I'm lost.
I though the whole argument was the D&D 5th edtion describes and displays humans, dwarves, elves, dragonborn, gnomes, orcs, gobliniods, and goliaths having martial and/or magical tradition, culture, organization, religion, and technology to help them repel, delay, and defeat common D&D low level threats and survive as races.
However for halflings 5e both does not display a martial or magical tradition for halflings and does not give them "you are too few in new be be a true civilization" excuse that half elves, half orcs, genasi, and tieflings have. 5e gives halflings the covering of other races without the "low population" excuse races typically get to make sense of it.
This causes many,especially newer and younger. fans of D&Dto not get the NPCside of halfling lore and for them to comepletly dismiss the base lore of many setting to substitute their own or shove NPC halflings into a worldbuilding corner.
Yeah, that was the point of this thread, but a lot of people couldn't see the forest for the trees.
I never expected this thread to reach this length. I can say without a doubt that this is the longest thread that I originally started on this site's forums. It's probably the longest thread that I've participated in. I wish that it had been more constructive, but it quickly devolved to circular arguments and endless "you're the one in the wrong!" accusations.
I dislike halflings. I find their lore lacking, and think that they have less ground to stand on than much of the other races in 5e. I don't want to tell anyone that their fun is wrong or gaslight anyone into thinking that their experiences weren't legitimate. The main point of the OP was saying that Halflings don't have a story. They're just short-people with a few random traits (Brave, Lucky) stapled onto them because the game-designers couldn't think of anything better to give them. They would be completely unnecessary as a player race if Humans were just allowed to be Medium or Small at character creation, or if there was a general "short human-looking person" race that combined Halflings and Gnomes. They're a bit redundant, and they have less stories as a race than most other races do.
That was the point, but very few people got it. Many people jumped to say "just don't play them!", or "why do you want to take away our fun!", which was not at all the point of the OP. If I wanted to removed halflings from D&D, I would have said that. IMO, putting them under a sub-type of humans isn't removing them, it's consolidating them to just simplify the game and stop people from feeling the need to cram them into their worlds/games with a bad/lacking excuse for their existing (and people can stop telling me that I don't have to include them, I knew that from before I made the OP. That doesn't stop the fact that people do feel forced to include them, which is the problem. Merging them with humans or gnomes would largely nullify that, IMO, as would making them not be one of the core races of the game (which also could be solved by not having any "core races" in 6e)). IMO, merging halflings with humans or gnomes is no more "invalidating of the halfling experience" than it would be "invalidating the grippli, grung, and bullywugs" if you were to just merge the three types of frog-humanoids into one race, or to make Lizardfolk and Saurials the same race to avoid redundancy (or even a semblance of redundancy).
Huh. I just realized that this is kind of similar to the phrase "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". Halflings have gotten a privileged/special treatment as a D&D race because they were in Tolkien, so people that liked that treatment feel that they're being attacked when it's suggested that Halflings get treated in the same manner that most other D&D races are. (I'm definitely not comparing the fact that halflings get the special treatment to the systemic oppression of real world people, I'm just showing that the phrase applies in much the same way.)
Just. . . ugh. I would like to fix halflings, but people keep getting mad that I think they need fixing in the first place.
