I never said that nomadic people don't keep things that aren't strictly practical. You would do a lot better in this discussion if you stopped attributing arguments to me that I am not making. You lash out at some imagined point then I have to fight back to even get back to where I started.
I'm doing fine in this discussion, my dude. I think it's probably time it got shut down, because it's quickly reaching the point where it's mostly mutual irritation and only a little bit new ideas or arguments, but I'm an optimist. Maybe it'll turn around.
So, in the text you quoted, I indicated that real life nomadic people keep things that aren't practical. You seem to have just assumed that I said this in direct response to you explicitly saying the opposite, even though the text gives no reason to think that. This is frustrating, because you've done a similar thing nearly every time you've replied to me in this thread.
The issue is HOW MUCH would they hold onto? Would they hide away and not "show off" fancy clothes they have, or would they wear them and get practical use out of them instead of having a storage box of clothes they never wear in the wagon. An agrarian halfling can get away with that, because they have more space and need to transport less, so they might end up treating items differently because of different practical concerns.
No, that's
your issue, that you've tried to make the argument about, even though it's a wild tangent. The issue is that you've taken "it's not hard to draw a paralel from the hypothetical, not at all meant to be taken literally as if all Halflings everywhere have cellars and store their treasures in them, idea of putting treasures in storage rather than showing them off, and apply that to nomadic life" as some sort of statement of...honestly I don't even know? What do you think my position even is, here? Did you think I was saying that riverboat halflings literally have cellars in their boat!?
Like...i don't understand how you can read my I wrote and take away the idea that the cellar is the damn point.
And if you also think I have so badly interpretted this line "the affront is that they are the only race that believes in peace, tranquility, joy, happiness." then please, tell me what you think it means?
By itself, outside the context of the entire post you've pulled it from? Literally nothing at all. I mean, the statement isn't even sensible in the form you've presented it. It can't be meaningfully interpreted when you don't include the rest of the text that makes clear what it's referring to.
So let's look at that quote again, shall we?
I have to chuckle. There is now this bizarre concept that a race that supposedly never goes to war, and is the only one, is worthless. Not even worthless, but completely unworthy. The idea is that this supposed people is so pathetic that they don't deserve to exist -- again, the affront is that they are the only race that believes in peace, tranquility, joy, happiness.
Holding this position is unfathomable, because believing both of these thoughts means that you feel that stories of peace and happiness cannot and must not exist. Holding this position is hypocritical, as you claim there is no story -- and yet you constantly repeat the story.
Heroes come from all walks of life. And if your table only has room for those who are constantly full of tragedy and violence I'm glad I don't play at it.
So, first we have an opening statement that makes it clear that the paragraph is addressing the "bizarre concept that a race...", then continues talking about
that idea, and finally says "again, the affront is", and you think that...the rest of that last sentence in the paragraph is them stating their opinion that halflings are the only race that believes in those things? Seriously?
They then go on to say that "holding this position is unfathomable". What position do you think they're talking about? Because the position they're very very
very clearly referring to is the position that they are decrying in the above paragraph, ie the idea that you are falsely ascribing to them as
their position.
And you once more, refuse to answer it. Somehow, you saying the PHB gives us three cultures and you also responding to a question about what the PHB says about those cultures being "the PHB doesn't cover everything" also... means something. I guess I can't say. I would think if the PHB included those cultures and those cultures had any differences, then answering "what are those differences" would be pretty easy. Instead you keep telling me how similar they are.
Refuse to answer a question I've never given a damn about? Probably, yeah. You've tried to twist my comment to someone else into an argument you think you can win, when I've never expressed the slightest interest in the point you're trying to make, one way or the other. The three halfling cultures presented in the PHB are very similar, yes. That was literally part of my point. That there is a clear through-line in the various halfling cultures, and that they are simply expressed differently depending on the material nature of how they live, ie whether they are agrarian, nomadic, or urban. This doesn't make them any less three distinct cultures, however, and this is more variety than we get for dwarves in the PHB.
Elves beat out both by virtue of having subraces that live completely different lives to the point where the last edition split them into wholly different races with a common ancestor.
OH, and I forgot to reply to a thing but I'm not gonna add it to this already long post. You claimed to have never struck out the text about halfling culture. I'll assume then that you did it by mistake, which is fair enough, but you absolutely did.
Also, in case I didn't already say this, I never said that everything I was quoting was directly relevant to nomadic halflings, I said I was removing anything I saw that was directly contradictory to nomadic halflings. So, getting pedantic about physical descriptions is pretty petty and weird.
