Do We Need Gnomes, Halflings AND Dwarves?

[Arkhandus]

A sad bunch of Gnome-haters and Halfling-haters we have here.....
If you think there are too many short races, you damned well ought to realize how many gads and gads of medium humanoids there are, and ditch the vast majority of them from your games too. Elves are just tall, arrogant, feeble, pansy Gnomes anyway. Who needs half-elves and half-orcs anyway? Orcs? Gnolls? Kobolds? Yuan-Ti? Half the Monster Manual?

Your assumption that small folk would have been overcome and killed off by larger folk fails to account for, well, anything in the descriptions of those races. Even dwarves would have difficulty following the winding, trap-filled, clever tunnels that halflings would escape through, let alone all the halfling trickery. Athasian (Dark Sun) halflings would just devour the shaken and cowering humans alive. Nobody could even get close to the gnomes, because every third step towards their domain is another spike- or acid-filled pit trap covered by illusion or devious ground camouflage....... Long live gnomes, halflings, and dwarves!

Odd that folks don't really think about how many millions (billions?) of different species we have here on Earth, and how so many millions (or billions) of them are just slight variations of the same few-thousand-or-so general types of creature here. You may or may not know that Homo Sapiens is just the only prehistoric human race to have survived and proliferated through the ice ages and climate changes over the eons. There were several other human species that either died during the ice ages or the sudden climate changes following them, or that crossbred and eventually merged with Homo Sapiens.

Having a mere handful of small humanoids in addition to all the medium humanoids in D&D is infinitely less preposterous than just having humans as the only humanoid race. Unless your campaign setting is monotheistic, it's highly unlikely that there's even a reasonably-logical religious or fantasy reason for there to somehow only be 1-5 humanoid races in a D&D game. I should think that each deity would create their own ideal race of worshippers or whatever, for instance, unless there were really very compelling reasons for them not to.

 

[Brennin Magalus]

Halflings are insipid, even in Lord of the Rings. As for gnomes, they should be folded into dwarves.

 

[ptolemy18]

2. Whilst agreeing on point one I don't agree with the premise of your question really NO race is 'needed' but options are fun- for instance my inclusion of goblins as a core race was unneccesary and the niche could have been covered by halflings, but goblins are kewl and suited the setting better - so I used them

Well, sure. I agree, Whatever works for your own campaign. I absolutely understand why all three races (gnomes, halflings, dwarves) are part of core D&D, although I'm personally inclined not to use 'em all. I'm not trying to say "D&D4E MSUT GET RD OF HLFLINGS & DWARFS!! I H8 THEM! RAARRGG!"

Goblins as PC races is a cool idea too, BTW. (I always prefer to think of them as like Brian Froud/"Labyrinth" goblins, personally... )

Jason

 

[ptolemy18]

Thing is, I just had a similar discussion with my Tuesday night gaming group and none of us could ever, in over a decade of gaming each, remember anybody playing a gnome or putting a gnome into an adventure of our own making. At that point, it is a question of why even bother keeping them?

Well, obviously I've got a lot of them in my campaign... Although none of the players seem to want to play them, and they're starting to get rapidly pissed off at all the tricks gnomes use to overpower bigger opponents, so maybe there *is* something innately annoying about them, much as I like them.

Jason

 

[ptolemy18]

A sad bunch of Gnome-haters and Halfling-haters we have here.....
If you think there are too many short races, you damned well ought to realize how many gads and gads of medium humanoids there are, and ditch the vast majority of them from your games too. Elves are just tall, arrogant, feeble, pansy Gnomes anyway. Who needs half-elves and half-orcs anyway? Orcs? Gnolls? Kobolds? Yuan-Ti? Half the Monster Manual?

Your assumption that small folk would have been overcome and killed off by larger folk fails to account for, well, anything in the descriptions of those races. Even dwarves would have difficulty following the winding, trap-filled, clever tunnels that halflings would escape through, let alone all the halfling trickery. Athasian (Dark Sun) halflings would just devour the shaken and cowering humans alive. Nobody could even get close to the gnomes, because every third step towards their domain is another spike- or acid-filled pit trap covered by illusion or devious ground camouflage....... Long live gnomes, halflings, and dwarves!

Odd that folks don't really think about how many millions (billions?) of different species we have here on Earth, and how so many millions (or billions) of them are just slight variations of the same few-thousand-or-so general types of creature here. You may or may not know that Homo Sapiens is just the only prehistoric human race to have survived and proliferated through the ice ages and climate changes over the eons. There were several other human species that either died during the ice ages or the sudden climate changes following them, or that crossbred and eventually merged with Homo Sapiens.

Having a mere handful of small humanoids in addition to all the medium humanoids in D&D is infinitely less preposterous than just having humans as the only humanoid race. Unless your campaign setting is monotheistic, it's highly unlikely that there's even a reasonably-logical religious or fantasy reason for there to somehow only be 1-5 humanoid races in a D&D game. I should think that each deity would create their own ideal race of worshippers or whatever, for instance, unless there were really very compelling reasons...

I just felt that there wasn't enough cultural variety between dwarves, gnomes and halflings, so I merged them all into one race.

For this particular campaign world, I felt that I'd rather come up with lots of different cultural varieties for a few core races, instead of just having another goofy race of monstrous humanoids living every few miles along the road.

I also wanted to reduce the number of races with which humans coexist peacefully... since in the evolutionary-historical example you mention, even though humans coexisted for awhile with other humanoid races, they DID eventually wipe them out either through genocide or interbreeding. There may be a lot of species on Earth, but there aren't a lot of intelligent species. Of course, D&D doesn't have to be that cynical, since as you point out, each race might have their own patron deity or other advantages which would keep them from getting overrun (like magical aptitude for the little races, on top of the burrowing & living-in-small-places and stuff).

Here's how it breaks down in my own boring homebrew:

Gnomes' main advantage, as I see it, is that they live longer than humans... which probably means that they produce more high-level wizards and clerics and experts and other classes that don't depend on physical youth (or am I over-thinking this?). But anyway, I'm trying to make the 'gnomes' from every different part of the world distinct.

Elves, of course, are even more long-lived and magical than gnomes... but I'm using the idea that they are SUPER-rare and basically xenophobic and just live in a few out-of-the-way places (the classical "elfland" type place). Most people don't even know about them.

Orcs and half-orcs, on the other hand, just take the place of the "barbaric people who live in some godforsaken place and have grown to be really tough and short-lived since they constantly have to fight creatures even more monstrous than they are." I'm using regular orcs and the ngoloko "African half-orcs" from NYAMBE: AFRICAN ADVENTURES.

Goblins and goblinoids (hobgoblins, bugbears) are the most numerous races which generally aren't accepted in human society. I'm trying to give them a lot of cultural variety too, but basically I'm acting on the assumption that although some of them are more peaceful than others, they're all sort of innately chaotic and short-lived and prone to insanity (though immune to "insanity" and "confusion" spells). This is totally the opposite of the D&D lawful evil goblinoids, of course, but it seems in keeping with the "classic" idea of goblins. I'm also assuming/making up the idea that kobolds are related to goblins, rather than being reptilians.

Then after that, getting into the "races which human beings, orcs and gnomes attack on sight", we have the lizardfolk, troglodytes, kuo-toa, sahuagin, and yuan-ti, and all the other reptilians. And then trace amounts of whatever weird race I happen to feel like adding.

Jason

 

[reanjr]

Do we need Humans, Elves,Half-Elves, and Half-Orcs? I mean, come on, 4 different races of big people? Isn't this a bit excessive?

 

[nopantsyet]

I keep them all for the players' sake. Instead of trying to further distinguish the smallfolk, I've blurred the lines between them and humans. They're more like subraces of humans. They still get the racial bonuses, and they maintain some cultural identity. Elves are actually treated much the same, although they are somewhat more enigmatic,. and are considered by many to be a separate and alien race. (Not in the planetarily sense.)

There are no half-stock of any races. They are all reproductively compatible, but their offspring gets the racial bonuses of one parent or the other, though their appearance (most notably their height) will be mixed. I've assumed a certain amount of dilution and therefore reduced their lifespans, but they all remain longer-lived than straight humans.

 

[Droogie]

I'd be all for consolidating gnomes and halflings into a single race, only if I was running a campaign in which I greatly reduced the number of humanoid races across the board. I wouldn't mind doing this, since I'm finding it increasingly hard to believe that a world, even one the size of our own, could possible support so many different intelligent humanoid species without resources becoming a serious issue. A world like that would be one of constant, bloody warfare, and the rate of extinction for some of these races would be so quick that maybe you would only see, at most, 4 or 5 different humanoid races on the planet at any one time. But then again, magic works, and the Gods tinker, don't they?

The only reason I keep them is because I have a tendancy to use published adventures, and it is much less work for me to try to convert every halfling and gnome NPC in into a home-brewed gnomish race.

 

[Gez]

I'm finding it increasingly hard to believe that a world, even one the size of our own, could possible support so many different intelligent humanoid species without resources becoming a serious issue.

We're more than 6 000 000 000 on that planet, compare to early medieval population figures... Sure, we've faster methods of production now, but we never had magic. Resources are effectively limitless, thanks to nexus and vortex from the Elemental Planes. Fortunately, there are dragons to hoard and consume these resources, otherwise the world would soon be filled with food and precious metals...

 

[Tonguez]

but we never had magic. ...

yes we did - at least thats what the legends say