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Well yes. But it also has to have gnomes and dwarves and elves. As I said earlier, I find halflings more malleable than dwarves and elves. If I had a player who really wanted to play a halfling I could fit them into anything with little trouble.

That's basically what I expected.

I think you are seriously underestimating people's willingness to accept thematic constraints on races. Look at the recent thread about human only games. The vast majority of responders were perfectly ok with a game that had NO non-human NPCs.

Birthright doesn't have gnomes. But it doesn't matter if all the 2e campaign settings are ancient now. Eberron has halflings but it has everything. Wasn't having everything part of the rules of the contest? I don't even know what you're trying to argue here. I thought you were arguing that...

No one's saying this. No one has to argue that they NOT forced, because no reasonable case has been made that they are. So all D&D settings have halflings except the the ones that don't? Ok I'll grant that. Other than the ones that are rehashes of old settings the only new setting that is...

If you do something to make Halflings cool and interesting in your games then you'd likely see more of them. But then of course, if no one is missing them, there's no real reason to do that either.

Works well. I've done pretty much exactly that. The only thing to consider is how this may influence short rests. If combats tend to be days apart then short rests tend to get taken for granted and certain abilities such as the Fighter's Second Wind become more powerful. You can account for...

By making choices. Funny voices are optional. I don't see how choices are. Exactly. Railroading tends to be experienced when choices are offered but are not meaningful. If you just told me a story about a bunch of adventurers and their hijinks there would be no railroad. Boredom possibly...

Huh? All I'm saying is that if you're doing what you're doing and everyone is happy then you might as well keep doing it and not worry about if you're sinning. I sure as hell wouldn't do it. To me seeing what unexpected things players do is the whole point of running a game.

If a halfling wears a Belt of Dwarvenkind is he now a gnome?

To be honest I don't think it's dismissive. I think it's basically just true by definition. Making choices is how you interact with the game. If you're not doing that how are you not an audience member?

It's all connected. Railroading often occurs because a DM tries to connect things with illusory choices., or because they have presented the players with choices they don't know how to follow up on.

But then it wouldn't be a failure to offer a meaningful choice. The example there is of what happens when the DM tries to pace a game through interaction without having a meaningful choice. It fundemantally fails. You can't pace that way. You either have to punctuate things with some kind of...

This is why I said earlier in the thread that there are two ways to look at railroading, from the perspective of DM practice, and the perspective of subjective player experience. Only the second is necessarily bad. If I feel railroaded, then something has definitely gone wrong.

To a degree. But characterisation basically becomes more meaningful when it informs choices. Is it more meaningful to have your Paladin spout moral platitudes, or to have him make the choice to do the right thing, even if it's not to his own advantage. To a degree. But they tend, I find to...

Meaningful choices are basically the currency of role-playing games run on. If you don't have meaningful choices, you don't just have an issue with railroading you have weird pacing issues. This is why so many DMs struggle with journeys. DM: So you start out on the journey to Fallcrest...

I'm kind of curious. I can see DMs who are happy to restrict any races on the grounds of thematic appropriateness I can also see DMs who feel that if it's in the PHB it must be available for players. I can also see DMs who really don't like Tieflings and Dragonborn because they're not...

If you pull out any charcacter sheet for a race that we haven't discussed is present in the setting it would raise an eyebrow. My last game didn't have halflings

It's the internet. Where would we be without hyperbole?

I'd bet they do. But I'd bet they also include Tieflings and Dragonborn even tough they are uncommon. I'm sceptical that the common/uncommon distinction will carry weight there.