Let's take a quick litte tanget before I answer you question.
Have you homebrewed or changed ANY class for DnD EVER? Even a little bit like giving Ranger's spells prepared, or giving sorcerers a few more sorcery points?
I've made an archetype and made wizard familiars more intelligent. That's it.
I'm going to assume yes, that at some point you have changed something written for a base class, or included a UA subclass or something.
Therefore this class should be completely acceptable at your table, right?
Chronomancer, 2nd Variant (5e Class) - D&D Wiki Or really, any class at all. Because you changed one right, so why do you have problem changing another?
Well, first, that's not a canonical class. At this point, I haven't allowed any completely homebrew classes or archetypes. Of course, nobody at my table has asked for one. I don't think anyone has even asked for any classes or archetypes from a published 3pp, even the ones I've said are available.
Secondly, that's D&D Wiki, well known for including unbalanced crap. Why would I take a class from that site? You'd've been better off using an example that's been well-received, like say, KibblesTasty psion. At which point I would have said "if one of my players had asked for it, I'd have read it through and made a decision then."
Third, why are you comparing taking a likely not-properly-playtested or unbalanced class adapted from a poorly thought-out 2e supplement (yes, I owned it) to keeping a race that's been around since D&D started? That's not apples and oranges; it's apples and carburetors.
That is the fundamental flaw you are making with your assertion. You are assuming that because I changed elves or dwarves or gnomes or anything that they were insufficient as a base design.
Your point above has nothing to do with this conclusion.
Because that is the claim I am making about halfling lore, that the base halfling lore is insufficient. And your response seems to be, constantly, that I can just change it.
Insufficient for whom? You? Because it's clearly not insufficient for me, considering the amount of material I've shown you from it. Not even my extrapolations like the puppet ruler stuff; just the stuff that's directly written in their PH and MTF descriptions.
So again: just because
you don't like halflings doesn't mean they're bad or insufficient. And your opinion alone is not enough to chuck them as a race.
Could they use more lore? In the Realms and Greyhawk, they could benefit from it. They have a lot of important lore in other official settings. The problem is with the Realms and Greyhawk, and for the writers for basing their PH halflings off of those settings instead of off Eberron or Dark Sun or Birthright.
So almost every halfling knows almost every story about halflings across the entire plane of existence? How.
The same way that every elf speaks Elven and every orc speaks Orcish (and they nearly always hate each other), and the wizards on Toril and Krynn can cast
Bigby's hand, and there's an eye and hand of Vecna and a
rod of seven parts on every world.
The real answer is: it's D&D.
If you want a more in-game answer, halflings are
adventuring travelers who tell stories to every other halfling they meet, who then tell those same stories to every halfling
they meet, etc. And they have a good memory for stories and not much need for confabulation (as extrapolated by their lack of need for ornamentation, which suggests they might not feel the need to invent things for their stories) so that it doesn't devolve into a game of
sending stones (they haven't invented telephones yet).
Or, more realistically, no, not every halfling knows
all the stories. But they know a
lot of stories. If one halfling doesn't know a particular story, then they can likely point you in the direction of one who does.
Let's just take a single continent. Are we trying to claim that every single remote halfling village has talked to every other remote halfling village, and every halfling has heard all of the same stories?
Let's take a single continent. Are we trying to claim that every single remote dwarf fortress is an filled with expert crafters who uses their enormous lifetime to make the best and most enduring things? That
all dwarfs are like this? No clan churns out crappy stuff, or turned to the dark side and came up with the idea of planned obsolescence in order to get more human buyers, or said "screw rock and metal!" and become expert ranchers, or just decided to go into ranching or pillaging and raiding?
Why is it you're willing to say that dwarfs are so important because they're all great miners and crafters, even though its illogical that all of them would be--or that even a majority of them would be--but not accept anything similar about halflings? Every trait you've been shown has been dismissed by you saying "well, it doesn't say
all halflings" or "other races do that too."
If you can say that
all dwarfs, or a majority of dwarfs, are all expert crafters then why can't you say that halflings are all expert storytellers and lorekeepers? It's part of their actual racial description, after all.
Why are you unwilling to take the exact same logic you've applied to elves and dwarfs and who knows what else and not apply it to halflings?
So your claim is that every single nomadic halfling is an adventurer. I find that is stretching the term "adventurer" until it breaks in half and is meaningless, but at least I finally got you to say it after three different times asking.
Since I made this claim right away when I said that the books support halflings being adventurers by saying that they're curious and nomadic, I think this is just proving that you're unwilling to think much about what you're reading.
So this means that Tabaxi merchants are also adventurers and lorekeepers right? They travel from place to place, collecting stories, and they are curious and enjoy exploring. So every Tabaxi merchant is also an adventurer, right?
Hmm, may be blessed by a god with an insatiable need to seek out stories, treasure, new locations, etc. Sounds about right. Sure, why not?
You realize that the affable and good-natured villain who turns around and kills someone is done SOLELY because being affable and good-natured is a contradiction with being an evil murderer right?
Traditional villains are evil in thought, word, and deed. They Kick the Dog every day, just because they think it's funny, they can't sympathize with the pain of others, and/or they think no suffering is too great when it serves their cause.
tvtropes.org
And, I'm seriously having trouble thinking of a single character who disliked displays of wealth who didn't have that trait as a good and positive character trait.
en.wikipedia.org
Same with being reliable and cooperative.
Alignment. Kobolds are fundamentally selfish, making them evil, but their reliance on the strength of their group makes them trend toward law.
Same with liking the common folk.
It's not enough for it to just feel good to be a gangster, you should also win the sympathy of the audience and community. Since racketeering, trafficking women, random murders and selling drugs don't really fly with the general public, heroic …
tvtropes.org
This is one method for avoiding doldrums from having an Invincible Hero. Scenes of Villainous Valor show the antagonists to be outmatched, forcing them to rely on daring, cunning, skill, and determination to hold their own against the heroes, or …
tvtropes.org
An elf who is empathatic, reliable and enjoys the company of a farmer? Yep, I've seen it.
Ah, but we're talking about
racial traits, not individual traits.
Or I'm just able to think "they are good-natured farm boys" and that covers 85% of your list. You are trying to make it seem like the list is bigger and more important than it is, and then when we examine the traits in aggregate... they don't amount to much.
OK, and? That was a list of 20 items. Halve it. Reduce it to a third. It's still a lot of useful and interesting traits.
No, I didn't forget to answer. I decided not to try and spend an extra five thousand words trying to figure out an answer that was going to not get picked apart in 30 seconds because you are determined to make me out to be the bad guy here.
So... you don't actually have anything, then.
Like, you mentioned dwarves are bearded... but that doesn't really matter in making dwarves interesting. Sure, all male dwarves have beards, it is a definining visual trait for them, but that is like saying all humans have hair. Having hair doesn't make you interesting.
Right. Dwarfs have even
fewer interesting traits than halflings. Or am I just to think "they are gruff craftsdwarfs" and that covers 85% of it?
Why is one big trait for elves and dwarfs better than one big trait and/or lots of little traits for halflings?
Are all elves really haughty and flighty? I've actually never encountered a flighty elf in my games. OR actually in most media depictions of them. Haughty, I've seen, but not ALL elves. I've seen the story of the wood elf ranger who fell in love with a human hunter, and that elf is never haughty.
Haughty and Gracious. Although they can be haughty, elves are generally gracious - even to those who fall short of their high expectations - which is most non-elves. Still, they can find good in just about anyone.
Alignment. Elves love freedom, variety, and self-expression, so they lean strongly toward the gentler aspects of chaos. They value and protect others' freedom as well as their own, and they are more often good than not.
So, I'm complaining about halflings because they have far less complexity and lore than the other races.
You still haven't said why this is a
bad thing. Obviously, people don't need to follow the lore to play a member of a race at all, or all the elves you've adventured with would be haughty, a bit racist, and chaotic. A purist may go so far as to say that any player you know who didn't play an elf as haughty, bit racist, and chaotic playing them "wrong." Which just says that having all that lore you demand is not only necessary but possibly even counterproductive to a fun game.
On the flip side, it is kind of bad to have every member of halflings be Mary Sue and her brother Bary Stu, because they are perfect innocent ultra-good people with no real flaws except that they just care too much.
Which halflings aren't like and nobody has claimed they are. Not all halflings are ultragood, and not even individuals are pure good.
And we're talking about racial traits here. If dwarfs can have "long memories, long grudges" as an acceptable racial trait, then isn't "kind and curious" one as well?
Halflings are presented with no real flaws, they are just the best people. And everyone else should be more like them. And that is boring as crap.
There's a section in MTF called "Bad Apples" and says that many of them "find a way to turn idleness into an art form." People in this thread have talked about how halflings, for all their welcoming ways, may not give a crap about anything that occurs outside of their homes--that it's very possible to see them as defining FYIGM.
And anyway, nobody has claimed that they're perfect. Just that they're nice people, and that it's perfectly OK for there to be a race of just nice people in a D&D setting. You may find nice people to be boring, but that doesn't mean they're bad.
No, I have actually never made that claim. I have said that they lack lore and that makes them boring. I have also said that you can't defend them by saying that they can be played towards certain tropes, which has caused people to constantly put forth that I hate halflings and that I only want edgy grimdark characters.
You certainly act like it. You don't accept positive anything about halflings, even if you accept the exact same thing for other races, and you claim that they're too nice.
Equating humans with elves because humans seek to be remembered is a laugh. They don't cover that base at all.
The base of providing information from a thousand years ago? Yes, they do. Because you can't
play a thousand-year-old elf and act as the infodumper in most games ("You're a thousand years old? And you're only third level? Also, this is DM info only; your character wouldn't know it"). You can go to your NPC millennial elf to get info told to you, or you can go to a library and have the info read to you by an NPC human sage. They're both going to be unreliable in some way that benefits the plot. Functionally, a really old elf and a human scholar are the same.
Gnomes are long-lived and magical, but they tend not to have that same weight of the ages upon them.
Says who? If anything, they'd have
more weight of the ages because they generally look older. Who seems more knowledgeable to you: A 500-year-old who looks like a wise granpa, or a 500-year-old who looks like they're 20? This isn't a movie where you can have the type of lighting and FX that made Galadriel so impressive. This is a RPG. You're limited by how good the DM is at conveying atmosphere.
I think it is because gnomes are often portrayed as being insatiably curious and always moving forward. They don't contemplate the past very much, which is one aspect of the elves.
And I've always read them in exactly the opposite.
Also, elves are generally presented as more widely magical. Elves make grand spells and grand uses of their magic, gnomes do illusions, but very few times are they presented as completing a grand magical ritual.
And I've usually seen elves as having a wide array of lesser magics, but very rarely having to cast anything big because those spells were cast 10,000 years ago and they've never had a need to cast them again.
You know, I was going to skip it, but since you brought it up twice... you do realize that when discussing player character races, there is a reason we aren't talking about Monsters... right? Saying Fire Giants can make cool things doesn't change the fact that players can't play fire giants. And Azer are really just dwarves from the elemental plane of fire, so I'm not sure about counting them at all. (Heck, even Fire Giants are often depicted as the dwarves of giant kind)
Unless all the PCs are crafters or Artificers, does it matter that you can't play fire giant? And in that case, you're playing a very odd version of D&D. Makers & Marketplaces, maybe.
And yes, I'm aware that humans have made stone structures that have lasted a long time. But could we carve a mountain into a statue? Maybe now a days, if we really wanted to, but it would be an incredibly difficult task. In Eberron they show the Mror Holds, and one of the mountain's was carved into a dwarven head. Not like Rushmore, where they carved a cliff face, they turned a mountain into a face larger than the mountain next to it. It is on page 120 in my book, if you want to turn and look at the sheer enormity of it.
Yes, I know that image. It's a great one. I like it. But if there hadn't been any dwarfs there to do that, the world wouldn't be bereft.
That is beyond human skill.
en.wikipedia.org
There is very little that is beyond human skill, says the human writing on a computer.
But halflings don't bridge the gaps between races. They are primed for doing that in a few ways, but they never have actually taken that step in the lore.
Because the PH lore is based on the Realms and Greyhawk. So again, the problem is with
those settings. Not with halflings.
And, I've sure never seen elves, humans and dwarves depicted as without food, ale/wine, and household goods if there are no halflings around.
I've barely seen elves and dwarfs as being depicted
with food, other than the aforementioned elven wine, lembas wafers, and dwarven ale. And plump helmets. But that's a different franchise.
Did you actually read through that link, or just put it up and think that disputed my claim?
See, because first of all, this includes a few lists like:
See, these are all different regional pantheons. So, while for example I do believe the Mulhorandi (fantasy egypt) area is fairly human centric, I'm not so sure that the entirety of Kara-Tur is limited to only humans.
Yes. Those are regional
human gods. The fact that some nonhumans worship them, and that some humans worship nonhuman gods, does not change the fact that there are
numerous human gods. Not "occasionally worshiped" by humans.
Primarily worshiped by them.
The Realms isn't Eberron or Dragonlance, where there's a set of god worshiped by everyone. It, and Greyhawk, have human gods (which vary by location) and nonhuman gods (which don't).
So, your halfling PCs never run into traps. They also have gold just appear in their path. All halflings, despite not wanting wealth, just find it randomly and without logic or purpose, and nothing bad ever happens to them.
No, but if they roll a 1 when making a save against a trap or when rolling to search for treasure, they can reroll. It's a lucky, last-minute effect: it looks like certain doom, but they manage to dodge out the way just in the nick of time; they can't find anything through diligent searching, but then the torchlight glints off a piece of gold they didn't previously notice.
I never said the rule was poor. I'm saying using a homebrew rule to justify an interpretation of official lore is a poor argument. After all, if you aren't using the homebrew rule... what justification exists for the lore?
I guess you don't have players who like to roleplay being afraid without mechanical incentive to do so.
So, halflings do not fear the unknown, and they don't fear the known. So if they have an orc coming to kill them they feel nothing resembling fear, because they are basically incapable of fear.
Their hands don't tremble with fright and they aren't so terrified they can't look upon the source of their fear. Meaning they can willfully approach the source of terror and their don't suffer disad on attack rolls against it. If they fail their save, which is less likely because of the advantage and the Luckiness.
And what is weird about that is... I know a few humans who wouldn't be creeped out by a spider and think it is cute. I'd bet gnomes aren't really creeped out a lot. And yet somehow, this is a halfling thing where they... I mean do they even have a concept of what fear is? You are bascially re-writing them to have no conceptual basis for fear, and yet halflings can get scared. Rolling with advantage isn't immunity. So, they just don't scare easily? I could say that about a lot of people.
No, I am
not rewriting them. You simply don't understand what it means to have advantage on saving throws against being frightened.
Hell, the fact that they have advantage rather than immunity tells you that they feel deep, paralyzing fear at times--just not as often as other races do. Did you just not
read the entry?
Maybe it's simply biology that prevents them from having a strong emotional reaction to fear. Maybe it's that halfling pipeweed that keeps them calm. Maybe it's something else. Who cares? Do you care why elves can't be put to sleep magically because of being fey, but most fey--including the actual fairies from the recent UA--have no such immunity?
Where did that wall come from? I never mentioned a wall.
OK, it's a free range gelatinous cube found in the open plains and meadows instead of in a dungeon.
Do they need a wall to use their ability? And it is kind of funny that my level 20 human rogue with a 20 dexterity can't move between the legs of a giant because they aren't fast or nimble enough, and they'd totally be caught off-guard because they can't keep track of more than one leg at a time, but my level 1 halfling wizard with a dexterity of 10 can totally pass through those giant's legs.
Tumble. A creature can try to tumble through a hostile creature's space, ducking and weaving past the opponent. As an action or a bonus action, the tumbler makes a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check contested by the hostile creature's Dexterity (Acrobatics) check. If the tumbler wins the contest, it can move through the hostile creature's space once this turn. (DMG page 272.)
Yes, this should be in the PH. The books are not well laid-out.
Oh, and there is nothing that says they are really bendy like cats. You are adding that part to try and justify it.
Yes, that is what one does with traits. Otherwise, you have to assume that all dwarfs are born knowing all about stonework. After all, the PH doesn't say that they take stonework classes. How do you
justify that knowledge?
Humans and everyone else have to make a check to tumble through a larger creature's space. Halflings and other Nimble races, if there are any, do not. You can assume that they're bendy, or you can assume it's just an auto-success on Acrobatics, or you can make up another reason. Your choice.
