D&D General Short folk appreciation thread – what do you play?

My last character was a an Eberroni Talenta halfling circle of the moon druid. The idea of a shamanic halfling that can turn into to dinosaurs just spoke to me.

I go for a gnome more than others, and I tend to lean into the old lore about them being illusionists. But normally if I'm wanting to play something shorter than human, it'll be a dwarf, even though they're no longer small.

CreamCloud0 said:

ah yes, the 'small' species that isn't actually small.

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Small is even more meaningless in 5.5 than before, I mean now we have small humans, but it's whatever.

I generally play humans when I play. For world-building and character creation as a GM or an author of read-only fiction, I favor goblins, halflings, and gnomes over the other 'small' folk.

Gnomes I treat as variant dwarves; they're a single race.
Halflings are strictly the furry-footed Tolkienic type.
Goblins can be either nasty monstrous types or part of the community, depending on the setting - although I lean toward the latter.

Halflings, Goblins and Kobolds.

I lean into them, particularly the specific racial traits for Halflings and Kobolds.

Humans can be Barbarians or Bards, so I don't see why Gnomes have an identity problem.

I've enjoyed playing Dwarves.

cwallach said:

Humans can be Barbarians or Bards, so I don't see why Gnomes have an identity problem.

I've enjoyed playing Dwarves.

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And even Barbarian Bards but yeah people still have that resistance to demihumans having different cultures that would allow Tinkers and Forest gnomes and house Brownies to be the same species.

Of course past DnD defaulting to subraces for every environment didnt help

cbwjm said:

I go for a gnome more than others, and I tend to lean into the old lore about them being illusionists. But normally if I'm wanting to play something shorter than human, it'll be a dwarf, even though they're no longer small.

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Dwarves are not small in the way that guys who spend way too much time at the gym and know their height down to the quarter inch are not short.

Last time I played a small PC, it was a Savage Species campaign and I was a pixie fighter named Nice Sunnyday.

I usually DM and have players that play halflings. Despite that, they usually figure into my settings, being a cousin of mankind, they typically reside in villages or ethic shires together but are fairly common. They played a large part in my Fantasy naughty word Nam' game where the PCs were part of a military sent by a large and powerful country to another continent to a jungle kingdom where nobody speaks common and they have a much different culture, but are being invaded by necromancers. All the Vietnam War tropes are in play. So, to match certain issues of racism, due to socio-economic issues that the human government did not care about, halflings were disportionatly conscripted to go fight in the war and formed a large part of the army there. There they were seen as uneducated rural hicks and often treated as such by their human and elf officers. On the first night in their permanent base, the halfling ranger PC went out to explore the base. He ended up in the trenches where he came across the halfling bard sergeant and the squad of halflings he had put together sitting around drinking ale and smoking pipeweed. The sergeant finished the song he was playing on his lute, said "welcome brother", held up a closed fist of resitance, and followed with "naughty word the tall man's war." (Sergeant's story was that while he was immune to conscriptionm his younger brother who had just married and had a family on the way got called to serve. At his insistence, they swapped identities and he showed up as his brother to be sent to war.)

I played a halfling warlock who leaned in to being lucky.

As a DM, I like running gnomes. Because I get to justify mechas and power suits.