RPG Evolution: The Trouble with Halflings

Over the decades I've developed my campaign world to match the archetypes my players wanted to play. In all those years, nobody's ever played a halfling.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

So What's the Problem?​

Halflings, derived from hobbits, have been a curious nod to Tolkien's influence on fantasy. While dwarves and elves have deep mythological roots, hobbits are more modern inventions. And their inclusion was very much a response to the adventurous life that the agrarian homebodies considered an aberration. In short, most hobbits didn't want to be adventurers, and Bilbo, Frodo, and the others were forever changed by their experiences, such that it was difficult for them to reintegrate when they returned home. You don't hear much about elves and dwarves having difficulty returning home after being adventurers, and for good reason. Tolkien was making a point about the human condition and the nature of war by using hobbits as proxies.

As a literary construct, hobbits serve a specific purpose. In The Hobbit, they are proxies for children. In The Lord of the Rings, they are proxies for farmers and other folk who were thrust into the industrialized nightmare of mass warfare. In both cases, hobbits were a positioned in contrast to the violent lifestyle of adventurers who live and die by the sword.

Which is at least in part why they're challenging to integrate into a campaign world. And yet, we have strong hobbit archetypes in Dungeons & Dragons, thanks to Dragonlance.

Kender. Kender Are the Problem​

I did know one player who loved to play kender. We never played together in a campaign, at least in part because kender are an integral part of the Dragonlance setting and we weren't playing in Dragonlance. But he would play a kender in every game he played, including in massive multiplayers like Ultima Online. And he was eye-rollingly aggravating, as he loved "borrowing" things from everyone (a trait established by Tasselhoff Burrfoot).

Part of the issue with kender is that they aren't thieves, per se, but have a child-like curiosity that causes them to "borrow" things without understanding that borrowing said things without permission is tantamount to stealing in most cultures. In essence, it results in a character who steals but doesn't admit to stealing, which can be problematic for inter-party harmony. Worse, kender have a very broad idea of what to "borrow" (which is not limited to just valuables) and have always been positioned as being offended by accusations of thievery. It sets up a scenario where either the party is very tolerant of the kender or conflict ensues. This aspect of kender has been significantly minimized in the latest draft for Unearthed Arcana.

Big Heads, Little Bodies​

The latest incarnation of halflings brings them back to the fun-loving roots. Their appearance is decidedly not "little children" or "overweight short people." Rather, they appear more like political cartoons of eras past, where exaggerated features were used as caricatures, adding further to their comical qualities. But this doesn't solve the outstanding problem that, for a game that is often about conflict, the original prototypes for halflings avoided it. They were heroes precisely because they were thrust into difficult situations and had to rise to the challenge. That requires significant work in a campaign to encourage a player to play a halfling character who would rather just stay home.

There's also the simple matter of integrating halflings into societies where they aren't necessarily living apart. Presumably, most human campaigns have farmers; dwarves and elves occupy less civilized niches, where halflings are a working class who lives right alongside the rest of humanity in plain sight. Figuring out how to accommodate them matters a lot. Do humans just treat them like children? Would halflings want to be anywhere near a larger humanoids' dwellings as a result? Or are halflings given mythical status like fey? Or are they more like inveterate pranksters and tricksters, treating them more like gnomes? And if halflings are more like gnomes, then why have gnomes?

There are opportunities to integrate halflings into a world, but they aren't quite so easy to plop down into a setting as dwarves and elves. I still haven't quite figured out how to make them work in my campaign that doesn't feel like a one-off rather than a separate species. But I did finally find a space for gnomes, which I'll discuss in another article.

Your Turn: How have you integrated halflings into your campaign world?

 

[Gammadoodler]

If there's one thing that never gets old and always gets resolved with perfect clarity on these boards, it's speculative physiology and biochemistry of fantasy creatures based on creature art.

You'd think it'd be difficult, what with how the concept of fantasy often openly admits and frequently demands the presence of the impossible. Yet somehow we have a 100% success rate at determining the viability and capabilities of these impossible creatures within their impossible habitats.

It truly is remarkable.

 

[Lanefan]

And last I checked those claws are retractable because constantly slamming them into the ground would dull them. This is why despite dogs having larger claws, cat claws are the ones we worry about. Additionally, the point of a cat's claws are to act as hooks, grabbing the prey and holding on to it so they can kill it with their fangs.

My once-housecat (RIP), as evidenced by some scars I still bear, would beg to differ.

Cats of nearly all types rake things with their claws as an attack method. A Demon-cat would of course raise this to a dialled-to-eleven art form.

And this thing likely isn't move that fast. The design of it would prevent that fairly easily do to how lion legs are designed to move.

If it was intended as a more mundane Prime Material creature of the woods or plains I'd agree with you completely. But it's a Demon. Forget the normal physics - none of that applies to Demons!

EDIT to add: it just occurred to me that the obvious use for the heads/mouths would be some sort of two-directional breath weapon...

Except many of them COULD actually exist. Maybe not on Earth as we know it, but I did an entire aside on how Piercers actually make functional sense. Well designed monsters can make a lot of sense. And those specifically designed not to make sense (like the Gibbering Mouther) are absolutely still obvious in how they are terrifying.

I hadn't seen a Gibbering Mouther in play for ages until our PCs met and killed a few in last weekend's session.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Last I checked, lions' paws have great big claws in them. Which means, depending how fast this thing can spin with its claws out, it might resemble a ten-inch-wide buzzsaw blade coming at you; and that's pretty damn cool!

Assuming it in fact uses its mouth(s) to eat, it would indeed need some means of lying down and standing back up again. But it's a Demon, meaning all so-called rules of anatomy go flying out the window; so who knows how it eats (absorption through skin?) and-or whether those mouths are just there for show?

(Emphasis mine.)

With that in mind, there’s no guarantee those “knees” work like simple hinges. They might be more like ball and socket joints, with a much broader range of motion than a typical knee.

 

[Oofta]

I kind of like the idea that a demon's physical essence can be so chaotic that we can't make sense of it so our brain does it's best to make sense of it and it ends up looking like a pinwheel lion.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I kind of like the idea that a demon's physical essence can be so chaotic that we can't make sense of it so our brain does it's best to make sense of it and it ends up looking like a pinwheel lion.

Every description starts with.."You're never gonna believe me..not really sure I believe me.."

 

[Irlo]

I kind of like the idea that a demon's physical essence can be so chaotic that we can't make sense of it so our brain does it's best to make sense of it and it ends up looking like a pinwheel lion.

Yes!

I’m not fond of the buzzsaw lion, but we certainly don’t need another extra planar creature that happens to be bipedal and vaguely human-like or some amped up animal.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yes!

I’m not fond of the buzzsaw lion, but we certainly don’t need another extra planar creature that happens to be bipedal and vaguely human-like or some amped up animal.

With cheese grater foreheads…

 

[Chaosmancer]

Did anyone else see this pic and immediately notice that it's not accurate? The victim is being hit by the eye rays AND the antimagic eye

I noticed it, but as was established in Volo's, Beholder's central eyes are not limited to antimagic, they are just usually antimagic.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The problem here might be that you're ignoring the fact that "medieval Europe" covers a span of a thousand years, If someone does prefer Arthurian stories (which take place in the very early middle ages), it's absolutely appropriate to exclude firearms, which appeared what, 800 years later? Around the same time that clocks came to be?

"Medieval Europe" is far too imprecise a term to use as a descriptor here. "Arthurian" suggests a much narrower time period, which makes it far more useful for such descriptions. And would certainly exclude 14th-century technological innovations.

I'm not ignoring that at all. In fact, it is kind of part of the point.

And sure, you may be able to ignore firearms, because Europeans didn't gain access to them until the 1400's. Which does make it weird to have full plate since that ALSO didn't exist until the 1400's. You also have to figure that hand crossbows, rapiers and other weapons and armor were scattered throughout that time period.

It is also harder to reason why they wouldn't have clockwork, considering robots were made by the 1100's. Steam engines were also functional and existed by the time of the ancient greeks, well before the Romans, who then had thousands of years of supremacy before their collapse. The aforementioned Galleons were made in the 1700's, long after "arthurian" times.

The thing isn't what did and didn't exist in a specific century. I don't care about having a historically accurate game. What annoys me are people who declare that their style of game cannot accept certain influeces, because they only allow a specific flavor of thing, and then ignore the fact that their games ALSO have a bunch of things in them from various influences outside that specific flavor they claim to "only" allow, and are excluding things that could reasonably exist.

 

[Chaosmancer]

No, it wasn't. Because you looked at the artwork, made a snap decision about its abilities--which was incorrect--and then failed to spend more than a few seconds imagining how to use a living wheel made out of lion. It sounds like you wasted an opportunity to possibly use something memorably different than the norm.

I mean, if it doesn't fit in with your setting's feel, sure--I can see that. I wouldn't use this thing in my current D&D game, because my setting doesn't have monsters like that. My setting doesn't even have mind flayers or beholders in it (except for that one spectator that was summoned) because it doesn't fit the feel. That's perfectly understandable. But if my characters get to my setting's Feywild/divine realm mix, heck yeah. I can even see having these as the wheels on some godling's chariot, and when battle comes and the godling gets off their chariot, the wheels pop off and begin attacking on their own.

But to just look at a monster, say "this looks dumb, therefore it is objectively bad," well, that's not only conflating your opinion with fact but is, as I said, a waste of a potentially interesting creature.

So... you literally have read nothing and cared nothing for the paragraphs I have written, have utterly dismissed my analysis as a "snap decision" and just wanted to berate me for "wasting my own time"

Well, I certainly wasted time in thinking you had a serious interest in the answer to your own question and would give my answer a considered chance instead of declaring I am wrong because of things that had nothing to do with my answer.