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

[Vaalingrade]

And what force of evil would ignore a group of people well known for producing "freaks who are larger than life and the actual one who change the world"?

Ones with better things to do than harass farmers on the off chance their grandson will learn ultraviolence?

 

[Bardic Dave]

A reminder: This is the same loser who created the halflings that you object to even existing.

I laughed, but let’s be fair: Chaosmancer wants to spice Halflings up (according to what he finds spicy). He doesn’t want to remove them.

Personally, I like my default halfling mild and unspicy, but with a hidden potential (just like Tolkien’s hobbits). They’re the quintessential zero-to-hero character race. Some might find that particular narrative conceit boring and overplayed, but personally I can’t get enough of it.

EDIT: although, if your point was that Chaosmancer’s criticisms apply equally well to Tolkien’s hobbits, then I agree with you!

 

[Bardic Dave]

Ones with better things to do than harass farmers on the off chance their grandson will learn ultraviolence?

See, @Chaosmancer, even when something doesn’t “make sense” in the fiction it’s nonetheless possible to come up with a fictional justification if you try hard enough. You can reject it as insufficient in your eyes, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

 

[Vaalingrade]

What if we made halflings incapable of stating anything in less than 500 words?

The verb 'to be' in halfling is a five page treatise on the nature of being and how the singular is actually a vast majority.

 

[Bardic Dave]

What if we made halflings incapable of stating anything in less than 500 words?

The verb 'to be' in halfling is a five page treatise on the nature of being and how the singular is actually a vast majority.

That would definitely make them “interesting”!

 

[Bardic Dave]

How do you know it doesn't matter to most people? You want to frame this like I'm the outlier, but you could just as easily be the outlier in not caring how a group of people interact with the world.

When it comes to our niche preferences regarding specific aspects of these fantasy races, we are all outliers. If we weren’t all so united objecting to your claims re:the one true way to do fantasy races, we’d probably all have a million things to disagree about on the topic of Halflings alone.

Which isn’t to say you aren’t entitled to your opinion, but to hold it up as “correct” and to argue passionately in its favour on the basis of aesthetic preferences that most of us don’t share is a losing proposition.

 

[Don Durito]

Why do Dwarves use Axes? Dwarves have short legs which limits their reach, yet they use weapons that by and large have short reach compared to other weapons like swords.

This makes absolutely no sense. Yet Dwarves are supposed to be extremely effective martial warriors. How can they have this reputation as warriors when they don't even choose the most effective weapons for their circumstances? Clearly they should be using spears or pole-arms. This completely kills my suspension of disbelief.

I demand that this be addressed forthwith. Clearly the design is objectively bad as I have just proven.

 

[Chaosmancer]

It would be hard for me to conceive of a less effective rebuttal; you’re completely missing the point.

It’s possible—admirable even—to design a fantasy world in which things “making sense” (according to your particular definition of what makes sense) is a top design priority. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It can get a bit unwieldy to do so, you’ll probably overlook a few things, and even if you nail it, somebody will inevitably complain that something doesn’t “make sense” regardless. Still, it’s a worthwhile exercise if you want to undertake it.

However, that’s clearly not a top priority for FR and D&D. It’s laughably easy to pick apart any number of design decisions on the basis that the in-fiction justification is insufficent, incoherent, or even wholly absent. It’s an exercise in futility, because it’s mostly completely beside the point. You could criticize ANY of the races for reasons very similar to what you’ve articulated.

We get it. You find halflings dissppointing. I hate gnomes, ironically because I don’t find them that interesting and I don’t think they’re distinct enough from halflings, elves or dwarves to have “earned” their place. What I won’t do, however, is put my own opinion up on a pedestal and try to argue that it’s the “correct” one. That would be absurd.

"The design of the game is already terribly unrealistic, therefore changing it is pointless"

First of all, I disagree with you. Just because DnD and FR are currently a mess doesn't mean that it is futile to try and make it a little neater. Sure, we can pick apart hundreds of things, thousands even, but just because we can doesn't mean addressing one of them in a fashion aimed to make it stronger and less incoherent is a wasted effort.

Secondly, there are plenty of aspects of DnD that can make sense. Not all of it, because it is a game and has some inherent limits, but one thing that shouldn't be that hard is making coherent lore for the races. Now, am I saying halfling lore is completely incoherent? No, I'm using your terminolgy in responding to you. Did you say that halfling lore is completely incoherent? No, but you clearly seem to think that it is one of those three adjectives, because your rebuttal isn't that it doesn't have issues, but that fixing those issues is a waste of time because there are many more issues.

Which is not a strong rebuttal.

 

[Chaosmancer]

One who cares about Linguistics passionately and less so about socio-economic plausibility.

Where did the Noldor get their slaves from? All the societies that inspired Tolkien's histories were slave owning societies. Where do the elves of Lothlorien get their food from? It's really difficult to farm a forest without at least some kind of slash and burn agriculture, yet if they were hunter-gatherers they would not be anything like as settled as they seem to be. What about Dwarves, what do they eat deep under mountains?

I can see why you feel there are things that are implausbile about halflings. What I can't understand is why you feel this one specific thing is particularly worthy of note, when it's just an arbritrary example of thousands of things that are implausible in D&D. Perhaps it just intersects with an issue that is important to you. (Personally, if I was ditiching or revising races that make no plausible sense the Dwarves would be going much sooner. At least the Halflings do farm.)

After thousands and thousands of words, isn't it time to acknowledge here that your issue is a personal one?

As I said to Bardic Dave "many things are broken so fixing any of them is a waste of time" is a poor argument.

As for why I am discussing this particular issue? Because someone made a thread about it, and world-building is a passion of mine.

Seriously, do you guys think this is my only possible issue? Do you think that I find no fault with anything else in the game? I've said repeatedly that I do. That there are a lot of things that I work to fix. I've been toying with a way to make slot based magic make sense for years. The reason I'm talking about halflings in this thread is... this is a thread about halflings.

And, how is my point that halflings could stand to be improved any less personal that your point that halflings are perfectly fine as is because you like them?

 

[Chaosmancer]

A reminder: This is the same loser who created the halflings that you object to even existing.

I know. Sort of the point of barb to show that "making things in fantasy realistic is a waste of time" by reminding people that own of their heroes of fantasy worked to do exactly that with something most people never bothered to care about.