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

[doctorbadwolf]

The year he died they were still letting airships with nazi crosses on them land freely in the USA.

The US had a small but vocal Nazi party of its own, as well. And many more people who were extremely critical of them.

Like…you know there were people publicly castigating the proponents of slavery in the first years of the transatlantic slave trade, right? The idea that living 100 years ago, literally within living memory, spares him from criticism for his clearly stated views, is just wildly bonkers.

In the 1940's the United States arrested a lot of Japanese people explicitly for being Japanese and mainstream society was ok with it.

Whataboutism is never valid. Both the actions of the US, and the views of people like Lovecraft, were utterly vile and deserving of scorn.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Sure there is. The intimidate skill exists.

And no, gnomes are resistant to mental magic. It’s not a difficult distinction. You’re aggressively not getting a very simple thing, here.

Intimidation doesn't induce a saving throw, so no interpration of the Halfling Brave ability would cover it.

Also, I pretty much never use Persuasion or Intimidation on Player Characters, because that would end up requiring me telling them how they react to an NPC. And I don't do that. Despite the number of attacks aimed my way saying I do.

That will never happen.

People sure do seem confident that statistics never does anything weird. I mean, after you roll a die so many times does every single face turn to a 1 and make it impossible to roll anything else?

Unlikely.

And yet possible. Magical Fear is not super common. And even if it comes up, that doesn't mean the halfling will even be targeted.

Yep.

Far as I can tell, yeah. I’ve never heard this complaint before, and even you didn’t harp on this in the last halfling thread, so it seems like an arbitrary complaint because you got no traction with other complaints.

Every thread I get involved in seems to have me locked into a constantly struggle to defend myself, but this is a new one. No, I didn't make up a problem that has never existed just to make up new problems. This is a different discussion than the last thread, so different things are getting brought up. Heck, this wouldn't have even been a thing if Faolyn hadn't started berating me about being a terrible DM because I struggle with portraying these features well.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Once again taking a grain of truth and twisting it into something it's not.

I don't put Tolkien on a pedestal. I've read The Hobbit and LOTR a couple of times (not unusual for me) but I wouldn't put him in my top 5 favorite author list.

I'm just saying his ideas and influence, not just in D&D but fantasy in general since is not matched by Martin.

The GoT books are well received and popular. But their ideas aren't particularly special or unique. It's typical Machiavellian scheming by politicians with dragons.

To say that Tolkien was different and opened up the ideas of what fantasy can be says nothing about authors before or since.

I'm sorry if I read too deeply into your post, but... Do you think you might be being a little bit harsh on a guy whose books aren't even finished and whose television series just ended 2 years ago?

I haven't read or seen any of it yet (by the time I heard about it, it was well underway and I couldn't find the time to break in) but just declaring that it is going to have nowhere near the impact in two years that Tolkien has had in 70... is kind of obvious. Like, someone in 1954 saying that Tolkien's ideas and influence n Fantasy are far less that Lord Dunsay's. Well, might have been true at the time but clearly as the years marched on that changed.

Personally, I don't think Tolkien really did anything that unique in terms of storytelling. Or at least, the things he did do were not the things that were carried on into fantasy as a whole.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This statement needs a “directly” or a “consciously” added to it, to be true.

Tolkein is literally part of the cultural water in which western fantasy fiction fans are swimming. Sea fish know salt water.

Why? I could have just as easily been inspired by Celtic Myths, Germanic Faerie Tales, or something from Japanese Culture I have never even heard of. Should I credit Robin Hood for my enjoyment of archery? Or do I have to give credit to Tolkien for making Legolas?

If I'm playing a wizard, was I inspired by Gandalf? Merlin? Harry Potter? Harry Dresden? The Gallant Jirayia? Sailor Moon? Can you say that I must have been unconciously influenced by Tolkien, when "magic" is such a common thread, and "magical old sage" as well?

 

[Yaarel]

Wasn't his wife jewish?

They divorced, partly because of his increasing racism.

 

[Bohandas]

There were people who weren’t racist in the 1600s. 100 years ago? He had contemporaries who found his views repugnant.

“Politically Correct” is a red herring. He was an absolutely vile racist sack of garbage who viewed the mixing of “races” as an evil that would doom humanity to degradation, and used frog people who were tainted by cosmic horrors as a direct, intentional, analogue for that “evil”.

EVERYONE before the 21st century was a sack of garbage in one way or another, with the exception of just a small handful of outliers. And it gets worse the further back you go; If you want to read any sort of classics, you're going to have to be able to get past the fact that a lot of the authors are just casually ok with things like slavery, sterilization, massacring prisoners, attacking civilians, draconian punishments, religious persecution, and, if you go back far enough in the right places, human sacrifice. I'm in the middle of reading the 16th century novel Journey to the West right now, and every few chapters there will suddenly be a passage containing something like "...and so the eunuch officer ordered the slaves to..." and these are the good guys and there isn't a hint of edge or irony. A few people get put to death for trivial offenses. And a couple times they accept a villain's surrender but then kill all of the villain's underlings. But you've gotta get past that values dissonance if you want to read classic literature because pre-information-age societies were all terrible.

EDIT:
And the Illiad. The Illiad starts with the greeks arguing over the distribution of comfort women.

EDIT:
and the worst ones of all are religious texts and you can choose any religion, eastern or western, they're all big on some combination of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, dangerous misinformation, massacres, forced conversion, self-inflicted misery, forced suicide, and/or torture, with very few exceptions. At least on paper. At least in the sacred texts.

 

[Oofta]

I'm sorry if I read too deeply into your post, but... Do you think you might be being a little bit harsh on a guy whose books aren't even finished and whose television series just ended 2 years ago?

I haven't read or seen any of it yet (by the time I heard about it, it was well underway and I couldn't find the time to break in) but just declaring that it is going to have nowhere near the impact in two years that Tolkien has had in 70... is kind of obvious. Like, someone in 1954 saying that Tolkien's ideas and influence n Fantasy are far less that Lord Dunsay's. Well, might have been true at the time but clearly as the years marched on that changed.

Personally, I don't think Tolkien really did anything that unique in terms of storytelling. Or at least, the things he did do were not the things that were carried on into fantasy as a whole.

I think there have been a lot of great authors, and if it hadn't been for Tolkien maybe someone else could have come along and done something similar. But before him we had some fantasy with authors like Burroughs and Howard, but those books were basically pulp fantasy. Those books were not bad and I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of or that I've never personally encountered. So yes, they wrote fantasy, but they didn't go as far in their world building. We likely wouldn't have elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins in anything like the form we have them now if it wasn't for Tolkien.

I mean, the last book I read was Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary and I really enjoyed it. Doesn't mean that I don't recognize Heinlein and Aasimov as being pivotal in the development of science fiction. Along the same line, JRR Martin may be a good author but he hasn't introduced pivotal or novel concepts to his world.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Personally, I don't think Tolkien really did anything that unique in terms of storytelling. Or at least, the things he did do were not the things that were carried on into fantasy as a whole.

Yeah magical world building in a universe not our own, with a map, made up languages, making mythic beings into people with cultures and recognizable emotions and motives, inventing songs, and other cultural intangibles, for those fantastical peoples, all totally old hat ideas before The Hobbit was published.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

EVERYONE before the 21st century was a sack of garbage in one way or another, with the exception of just a small handful of outliers. And it gets worse the further back you go; If you want to read any sort of classics, you're going to have to be able to get past the fact that a lot of the authors are just casually ok with things like slavery, sterilization, massacring prisoners, attacking civilians, draconian punishments, religious persecution, and, if you go back far enough in the right places, human sacrifice. I'm in the middle of reading the 16th century novel Journey to the West right now, and every few chapters there will suddenly be a passage containing something like "...and so the eunuch officer ordered the slaves to..." and these are the good guys and there isn't a hint of edge or irony. A few people get put to death for trivial offenses. And a couple times they accept a villain's surrender but then kill all of the villain's underlings. But you've gotta get past that values dissonance if you want to read classic literature because pre-information-age societies were all terrible.

EDIT:
And the Illiad. The Illiad starts with the greeks arguing over the distribution of comfort women.

EDIT:
and the worst ones of all are religious texts and you can choose any religion, eastern or western, they're all big on some combination of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, dangerous misinformation, massacres, forced conversion, self-inflicted misery, forced suicide, and/or torture, with very few exceptions. At least on paper. At least in the sacred texts.

LOL so you’re using a melodramatic rant about ancient texts to tell me to shut up about how bad a guy who wrote within living memory was.

Do you expect anyone to take that seriously, or are you just doing it for laughs?

EDIT: I forgot to even mention….quote me where I said that no should ever read Lovecraft!

 

[Umbran]

EVERYONE before the 21st century was a sack of garbage in one way or another...

Mod Note:

I think someone needs to chill out a bit. Will you do it on your own, or do we need to enforce it.

Folks, the hyperbolic rhetoric isn't going to be constructive. Tone it down several notches, please and thanks.