Dark Halflings

[77IM]

Balanced, or not?

Dark Halfling
As a dark halfling, you're rough and tough and don't take crap from nobody. As a race, dark halflings are rustic, xenophobic and inbred, recognized by their pale veinous skin, webbed toes, and monobrows. They are known to practice blood sacrifice, and many become evil druids, rangers, or barbarians.
Ability Score Increase. Your Strength score increases by 1.
Brutish. When you attack using a weapon which has the heavy property, you don't suffer disadvantage on the attack.​

I guess the deeper question is: does the small creature's disadvantage on attacks with heavy weapons affect game balance? It limits their options, sure, but are the remaining options inherently weaker? Or do heavy weapons have some weird synergy with small size that I'm missing?

 

[CubicsRube]

Balanced. The heavy weapon disadvantage i think is more for verisimilitude if anything.

Although id be tempted to give them the half orcs savahe attacker feature. Extra dice on a crit. I imagine it as a savage halfling bite on top of the attack...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The big "hidden" secret of heavy weapons is that they work with the Power Attack sub-feat. The prohibition against small creatures using heavy weapons is entirely to discourage them from ever acting like a raging berserker. Balance was never a factor in that decision.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You might want to qualify it to "When you attack using a melee weapon which has the heavy property, you don't suffer disadvantage on the attack."

Since as written it enables longbows, which I don't think is the intent.

 

[Azzy]

You might want to qualify it to "When you attack using a melee weapon which has the heavy property, you don't suffer disadvantage on the attack."

Since as written it enables longbows, which I don't think is the intent.

I agree with this.

On an subject that's only vaguely related to the topic ("dark halflings"), have you (the OP) seen the Jerren halflings from 3e's Book of Vile Darkness? They're an evil subrace of halflings. Mechanically, they were barely different from the default (lightfoot) halfling in the 3e PHB (bonuses to a different set of skills). The fluff really isn't anything to write home about, either (not that it's bad, it just felt phoned-in), but I bring them up just in case you might find anything useful from them.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

There were a canon evil halfling race, the jerren from 3rd "Book of Vile Darkness".

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Also the cannibalistic Dark Sun halflings.

But you can never have too many evil halfings.

 

[Satyrn]

Also the cannibalistic Dark Sun halflings.

But you can never have too many evil halfings.

Disagree. My stewpot can only hold so many.