Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 8112669" data-attributes="member: 6777454">I think it is pretty obvious that Kender are a kind of very extreme Halfling.Similar to how the Tinker Gnomes are a very extreme Gnome.And then there are Gully Dwarfs....Dragonlance went very cartoony with its races like that, everything having to be over-the-top to the point no one could take it at all seriously. And within the context of you having a single writer, perhaps it all works out quite well. The issue is what happens when you put such concepts in the hands of PCs who actually want to play out such concepts. Because with a single writer, their antics can be leveraged solely for plot device to further the story, whether it be the stakes or the humor, and never to disrupt, undermine or sidetrack the story in undesirable ways. The sole writer controls what they do, what the consequences of what they do are and how all the other characters react to it. But when the person choosing when and what to do is different from the person who controls the results of those actions and each of the other characters is controlled by a different person with their own agendas... it just doesn't work.But, nonetheless, Kender are just more extreme Halflings. And if the Kender didn't have a reputation for being so toxic, I would even go as far to say that it is perhaps a better name for Halflings than "Halflings" are. "Halfling" is a terrible name for a race (then again, so are "Dwarfs") because it is just something a race would not call itself-- after all, they aren't going to consider themselves "half" or in any way less or smaller than normal-- they would define what is normal by themselves. They would have their own term for themselves. And if you had a decent number of humans with regular contact with them they would eventually respectfully call them whatever the race calls themselves and not continue to refer to them by something that is quite obviously a slur.Seriously-- calling a group of people "half" people simply because they are smaller than humans? It's just weird.And that it was not just normalized in D&D, but made its way into dozens of games inspired by D&D and no one ever just thought that through and fixed it when importing them into their own fantasy worlds is kind of mind-boggling to me.</blockquote>

Verification