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

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I've pretty much decided to hand wave away speaking with animals as the magic taking liberties with the translation to making something intelligible rather than a literal translation.

I do this, but do combine in a spattering of animals just being animals, reacting instead of pre-acting, like a mouse going on a random rant about how much it likes cheese, or a songbird screaming, "Aaaagh! Big scary people! Lots of big scary people!" as it flies away from the scary party.

I also justify part of gnomish eccentricity by this. If all you heard all day were a bunch of high-pitched, tiny animals asking you for food, twitching about looking for predators, and so on, you would be a bit jumpy and eccentric, too. The nature of these animals kind of rubs off on them, in my campaigns.

 

[Don Durito]

Ranger: "Look yon rabbits frolicking in the wan light of sunset"
Halfling Bard: "Oh so cute. I love bunnies".
Forest Gnome: "Quick everyone, lets move fast, pretend we're in a hurry and whatever you do, don't make eye contact".

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

small children and with an alien mindset

Redundant.

 

[Scott Christian]

As usual @AcererakTriple6 you make valid points. But I think there is a piece of logic you are missing. The reverse is true for almost all races. Elves. Dwarves. Humans. Gnomes. So many of them. None of them exist for no real narrative or plot driving purpose, especially in a game where DMs can make their own world.

Take the wood elf. Just a forest human with a long lifespan. The mountain dwarf is a hairy human that is short. Etc. And that gets us to the crux. It is not about the narrative of the race - it is about the mechanics. Halflings have a niche in the mechanics that are just as powerful as the dwarf or elf. And in the end, that is why many players choose their race.

Those that don't choose their race that way, still look at the mechanics, and use those mechanics to build the narrative. So be it charismatic and happy halfling bard that has second breakfast planned before camp has broken or the hairfoot hiding rogue that has the stealth to crawl past two fire giants, those mechanics help build the halfling narrative.

 

[Don Durito]

And no doubt a higher percentage of players and GMs read the mechanics than the background lore.

God knows I haven't read most of the lore in the PHB, or if I have it's just sunk into the morass of background knowledge. I certainly couldn't tell you what specifically what it says about Dwarves in the PHB as opposed to my general pre-conceptions about them.

That may be different of course for new players, but it may not. Most people learn the game from other people, not by reading the book. (And perhaps now by watching streams).

I don't think the mechanics are all that matters. But I also don't think the 5e specific conceptualisations carry as much weight either as some people here seem to think they do.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My favorite gnome PC so far was a forest gnome conjuration wizard who could talk to small animals, but he didn't like them and found them annoying most of the time. He also worshipped Urdlen, the evil giant mole god, due to his grandfather's bizarre beliefs that the rest of the Gnomish pantheon was a bunch of bullies who did Urdlen dirty.

He also had a flying monkey familiar that could pick him up and fly him around by RAW.

Mine was a ranger who used silver-tipped bolts for his twin repeating crossbow. He had a giant space hamster mount named Mithril.

 

[Campbell]

Is this where I admit my irrational fear of the short and say I don't trust anyone not in my field of vision?

 

[Hussar]

Thanks for this @Faolyn. This is honestly, truly appreciated.

Reasons:

People play them. Maybe not a lot, but enough.

See, that's I think the crux of my disagreement. I don't think it's enough. And, I think it's a number that is dropping as years go on. Or, at least the percentage is dropping. But, I have pretty much zero proof of that, other than reading chicken entrails, so, I can't really argue with you.

The fill the everyman niche well, and people like them for that.

They're generic enough that it's very easy to stick them in any world with few or no modifications. Many other races--dragonborn, any planetouched, gith, minotaurs, kobolds, goblinoids--have enough differences or history that they don't fit in some settings well.

That's actually not really accurate though. Halflings in every other setting are massively rewritten from the PHB. Darksun, Dragonlance, Eberron. If halflings are included in the setting, then they are rarely PHB halflings, to the point of being pretty much unrecognizable as halflings. Kender aren't even called halflings. And dino riding plains barbarians is about as far removed from the PHB depiction of halflings as you can get. Whereas Eberron elves aren't all that terribly different from bog standard elves. Same as Eberron dwarves. While Dark Sun elves are quite different from standard elves - they do share more points than differences. And an Athasian Dwarf is basically a really dwarfy dwarf.

Again, you're comparing minor races like dragonborn, which have very short histories in the game, with one of the core 4 races. I mean, of the examples you gave, only the dragonborn and planetouched (tiefling) even appear in the PHB. We need to be careful to compare apples to apples.

They're traditional.

They don't take up that much space in the book.

More races can be added to the PH without having to remove them.

Traditionally though, no you can't. 5e is the first PHB to add races. 4e added and subtracted. 3e and earlier never added anything that wasn't in 1e PHB. Five editions of the game and we've only seen one PHB that added races to the PHB. So, the idea that we can just add more races, while true, certainly isn't borne out by experience. And, three pages in the PHB is a LOT. That is a significant amount of space. It's not like the old days when a race description took up a couple of paragraphs.

 

[Hussar]

Ok, just for the sake of completeness, I'm going to go through all the modules for 5e and count the number of references to halfling dragonborn and dwarf/dwarves.

Module	Halfling	Dragonborn	Dwarf/dwarves	Page Count
Hoard of the Dragon Queen	2	0	5	96
Rise of Tiamat	1	1	14	98
Princes of the Apocalypse	20	0	88	258
Out of the Abyss	0	0	42	256
Curse of Strahd	0	0	5	256
Storm King's Thunder	14	0	35	256
Tales of the Yawning Portal	6	0	50	250
Tomb of Annihilation	5	2	51	260
Waterdeep Dragon Heist	18	6	41	228
Dungeon of the Mad Mage	8	4	120	322
Ghosts of SaltMarsh	8	2	28	256
Baldur's Gate Descent into Avernus	7	5	10	256
Rime of the Frostmaiden	Not available
Candlekeep Mysteries	0	11	15	265
Totals	89	31	504	3057

Wow, dragonborn are REALLY getting the shaft here. But, as far as the core 4 main races go, halflings are virtually non-existent in the adventures. They are very under utilized.

 

[Don Durito]

How many of those references to Dwarves say they built something in the past?