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

[FrozenNorth]

Rewriting them from the ground up to be more like other races and completely changing their identity does effectively destroy them. Others want to remove them from the PHB because they don't like them.

Change is change. Saying that halflings probably aren’t popular enough to be one of the four core races (or should be relegated to the equivalent of Volo’s or MtoF) in a new edition is not “destroying” them or an indication that one “hates” halflings. Neither is saying that their lore would be more interesting if modified.

Saying that people who disagree with you are trying to “destroy” what you like or “hate” the things you like only serves to turn up the heat in a discussion and to give people who agree with you an excuse to dig in their heels and dismiss others. It is even worse when it is a caricature of others’ position.

No one is arguing for grabbing anyone’s PHB and tearing pages out of it. Even if 6e comes out and halflings are portrayed somewhat differently (or only appear in a splatbook), nothing prevents you from playing a halfling in exactly the same way you have to date.

Those who wish to change (or demphasize) halflings have the same goals you do: they believe the game as a whole would be better if changes were made. One theme that has returned repeatedly is that replacing some of the older races would allow newer races more chance to flourish, and would reflect the characters that newer players wish to play.

I like playing half-orcs, but if a compelling case can be made that the next edition is better served by replacing them with full-blood orcs or goliaths, well, I’ll probably still argue, but I won’t say that the change “hated” half-orcs and were trying to “destroy” them for no reason.

 

[Bolares]

"Perhaps it is because of their shorter
lives that they strive to achieve as much as they can in
the years they are given. Or maybe they feel they have
something to prove to the elder races, and that's why
they build their mighty empires on the foundation of
conquest and trade. Whatever drives them, halflings
are the innovators, the achievers, and the pioneers
of the worlds."

This is a really good point.

Halflings are really similar to "real world" humans, but are totally diferent from PHB humans. Humans can be put in place of halflings in their description, but PHB humans cannot

 

[ccs]

My gripe is on the DM side.

A village of halflings offers no gameplay alterations over a village of humans. Halflings don't special in anything that affect gameplay. Halflings would not have craftmen and masters that differ in quantity or quality than humans. The only thing that changes is the heights of doors and ceilings.

The base lore do not seperate them from humans at all. A dwarven village would have better axes, hammers, and metal armors. A elven village would have bows, swords, instrutments, and healing potions for sale. Even if you made awhole village of tieflings, you'd think someone has a cursed or infernal weapon stashed someplace for sale as devils and cultists would constantly attempting to tempt evil tiefling villagers.

So your dislike of halflings stems from the fact that your a crap/lazy DM who won't use your imagination to fill in the blanks.

Look, I get "not being inspired" by something as written. It's how I feel about Sorcerers....
But, unlike the anti-halfling crowd, I don't rant about them or wish them removed as an option.
And if I ever actually need to for whatever reason I can certainly spend some time coming up with something interesting for Sorcerers....

 

[Bolares]

So your dislike of halflings stems from the fact that your a crap/lazy DM who won't use your imagination to fill in the blanks.

woooow, that's agressive

 

[carkl3000]

okay, so we should just get rid of all races?
look the list of things so far found in nature that are inscrutable are things like quantum physics or the point of reality nothing has been found that we can't comprehend how it works however we have found endless numbers of complete weirdos thus a dnd race is one of them as the base line instead of the anomaly.

Not at all, there's interesting stuff to work with in all the race descriptions, but from the standpoint of character type and personality, you can't say that any of it isn't based off of very human emotions and motivations. They tried to make a non-human intellect in the lizardfolk description. It was a valiant attempt, but there is no way to write a personality or character-type that makes sense to human players without making it somewhat human.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Okay...

Oops! Nope!

you did the reverse not the task,

So your dislike of halflings stems from the fact that your a crap/lazy DM who won't use your imagination to fill in the blanks.

Look, I get "not being inspired" by something as written. It's how I feel about Sorcerers....
But, unlike the anti-halfling crowd, I don't rant about them or wish them removed as an option.
And if I ever actually need to for whatever reason I can certainly spend some time coming up with something interesting for Sorcerers....

why should wotc not fill in the blacks it is their product? tsr never managed it.

 

[Oofta]

Change is change. Saying that halflings probably aren’t popular enough to be one of the four core races (or should be relegated to the equivalent of Volo’s or MtoF) in a new edition is not “destroying” them or an indication that one “hates” halflings. Neither is saying that their lore would be more interesting if modified.

Saying that people who disagree with you are trying to “destroy” what you like or “hate” the things you like only serves to turn up the heat in a discussion and to give people who agree with you an excuse to dig in their heels and dismiss others. It is even worse when it is a caricature of others’ position.

No one is arguing for grabbing anyone’s PHB and tearing pages out of it. Even if 6e comes out and halflings are portrayed somewhat differently (or only appear in a splatbook), nothing prevents you from playing a halfling in exactly the same way you have to date.

Those who wish to change (or demphasize) halflings have the same goals you do: they believe the game as a whole would be better if changes were made. One theme that has returned repeatedly is that replacing some of the older races would allow newer races more chance to flourish, and would reflect the characters that newer players wish to play.

I like playing half-orcs, but if a compelling case can be made that the next edition is better served by replacing them with full-blood orcs or goliaths, well, I’ll probably still argue, but I won’t say that the change “hated” half-orcs and were trying to “destroy” them for no reason.

I personally wouldn't have used the term "destroyed" but I do think some people want to effectively remove the halfling as we know it from the game. As far as popularity, what threshold do we need? According to the best numbers we have they're between 5-6% of the PCs played. That's actually quite good considering how many races are available.

Going from personal experience, halflings are about as common as a lot of the non-human races. Should they be a common race? Who cares? Whether you like it or not, D&D has been and likely always will have a shared heritage with LOTR and halflings are part of that heritage right along with elves, dwarves and how dragons are depicted. While we aren't playing Adventures in Middle Earth by default (I'm sure some people do), there is still an expectation that some of the visuals will remain the same.

A compelling case to me is not "make them more aggressive like every other race". If you don't want to play halflings, there are a ton of other options. All I ask, all anyone is asking, is that you leave us our particular niche race alone even if you don't want to play them. Personally I don't think I'll ever play a tiefling, doesn't mean I'm telling everyone they should be removed from the PHB.

Change for the sake of change is not justification.

 

[Neonchameleon]

why should wotc not fill in the blacks it is their product? tsr never managed it.

I don't know why TSR and WotC don't fill in the blanks in the Forgotten Realms. Based on the 2e and 3.X publishing schedule I thought that filling in the blanks was the whole point of the Realms?

 

[Gammadoodler]

I don't quite know what work "uniquely" is doing here, but setting that to one side I don't think this is true. Elves are non-human - we're told that they are a magical people of otherworldly grace and not entirely of the material world. (@Neonchameleon has shown that this can be treated as a metaphor for some humans; but literally it does not describe any humans. That's the difference from the Halfling description, as @Hussar and @Yaarel have pointed out.)

If all you need is a description of being "magical" and "otherworldly", they can be added in basically anywhere in the halfling description without changing the substance of the description one iota.

"Magical" and "otherworldly" are meaningless descriptors beyond lazy writer code for "you should be impressed."

 

[Gammadoodler]

you did the reverse not the task,

why should wotc not fill in the blacks it is their product? tsr never managed it.

If your argument is A=A, the task should work in either direction. It doesn't.