. Now, do you feel that this is normal among game tables or an outlier?

 

[Yora]

In my experience, no one reads the lore in the PHB anyway.

Since setting specific cultures and history overrides the PHB anyway, there's little point in doing that.

 

[Oofta]

LOL. To be honest, I never even bothered adding halflings to any setting I homebrewed because no one ever wanted to play them. Heck, we played Scarred Lands for nearly two years before anyone noticed that there were no gnomes in the setting.

Then again, usually the first race to get the axe when I homebrew is elves, since I actually DO dislike them. Halflings? I have zero feelings about halflings because, well, frankly, they're so unimportant to the game that I would never have a chance to have feelings about it. They're kind of like Flumphs. Sure, they're funny and all, but, I'm never actually going to use them.

Well, every elf I ever play dies after a few games, but I wouldn't say I find them annoying, except I can see how their whole schtick "Just like humans, only better" could be. Personally I find tieflings a bit annoying because it's either "cool, fire resistance and hellish rebuke!" or "Look at me, I'm all edgy and emo because I'm a tiefling."

But halflings? Well I have 2 in my current campaign out of 6 players. More often than not I have 1. I wouldn't say they're super popular but given the number of races out there they're reasonably well represented in public games. It would be interesting to see a poll of what's popular in adventurer's league, I think that would be a better representation of popularity than here or DndBeyond.

 

[Hussar]

I am the one fixating on quality on the thread which whole premise that people are arguing that the quality of halfling lore is objectively bad? Wow!

And these items have no lore, besides word 'elven' or 'dwarven' in the name. It is about as much lore than there being word 'Mordenkainen' in some spells. Yes, 'scarping the bottom of the barrel' was accurate.

But... that's not the premise of the thread.

No one is arguing that the lore that exists is objectively bad. @Chaosmancer certainly isn't. He's arguing that it's lacking but that's not the same thing as bad. It's not that halfing lore is bad. There's not enough of it to be good or bad.

Umm, no lore? What? Pull out your DMG. READ the section on Axe of the Dwarvish Lords and tell me there's no lore there. Heck, dwarves have a belt that turns everyone else into a dwarf. That's how cool it is to be a dwarf.

But, again, THAT'S NOT THE POINT. There IS lore for elves and dwarves all over D&D. That's undeniable. Whether we talk about the core books or expand it into settings. Elves and Dwarves both matter to the game. Now, the argument is that not mattering is a feature of halflings. Fair enough. Then why do they need to be in the PHB? Since they don't matter, they don't exactly need to eat up space in the PHB. Give them the one page in the Monster Manual and make room for stuff that might have a chance of actually helping people build settings.

This is the question that never seems to get answered. How long do we keep an option in the book that is, and always has been, one of the least popular options? What's a reasonable number here? Halflings have never been popular. At best, you might have one in a group (outside of some very strange outliers) and easily none in many groups. So, how long is reasonable? How long should the game cater to a tiny minority of players instead of much larger groups? I get that you really like halfings and that's fine. No problems. But, how long? Is 50 years long enough for a failed option? And, yes, it is a failed option since it never, ever gained any real traction among game tables.

Let's be honest here, if halflings WERE relegated to the Monster Manual, do you think it would have the slightest impact on the number of tables that see halflings played?