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

[doctorbadwolf]

This is why I’m not super crazy about Elves as a common PC race, or even as common NPCs (probably an unpopular opinion, I realize). When Elves are common in the setting, they do tend to wind up as little more than pointy eared humans.

I like Elves a lot. I like them as ethereal, aloof, inscrutable Fey folk. When a player plays an Elf, I like it when they really lean into that side of things

That being said, I would never tell my player they can’t play an elf or that they’re playing an Elf wrong. I’ve had some players take Elves in radically different directions that I never would have thought of myself, and the results have often been delightful.

Speaking to that, I was just telling my wife that if I could, I think I’d either get rid of elves and have the “elf” option be half-elf, or make half-elf a variant elf. (Take elf, trade Dex for Cha, and perception for persuasion, and you got yourself a half elf)

The two options produce different results obviously, but yeah, getting rid of elves as a common race would make them more interesting. Or perhaps they simply need to be less mundane? Like, make them more like Eladrin? Not sure how mythical you could make them and stay within D&D race paradigms, though.

In my game, Alfar are closely related to the Vaetr, which are spirits associated with land features, events like sunrise and the tides, or with elements. Alfar are descended from vaetr who became mortal in order to affect the mortal world more directly, and stayed too long amongst mortals, and became a mortal Fey race. They are cousins of the svartalfar, who are particularly related to nocturnal and subterranean spirits, but less spirits of the earth and more spirits of life underground.

Alfar are beings of light and spirit, but also of corporeal flesh, and they can become more spirit or more mortal as they grow in experience and wisdom, though they don’t age as other mortals do, but instead go through cycles of youth and age, eventually entering a long slumber and awakening, sometimes decades later, essentially a new person with distant memories of their old lives. When they do die, their spirit continues within the land as a spirit, sometimes becoming a minor vaetr, sometimes incorporating back into the spiritual community of living alfar, which means that they are somewhat reincarnated with a future generation.

Procreation is a partly spiritual affair for all creatures in quest for Chevar, as a principle of the setting is that the formation of a new soul is a process that takes seed elements from the parents, from the community, and from the land, and gathers those disparate elements into a new soul that then grows over time into an individual that is part of a spiritual whole.

For alfar, this isn’t philosophy, as they actually experience the process consciously, and retain some of what came together to form them.

Alfar can speak to spirits naturally, without the need to train in the usual skills. It’s limited, but being a bridge between beings wholly of spirit and beings primarily of flesh gives them a special place in the world. They’re ethereal but tangible, mortal but not in the same way humans are mortal, they are fundamentally different from humans.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

@Chaosmancer I am sorry, I had to put you on ignore in order to exit the earlier interaction without making it worse.

Having taken a break from this discussion, I have a question. Earlier in the thread I posited some simple additions to Halfling lore, and asked if something along those lines would potentially fix the problem for you.

So, would you be interested in a fresh discussion about making Halflings more interesting to you?2

 

[Hussar]

That's the only reason any race is in the PHB.

Strongly disagree.

"I like it therefore it should be in the PHB" is an incredibly arrogant point of view. As if my personal feelings should dictate what you get to play or how the game should look? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.

If something is in the PHB, it should be serving a purpose other than, "Well, I like it."

 

[Hussar]

You've already said you have nothing to back this up, so you should probably stop making this claim.

Actually, I have LOTS to back this up and no I certainly said nothing of the sort.

I POSTED the number of times halflings appear in WotC adventures. It's pretty much very close to zero in most adventures. So, no, the point about if you play a WotC adventure, you will almost never meet anything related to a halfling in the entire campaign stands as a pretty easy to show fact. If halflings are never mentioned AT ALL in an adventure, then odds are, you won't meet any halflings in that adventure. And of all the WotC adventures, halflings barely appear in any of them.

Now, you have zero evidence that halflings are more used in home games. You have zero idea. They might be in your games, but, that's it. At least I can point to ACTUAL BOOKS that many thousands of groups are using, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of players are playing. Your counter evidence is... your game?

 

[Hussar]

And finally, it's been said, frequently, that many halflings live among humans, so if there's a human population in the area, there will be halflings. Maybe they're not directly mentioned by the adventure, but they're there in the background.

But, they aren't.

They are never the shop keepers, or people you randomly meet on the street or anything the PC's interact with. In all of Waterdeep, halflings are barely mentioned at all, in a city of hundreds of thousands of humans. And that's the one module where halflings appear the most. Yet, despite the hundreds of NPC's in Waterdeep Dragon Heist (and there are a LOT of NPC's in that module, it's more setting guide than module), virtually none of them are halflings.

So, even the published material doesn't match what you're claiming.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Strongly disagree.

"I like it therefore it should be in the PHB" is an incredibly arrogant point of view. As if my personal feelings should dictate what you get to play or how the game should look? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.

If something is in the PHB, it should be serving a purpose other than, "Well, I like it."

I thought it was obvious I didn't mean "I personally". If it was what I liked the first thing I would do would be to delete tired cliché-ridden elves.

I mean "what people like to play (at the time of writing)" - with the emphasis on PLAY for PCs, not "what the DM wants to use for world building" which belongs in setting books and monster manuals.

Obviously no one is going to go back and change the 5.0e PHB significantly, and and 5.5/6e book would be based around the idea of lineages (which cover a wider range of concepts) rather than races.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I POSTED the number of times halflings appear in WotC adventures.

I don't know if you mentioned it elsewhere, but there are two named halfling NPCs in Rime of the Frostmaiden (more than there are elves). Nimsy Huddle, the Lonlywood speaker and a questgiver, and Perilou Fishfinger, an adventurer in need of assistance.

Does it matter that Nimsy is a halfling? Not particularly, you could replace her with a stick figure with a gold exclamation mark over her head, but Perkins does make use of her halfling-ness in establishing her character, which is more than he does for Imdra Arlaggath, the Easthaven questgiver, whose halfelfness isn't touch upon.

Edit: I forgot one: Rinaldo, a local Character in Easthaven who organises a séance. Poor Rinaldo came to a sticky end in my game.

 

[Hussar]

I thought it was obvious I didn't mean "I personally". If it was what I liked the first thing I would do would be to delete tired cliché-ridden elves.

I mean "what people like to play (at the time of writing)" - with the emphasis on PLAY for PCs, not "what the DM wants to use for world building" which belongs in setting books and monster manuals.

Obviously no one is going to go back and change the 5.0e PHB significantly, and and 5.5/6e book would be based around the idea of lineages (which cover a wider range of concepts) rather than races.

The problem with this point is that there is zero evidence that there are any significant numbers of "poeple who like to play". And at least circumstantial evidence that they don't, compounded by the virtual complete lack of use of halflings in any WotC publications where the other races at least get some to a lot of attention.

This is my point of contention. The basic counter argument that I keep getting is that halflings are this popular, commonly played race. The only problem is, there is zero evidence to support that.

 

[Hussar]

I don't know if you mentioned it elsewhere, but there are two named halfling NPCs in Rime of the Frostmaiden (more than there are elves). Nimsy Huddle, the Lonlywood speaker and a questgiver, and Perilou Fishfinger, an adventurer in need of assistance.

Does it matter that Nimsy is a halfling? Not particularly, you could replace her with a stick figure with a gold exclamation mark over her head, but Perkins does make use of her halfling-ness in establishing her character, which is more than he does for Imdra Arlaggath, the Easthaven questgiver, whose halfelfness isn't touch upon.

Note, I did mention that I couldn't do a search on Rime of the Frostmaiden, so, I couldn't include that in any of my numbers. But, it looks like halflings play pretty much no role in the module, from what you're saying, in a setting that is predominantly human (the Ten Towns) which means, according to many in this thread, we should be up to our ankles in halflings.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I thought it was obvious I didn't mean "I personally". If it was what I liked the first thing I would do would be to delete tired cliché-ridden elves.

I mean "what people like to play (at the time of writing)" - with the emphasis on PLAY for PCs, not "what the DM wants to use for world building" which belongs in setting books and monster manuals.

Obviously no one is going to go back and change the 5.0e PHB significantly, and and 5.5/6e book would be based around the idea of lineages (which cover a wider range of concepts) rather than races.

look if players like to play them then making it so that dm can world build with them effectively would help avoid the container look and make both sides feel less at odds.