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

[Chaosmancer]

A light crossbow is 25 gp. That’s like 2 years’ wages to a farmer.

Um... no?

If you look at DMG pg 127 you see that a farm has 1 skilled hireling and 2 untrained. Considering a shopkeeper is considered skilled, I'd say a farmer is skilled, and the farm hands (who would be the family anyways) are unskilled.

PHB tells us that a skilled hireling can expect to make 2 gp per day. Obviously there is some wiggle room because that is before expenses, but considering that has a farmer would therefore be making something like 60 gp a month, it shouldn't take them more than a few months to save up for a crossbow, especially if the town is working together,

 

[Yaarel]

Um... no?

If you look at DMG pg 127 you see that a farm has 1 skilled hireling and 2 untrained. Considering a shopkeeper is considered skilled, I'd say a farmer is skilled, and the farm hands (who would be the family anyways) are unskilled.

PHB tells us that a skilled hireling can expect to make 2 gp per day. Obviously there is some wiggle room because that is before expenses, but considering that has a farmer would therefore be making something like 60 gp a month, it shouldn't take them more than a few months to save up for a crossbow, especially if the town is working together,

In reallife medieval contexts, bows and arrows that can be made from the woods, are cheaper than the swords and so on that require metallurgy.

Archery requires a significant amount of training, but is relatively inexpensive.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Um... no?

If you look at DMG pg 127 you see that a farm has 1 skilled hireling and 2 untrained. Considering a shopkeeper is considered skilled, I'd say a farmer is skilled, and the farm hands (who would be the family anyways) are unskilled.

PHB tells us that a skilled hireling can expect to make 2 gp per day. Obviously there is some wiggle room because that is before expenses, but considering that has a farmer would therefore be making something like 60 gp a month, it shouldn't take them more than a few months to save up for a crossbow, especially if the town is working together,

The PHB tells us that a skilled hireling charges 2gp per day for short term services to extremely dangerous and rich individuals. But this is windfall short term cash; you earn a lot less than that in a stable job.

Meanwhile the big issue with farming is how seasonal it is. That three person farm is almost certainly referring to growing season. It's going to need a lot more farmhands both in planting season and harvest season, and those are also considered unskilled. The question is what they do the rest of the year.

 

[Oofta]

... The question is what they do the rest of the year.

You've never worked on a farm, have you?

There are always things to prepare, fix, replace. Most farms are going to have animals and as the saying goes "the cows won't milk themselves".

There are certainly slower times, times to relax. But generally farmers are either busy or really super busy and having the entire family join in.

 

[pemerton]

Are we now arguing that the D&D price and wages lists actually model a real economy?

 

[Neonchameleon]

You've never worked on a farm, have you?

There are always things to prepare, fix, replace. Most farms are going to have animals and as the saying goes "the cows won't milk themselves".

There are certainly slower times, times to relax. But generally farmers are either busy or really super busy and having the entire family join in.

I'm not sure you have based on your comments. There's always something to be done - but there is very much seasonal labour involved especially for fruit picking and vegetable harvests. There is plenty for the skeleton crew of year round staff - but there is also a reason that there is an entire subculture of people travelling round Europe, following the seasons and harvests - and a reason that Brexit, which caused these people to stop coming to Britain, has resulted in fruit rotting in the fields and complaints that people won't uproot their lives for a few weeks for minimum wage.

There's always plenty for the farmer and family to do. But the seasonal labour requirements go far beyond that.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

All the younger players I know in person are inclusionists who detest or have no time for the gatekeeping of old - and all the halfling-haters I know in person are over the age of 40.

I'm a younger player, as I detailed in the OP, and I don't tolerate any gatekeeping, however, I completely disagree with the labeling of "people that dislike halflings" as "gatekeepers of the old". I've never said that anyone's fun was wrong, or that they shouldn't be able to play halflings, or that their fun is lesser than anyone else's, I just said that halflings aren't held to the same standards as plenty many of the other races in the game and want the game to change this in some way (to either make halflings have better lore or merge Halflings with Gnomes or even Humans by letting Humans be Medium or Small like Owlfolk and Rabbitfolk).

Also it's the younger settings from the 00s and 10s (like Eberron, the Nentir vale, and Exandria; all three seasons of Critical Role have had halfling PCs) that use halflings well and older settings from the 80s or even 70s (like Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Realms) that use them badly.

. . . But those settings almost definitely wouldn't include halflings in the first place if they weren't one of the "core" D&D races. Eberron makes interesting halflings (it doesn't make halflings be interesting, instead, it gives an interesting culture to halflings) and Exandria barely does any better than the Forgotten Realms in this manner (Lotusden Halflings are cool, but literally could just be Gnomes and there would be no difference). I know next-to-nothing about Nentir Vale, so I'm going to need an explanation of Halflings from that setting, if you would be so kind to provide it.

And another minor correction, there have only been two seasons of critical role, and only one of them included a Halfling PC, and that PC was a Goblin for about half of the campaign, so I'm going to count that as .5 Halflings in one season of Critical Role.

There were two gnome PCs in Season One of Critical Role, so going off of the fact that only about half of season 2 included a Halfling PC to support this statement:

There are 4 times as many long-term Gnome PCs (2 of them) than long-term Halfling PCs (.5 of them) in the combined first two seasons of Critical Role.

But superficially the move to push halflings out would seem to be rejecting tradition. It seems to me to be more circling the wagons and making an attempt to throw out the group that was unpopular back in the day. While also trying to restrict races under the guise of making space.

I don't want to restrict races, I want to allow anyone to play any race that they want. However, if something as simple as letting Humans be both Medium and Small can practically invalidate a race, I don't think that they warrant having their own separate race. Obviously I'm not the one that's going to make the decisions here, but I think that halflings would function just as well thematically as their own race as they would being a sub-type (not subrace, sub-type, just like Small Owlfolk and Rabbitfolk are subtypes of those races) of humans.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Because it's hard to be a trickster if everyone knows you're a trickster because you wrote "race of small magical tricksters" on your character sheet. If you make gnomes a subrace of halflings then you aren't advertising that aspect of gnomery

Yeah, just like a magician can't trick you, because everyone knows magicians do sleight of hand.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Did you not see where I specified high elves?

Also, there are several real-world living creatures that are nearly immortal and/or don't need to sleep, need almost no sleep, or that "trance" instead of sleep. So those traits are not inherently magical. They probably are, in the case of elves, but they don't have to be.

Um, I question this claim. Heavily.

Not the nearly immortal, I know that, but not needing sleep? To my knowledge one of the great mysteries of biology is that basically anything that doesn't need a microscope to be seen needs to sleep at some point. I've never heard of a complex life form that doesn't need to sleep. What are you thinking about here?

 

[Chaosmancer]

The thing is this is a consequence of just how unrealistic D&D damage is. If it's in the real world retreating from a rolling pin in dim light is an extremely sensible thing to do. You don't know what's there, that thing might break bones, and if you kill what do you actually achieve? The only thing that makes it a problem is the unrealistic consequence-free nature of hit points and the information the players are used to having.

IE: DnD working like Dnd makes this story more unrealistic.

It should also be noted that a 3 ft tall older woman with a rolling pin seriously injuring a 7 ft 300 lb monster covered in shaggy fur and armor (which would cushion impact) is also unrealistic and because of DnD