I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[Fanaelialae]

What's always been really funny to me about people getting SO MAD about strong, brutish halflings being possible is that they canonically exist in Tolkien (c.f. Bullroarer Took etc.). Like:



Y'all trying to tell me Bullroarer here didn't have 20 STR? Because I'm pretty sure that's something you need 20 STR or more to to.

So, frankly, guys, if Tolkien could and did imagine super-strong halflings, and he's held up by you guys as this "gold standard", why is there a problem? Seriously, please explain!

(Also "You guys, I need to take my fantasy seriously, like Tolkien, and strong halflings stop me!!!" well maybe click on Golfimbul's name right there and see how seriously Tolkien took stuff.)

I think some of this comes down to RPGs doing a lot of abstraction for ease of play.

Some people interpret those abstractions as absolute, while others see them as relative.

If you're an absolutist in your interpretation, then having a halfling with 20 strength (the same as the half giant in the party) may seem absurd, as that would imply that this halfling has super-strength (not explicitly impossible for a fantasy game, but something one would expect to be worthy of mention in their write up).

If you're a relativist, it's much easier to contextualize, since the halfling is as strong as the half giant, relative to their respective sizes. Meaning the half giant is in an absolute sense stronger than the halfling. Game mechanics rarely do a good job of supporting this interpretation, beyond encumbrance.

Ultimately, RPGs use abstraction to simplify a lot of the "simulated reality" that the games are based in. I don't think anyone reasonable would take issue with a really muscular halfling. Some folks do, however, take issue with a halfling who'd be an even match for The Mountain (GoT) in a wrestling contest. And I don't doubt that there are folks who prefer the idea of their 20 Strength halfling being an even match for The Mountain. IMO, there's no perfect answer, or at least I haven't one.

 

[Umbran]

Having said that, I do think it would work better from an attribute point of view if the ancestry stats were based on limits and not bonuses. If, for example, the generic strength cap was 20, but goliaths' strength cap was 22, that's functionally the same thing in the long run, but in the lower levels where most people play, it would rarely come up, and it would be a lot easier for me to create a "weak" goliath.

Or, you can imagine a design in which for those characters, acquiring a featured stat is cheaper for them than for others - like saving a point or two in point-buy D&D character generation - it would thus encouraged, but not forced.

 

[Bill Zebub]

For me, that leans a little too close into the "tyranny of fun" problem, where "fun" is equated to "being able to have/do what(ever) I want (at any given time)," and so the idea becomes that any instance of being told "no" by the rules is therefore an instance of bad game design.

Wow...that's quite an extrapolation. Maybe even technically a parade of horribles?

EDIT: To reiterate my position, it's not that we should allow Johnny to have a 20 Str halfling because otherwise he's going to be upset, but that players' tendency to optimize leads to a boring similarity of characters, and discourages them from trying unusual combinations. (D&DBeyond data illustrates that effect.)

 

[Bill Zebub]

Or, you can imagine a design in which for those characters, acquiring a featured stat is cheaper for them than for others - like saving a point or two in point-buy D&D character generation - it would thus encouraged, but not forced.

IMO, that solution still results in one 'race' being a superior choice for a given class, which is one of the things I want to avoid.

 

[Alzrius]

Wow...that's quite an extrapolation.

It doesn't seem like much of an extrapolation at all when people unironically posit that a -2 penalty to one ability score is "shutting down some character concepts."

EDIT: To reiterate my position, it's not that we should allow Johnny to have a 20 Str halfling because otherwise he's going to be upset, but that players' tendency to optimize leads to a boring similarity of characters, and discourages them from trying unusual combinations. (D&DBeyond data illustrates that effect.)

EDIT: As far as I'm aware, the D&D Beyond data lists the most popular races, and the most popular classes, but not the most popular race/class combinations. So I'm not sure what you mean when you cite it regarding optimization.

Even then, characters can be boring in numerous ways that have nothing to do with race/class combinations, and likewise can be unique and interesting even if they take "stereotypical" (or "archetypal") combinations. The idea that we'll see more unique, individualistic characters if we eliminate racial ability score modifiers strikes me as not getting at the underlying problem.

 

[Cadence]

Also what even is evil in this context - like, if you're really assigning some "biological evil" to a species, what exactly is that "evil"?

...

Why is it instead with these "bad" races we just get this generic pile of "bad motivations"? (Which often seem to map closely to generic piles of "bad motivations" assigned by racists to human ethnicities hmmm). I think a lot of it comes down the idiocy of alignments, which don't map to... well... anything real or even really to fiction particularly effectively. Because early D&D featured a lot of lazy half-considered "Race X is alignment Y" stuff (which was often near-immediately counterpointed by some member of that race which wasn't that alignment, something that tends to get lost in the mix), people think you "need" races which are "just evil" or w/e, and you really don't.

Over the past few years I've dumped "Alignment" in the metaphysical game mechanics sense. My default has become that there are three distinct groups of things/power sources that fill the colloquially "evil" side of things: far realms/Cthuluesque ; undead/anti-life ; lower planes/moral evil. They each give "non-people" things to unreservedly fight (aberrations, undead, demons/devils), but the people they are trying to corrupt are people who are either doing "bad" things or are being tempted by them.

According to Wikipedia, there are two different kinds of evil IRL. The first is Moral Evil, which is often the result of a person who engages in vice, either through intention or negligence. The second is Natural Evil, which does not involve a perpetrator. It's often the result of natural processes and it's seen as evil from the perspective of those affected and who perceive it an affliction. Examples include cancer, birth defects, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and other phenomena which inflict suffering with apparently no accompanying mitigating good.

Devils trying to tempt people feels like a moral evil. Are the undead trying to destroy all life or far-realms beings trying to mutate the universe outside of those two or a combination of them?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Ultimately, RPGs use abstraction to simplify a lot of the "simulated reality" that the games are based in. I don't think anyone reasonable would take issue with a really muscular halfling. Some folks do, however, take issue with a halfling who'd be an even match for The Mountain (GoT) in a wrestling contest. And I don't doubt that there are folks who prefer the idea of their 20 Strength halfling being an even match for The Mountain. IMO, there's no perfect answer, or at least I haven't one.

I feel like whilst Bullroarer Took might not able to beat the Mountain in an wrestling contest, he probably could hit someone as hard as, if not harder than, The Mountain. I don't think The Mountain could even reliably throw a head 100 yards, let alone "batter up" it straight off a neck. But wrestling isn't pure strength - The Mountain's real advantage is being 8ft tall and 420lbs, not being superhumanly strong, which he wasn't - he is just as strong as you'd expect from a muscular man of his size who wasn't that height because of any kind of illness, whereas Brandobras/Bullroarer kind of was just terrifyingly and freakishly strong for his 4'2" height - I mean the halflings kind of are in general by human standards but he really was.

So that's actually engaged with by 5E 2024 - your 7-8ft tall 300lb+ Goliath has Powerful Build, which makes him better at wrestling (admittedly you might say the unidirectional nature of it is a bit weak, I'd agree).

I think D&D actually handles both those characters kinda okay.

Also I kinda really wanna play a halfling in D&D for the first time ever lol.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It doesn't seem like much of an extrapolation at all when people unironically posit that a -2 penalty to one ability score is "shutting down some character concepts."

Yeah, I wouldn't agree that it "shuts down" those concepts. But it does undeniably, and dramatically, reduce their frequency.

I think that attribute restrictions are simply bad game design, not that getting rid of them is catering to people who just don't like having limits.

For reasons I'm not quite sure I can elucidate, I'm far more ok with actual race/class restrictions than with attribute restrictions. "No, you can't be a halfling barbarian" is preferable, in my opinion, to "Sure, you can be a worse barbarian." Other than satisfying some people's sense of verisimilitude, the latter isn't actually good game design. It's not a constraint that leads to better game play.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Oh, and maybe that last part of what I just wrote is getting to the essence of what I'm trying to say. Yes, constraints in the form of rules that force choices are a vital part of games, but there is a difference between constraints that are, for lack of a better term, intended for mechanical balance, and those that are there entirely for aesthetic reasons.

So unless one could argue that a combination of the "Lucky" feat with high Strength is somehow unbalancing to the game, I can't see how a constraint on halfling strength is anything other than aesthetic. And therefore to extrapolate that opposition to that aesthetic is the first step toward rules anarchy is to, in my opinion, make a category error.

EDIT: For example, it would be totally acceptable to me to have a general rule that "small" characters have limits on strength and all weapons are considered one category larger (e.g., can't use large weapons, and must use two hands for medium weapons) but in return they have other melee...probably defensive...combat advantages, as long as those disadvantages/advantages model out (to the extent they can be) as roughly equivalent.

 

[MGibster]

It is perhaps key to remember that the work of fiction that has most influenced our game's thoughts on "races", The Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien, does not use them as simulation of how biology impacts personality. They were metaphors!

Bingo. The non-human species in most works of fiction are there because they serve some sort of narrative purpose and I feel as though that should be true for most RPG fantasy settings as well. What narrative purpose a halfling might serve in any given setting might vary of course. One nice thing about having non-human species is it helps instill a sense of wonder and the fantastical into a setting. The cantina scene in the first Star Wars made a big impression on audiences as it showed them the galaxy was a big place with a diverse population. It wouldn't be so well remembered if the patrons were all humans.