Okay, I'm coming back into the thread after catching up with the most recent dozen pages or so. I've seen a lot that I wanted to address/talk about throughout these pages, but I'm not in the mood to go through all of the pages again, find the specific posts, break them down to reply to all of them, and create a huge mess to read, so I'll just go over most of what I want to cover in this post without quotes.
A few pages ago,
@Oofta created a post about why they like halflings, and compared them to the happiest nations on Earth. I like that comparison, and think that including something like that in a future PHB would help give them a bit more identity, but I do have a few issues with it. First off, that's a cultural identity. That's a great bit of fluff for the Forgotten Realms or Wildemount, but not Eberron, or even just a different culture on the same world that has those halflings. And it doesn't seem to vibe as well with halflings as the cultures of dwarves and elves. Dwarven culture is rooted in their genetic nature, with them naturally being better miners and people that dwell underground than most other main D&D races, which makes their culture on many D&D worlds have to do with blacksmithing, stoneworking, armor/weaponry (in case they dig into a cavern with enemies in it), brewing (because of their natural resistance to being poisoned, and thus able to drink more alcohol before being drunk), and having less lighting underground because of their darkvision. Elves either have natural magic (High Elves, Eladrin), are adapted to the ecosystem they live in (Wood Elves for forests, Sea Elves for underwater), or both (Drow, Shadar-Kai, Pallid Elves) and their Trance and Fey Ancestry features also help influence their culture, like them not having beds because they don't sleep, being more likely to interact with entities that can charm or put people to sleep, because they're less likely to be affected by those features, and so on. Forest Gnomes are more likely to be surrounded by adorable, fluffy pets because they can talk with them, they protect their homes with illusions (as do Deep Gnomes), and they often live inside of hollowed-out trees because of they're small enough to fit inside of them. Rock Gnomes are often artificers and other artisans/tinkers because of their affinity to crafting things (I always explained it as them having small and nimble fingers that makes it easier for them to tinker), and it's not unusual for them to experiment with potions, inventions, spells, and other magical innovations because they're more able to take the side-effects of lots of those experiments if they go wrong, because of Gnomish Cunning.
Do halflings have any descriptions like that? Not as far as I'm aware. I know that this is subjective, but I like building the cultures of races off of their mechanical traits. I like creating different spins on these cultures using the mechanics, too. That's why I love the Zil Gnomes of Eberron, because it takes the fact that forest gnomes are small, sneaky, adept with illusion magic, and capable of using small critters for communication, and it takes a new spin on it. Now, Halflings are an amalgam of Kender and Hobbits, who look basically like just short humans (with big heads). They also don't have any explicitly magical features (I'm not saying this is a good thing or bad thing, it just makes their unique racial mechanics harder to justify in non-FR worlds), and they have much less of a defined cultural identity than most other PHB races (I'm excluding any race that depends on humans to exist, because humans are the "jack of all trades" race that can fulfill nearly any cultural theme that you want to give them. So, Tieflings, Half-Orcs, Half-Elves, and the like (Genasi, Aasimar, etc) aren't valid races to criticize for "what about their cultural identity!?!? They're lacking it too!!!"-whataboutisms in an argument that talks about Halflings lacking cultural identity).
The main racial traits that halflings get in the PHB are much harder to base cultures off of than nearly any other race in 5e that I have come across. Why are they brave?
Who knows? One would think that a small race would be more inclined to be cowardly than brave (because then an Ogre would look twice as big to a halfling than it would to a human, and thus be much more intimidating). Are any of their cultures ever based off of that? Not as far as I can tell. Why are they lucky?
This also has no workable explanation for non-FR worlds. Their cultures also don't seem to be based off of this at all, because how do you base a culture off of luck? I could see them doing something like Karma for a halfling culture, but that hasn't happened yet, and still wouldn't explain where they get their luck from.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to create good/inspiring cultures for Halflings, I'm saying that it's significantly harder to create them for Halflings than it is for almost any other race in the game. I know how to make cultures for Animal-folk (Aarakocra, Lizardfolk, Rabbitfolk, Owlfolk, Gnolls, Tortles, Locathah, Grung, etc), as you can just loosely base it off of the real world equivalents of/stereotypes about them. I know how to make cultures for inherently magical races, because that magic would likely be integrated into their culture. I know how to create cultures for fey-ish races (Elves, Gnomes, Centaurs, Satyrs, Firbolg, Fairies, etc), because I know what Fey are like and how they act. I know how to create cultures for races that are adapted to a specific environment (dwarves, goliaths, tritons, etc), because you can just go off of real world cultures/civilizations that lived in similar environments and take a fantastical spin on it. However, I don't have a single freaking clue how to create an inspiring and unique culture for short people that are inexplicably brave and inexplicably lucky. The closest thing I've seen to this is the Boromar Clan from Eberron, and even then, it would work better with gnomes (IMHO).
For races, mechanics are how you build good lore for races' cultures (IMO and IME). Halfling mechanics are difficult to base "good" lore off of. This is what I suspect is at the root at much of this disagreement.
Next, someone satirized that Halflings don't have an evil culture/subrace, and that's why they suck. I want to say, yes, that actually relates to the problem.
The problem is the lack of
good halfling lore. The race as a whole is lacking in general lore, but it's especially lacking in
good lore. Obviously, lore is subjective, but what I define as "good lore" is lore that is engaging and inspires character/world/culture ideas. Lore that doesn't do that is just filler lore/lore that exists just to have lore for something. Lots of races have filler lore (like many of the gnomish/dwarvish deities), but most of them have good lore (elven reincarnation, the war between Githyanki and Githzerai, the Dwarf-Duergar War, etc), and the ones that really stick out have more good lore than the others.
Dwarves and Elves notably have lots of lore, and a lot of that lore is good lore. This is largely because Dwarves and Elves were major protagonist races in Tolkien's works, and thus people were already fairly familiar with them and there was a starting place for D&D lore. People knew about them, thus there was a reason to give them the spotlight, and thus more lore was given to them than most other races. The more lore a race/culture has, the more likely it is for some of that lore to end up being good/inspiring lore (this does not mean that more lore automatically creates good lore, though, it just means that the odds of getting good lore is more heavily weighed in favor of races/cultures that have more total lore). Halflings, for some reason, got the short end of the stick, and ended up getting less lore than others. Their cultures are less defined and memorable than those of Dwarves and Elves in D&D, and thus there is less good lore to go around to them.
D&D's Elven and Dwarven cultures had good lore. They had lore that inspired tons of character ideas. This allowed them to take spins on the classic elf and dwarf tropes, and invert them so there was an evil equivalent of them (
like how MCU villains almost always are just a dark reflection of the superhero). Halflings, however, didn't have enough good cultural lore to be inverted in this way, and thus they're stuck in a sort of in-between place, where they're a perfectly fine race, but their lore is lacking in both quantity and quality.
However, if there was some good halfling lore, like that they're basically Always Happy People that's dogma in life was "
we can endure struggles if we can make the end of it sweet", that would codify their culture in an inspiring way that could be inverted. If that cultural ideal was inverted,
you could end up with something like halflings that force other people to be happy (
or act/look happy) or halflings that try erase every other cultural that they come into contact with because they see theirs as superior due to their people always being happy (maybe
this trope would fit the last example).
I still have the same issue with giving halflings this main culture as before (that I don't see why halflings would be the happy people), but I would be willing to suspend my disbelief if something like this was given. Tiny evil halflings that are so obsessed with their people being seen as happy that they force others to join their culture and enforce happiness/smiling with
disproportionate responses is at least an inspiring culture concept that I could get behind. That would be cool. I don't care if the basis for this is for a race that is no more inclined towards happiness than any other (IMO), it's a cool enough bit of lore that I would support being added to D&D halflings officially.
So, yeah, a problem I have with halflings isn't necessarily that there isn't any evil equivalent of PHB halflings, it's more that there isn't enough halfling lore to go on to make an inspiring evil twist on it if you wanted to do that. So, even though that post was meant to be absurd, it's actually highlighting part of the problem that I and others have been saying since the beginning of the thread.
