D&D General My Problem(s) With Halflings, and How To Create Engaging/Interesting Fantasy Races

[Chaosmancer]

I think the point you’re missing is that just because you have a problem with the PHB Halfling doesn’t mean they need to be “excused”. Your personal preferences and opinions don’t have that kind of weight. There’s no objective problem here, no matter how much you insist there is—just different people’s competing preferences. It’s too bad you can’t fathom how people might be justified in liking things you don’t. And it’s too bad (for you) that you got the short end of the stick on PHB Halflings. Hopefully, other areas of the game cater to your preferences more.

Obviously there are, since I'm just trying to have a discussion about halflings and not everything in 5e.

But see, here is the thing. I'm not allowed to have a discussion about the PHB halfling. I am in no way allowed to criticize them in any manner, unless I explicitly say first that my opinion doesn't matter and that I expect nothing to be done because other people's opinions are clearly more valuable than mine. I can't even say "look, it literally says this" without that being my opinion, and wrong, and me being a close minded individual.

And, if I do attempt to talk about the PHB... then how dare I not talk about Eberron, Golarion or any other setting. Who cares that those settings seem to do exactly what I'm talking about and change the baseline halfling, since they do then there is no reason to even discuss the PHB halfling. I mean, we all know that if a setting does something then that means no one is ever allowed to think "wouldn't this make for a better baseline than what we have?"

Look, obviously I'm getting heated about this. But the thing is, I'm getting sick and tired of every single thing I say being met with "why don't you consider other people's opinions?" I tried. I have never gotten anyone to talk about more than "I like it, it shouldn't change because I like it, how dare you try and force your preference on me" With an heavy helping of "If you can't understand why I like it, that's on you for being close-minded". Well, maybe if people actually said something beyond attacking me for not rolling over, I could understand. But so far it is just an endless parade of people telling me how wrong I am for challenging the status quo, because they like the status quo and a personal preference shouldn't be forced upon other people.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I will play the "elves are generic" game though.

Let's see racial features:

• Medium size - sounds pretty human to me
• Long Life - The number of campaigns that span a time frame greater than a human life has got to be incredibly small. As such, Elven characters don't really ever get a chance to feel old. Time passes for them the same as every other character. In fact, they likely get to feel old less often than halflings get to feel lucky or brave.
• Perception proficiency - Humans can have this
• Trance - Roleplaying how the party sleeps is boring. How often are we acting out long rests?
• Some weapon proficiencies - humans can get these.
• A cantrip - humans can get these
• Slightly faster move speed - humans can get this
• Dark vision - you got me

Still.. what do we have? Elves are basically just humans with darkvision.

Generic.

Well, you are wrong. You really should consider other people's points of view

 

[Bardic Dave]

Obviously there are, since I'm just trying to have a discussion about halflings and not everything in 5e.

But see, here is the thing. I'm not allowed to have a discussion about the PHB halfling. I am in no way allowed to criticize them in any manner, unless I explicitly say first that my opinion doesn't matter and that I expect nothing to be done because other people's opinions are clearly more valuable than mine. I can't even say "look, it literally says this" without that being my opinion, and wrong, and me being a close minded individual.

And, if I do attempt to talk about the PHB... then how dare I not talk about Eberron, Golarion or any other setting. Who cares that those settings seem to do exactly what I'm talking about and change the baseline halfling, since they do then there is no reason to even discuss the PHB halfling. I mean, we all know that if a setting does something then that means no one is ever allowed to think "wouldn't this make for a better baseline than what we have?"

Look, obviously I'm getting heated about this. But the thing is, I'm getting sick and tired of every single thing I say being met with "why don't you consider other people's opinions?" I tried. I have never gotten anyone to talk about more than "I like it, it shouldn't change because I like it, how dare you try and force your preference on me" With an heavy helping of "If you can't understand why I like it, that's on you for being close-minded". Well, maybe if people actually said something beyond attacking me for not rolling over, I could understand. But so far it is just an endless parade of people telling me how wrong I am for challenging the status quo, because they like the status quo and a personal preference shouldn't be forced upon other people.

I really don’t think you’re fairly characterizing your opponents’ positions. I don’t think anyone begrudges you your opinion, or objects to you brainstorming solutions to your problem (I certainly don’t). The issue (for me at least) is your apparent insistence that it’s not just your problem, that it’s not just a matter of taste.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And yet, I am using facts, textual evidence and much more to defend my position.

A waste of time I suppose since no amount of evidence will ever be enough to get people to stop dismissing me as being arrogant and trying to force my vision upon others.

How is "I want information removed from the PH (and perhaps put elsewhere)" not forcing your vision upon others? It is literally changing the existing text to conform to your opinion of how it should be.

 

[Oofta]

Of course campaign settings are important. I never said they weren't. What I have said is that there are two major campaign settings and a whole lot of "generica land" that use the PHB lore.

Because, despite your opinion on the matter, the fact is that there is lore in the PHB. You can be of the opinion that the lore is bad, but it does exist over the course of a few different races. In fact, the very existence of Drow is a major setting decision, and yet they are presented whole cloth in the PHB.

And, honestly, the only thing I asked Crimson was "do you have any evidence to suggest that the PHB races like elves and dwarves and gnomes" also are equally generic. And now you are telling me that "a lot of people" like halfling lore and abilities

I wasn't talking about abilities in my question. So, why even bring it up?

I just don't get why everyone who is telling me to be more open minded can't actually do anything except beat the drum that I should be less arrogant, less tyrannical and more open minded. Because clearly if you aren't having a problem because you made a homebrew setting with homebrew lore, then how could anyone have a problem with the halflings in the PHB.

Heck, everyone who plays DnD buys a setting book from second edition to run Birthright or Darksun, or immediately decides to play in Eberron, right? So, how could any look to the Player's Handbook, one of only three "required" books and think "this is what a halfling is supposed to be" and not like it. Oh, or maybe they play in the Forgotten Realms, which everyone hates and has terrible lore, but that isn't something we can actually offer alternatives to in the PHB.

I can't even ask for people to do more than state their opinions about how wrong I am without me being called arrogant.

I agree that there is lore for all the races ... where do you even come up with this ****? What I've said is that the lore is a starting point and it's up to each campaign setting to fill in details if people care. I think the halfling lore is decent, I made minor tweaks to fit them in to my campaigns.

There is no "evidence" that other races have better or worse lore because that's based on opinion. In my experience most people are perfectly fine with the lore as presented for all of the races (with minor wording issues for half-orcs perhaps).

Maybe we're telling you that you should be less arrogant because what you post on this subject comes across as arrogant? It's fine to not like halflings. I don't care much for tieflings and I think the lore for genasi is pretty lame personally. But we've had more than a hundred pages largely because you keep complaining about a supposed lack of lore and so on.

But mostly I still don't know why you bother posting other than to play victim because people disagree. Oh, and to tell me that I put Tolkien on a pedestal and dismiss every other fantasy author because I think Tolkien was more influential for fantasy in general than Martin.

 

[Gammadoodler]

With "didn't this start" are you referring to nearly a year ago in a different thread? I can't tell you. I remember very heated discussions about aspects of that book. Much of which I still standby, but there is no point in rehashing those arguments here.

In this thread, as I said in my first post, I had a thought and realized I didn't know the mythos origin of Halflings. I figured Yondalla had created them, and I didn't remember how. So I looked it up in the Wiki... and that led to the completley accidental finding of the information I shared in my first post. But, I guess I'm not allowed to have more than one issue. Have to be hyper focused and never talk about anything else, right? I can't have discovered something else to talk about, if I ever deviate from things I said a year ago it must be because I abandoned those positions to be terrible in new ways.


You know, I really shouldn't bother posting. Everyone knows me better than I know myself. My reasons, my beliefs, how I run my game, the quality of my games. I'm a completely known factor. No matter how often you all are dead wrong about me and state I believe or said things that I have literally stated the opposite of. In literally this thread

Could be. It does all run together. MToF has certainly come up in this thread as well. Perhaps not from you. Willing to take your word for it.

That said.. If you want evidence for halfling culture, you already had it, and you had it before you made the argument to which I replied. Perhaps you just forgot?

But let's be clear then, in your opinion is MToF to be ignored as documentation of halfling differences? Because you didn't actually address that. You just kinda complained about it being brought up.

And, if we're complaining now, I've said exactly nothing about the way you run your games, or the quality of your games. I've even agreed that halfling lore, as it exists could be better. The full extent of my criticism toward you, personally, is that you have expressed opinions as if they are objective truths in a way that I find arrogant.

You've had multiple opportunities to back off of these positions, to frame them as the opinions they are, and, rather than doing that, you've doubled down on them as "facts". This is like 95% of friction we have from my point of view. The other 5% is time served.

 

[Bardic Dave]

I will play the "elves are generic" game though.

Let's see racial features:

• Medium size - sounds pretty human to me
• Long Life - The number of campaigns that span a time frame greater than a human life has got to be incredibly small. As such, Elven characters don't really ever get a chance to feel old. Time passes for them the same as every other character. In fact, they likely get to feel old less often than halflings get to feel lucky or brave.
• Perception proficiency - Humans can have this
• Trance - Roleplaying how the party sleeps is boring. How often are we acting out long rests?
• Some weapon proficiencies - humans can get these.
• A cantrip - humans can get these
• Slightly faster move speed - humans can get this
• Dark vision - you got me

Still.. what do we have? Elves are basically just humans with darkvision.

Generic.

This is why I’m not super crazy about Elves as a common PC race, or even as common NPCs (probably an unpopular opinion, I realize). When Elves are common in the setting, they do tend to wind up as little more than pointy eared humans.

I like Elves a lot. I like them as ethereal, aloof, inscrutable Fey folk. When a player plays an Elf, I like it when they really lean into that side of things

That being said, I would never tell my player they can’t play an elf or that they’re playing an Elf wrong. I’ve had some players take Elves in radically different directions that I never would have thought of myself, and the results have often been delightful.

 

[Yaarel]

One way to enhance the Elf identiy is to grant free known spells that have Elf flavor. Then whatever kind of spellcasting class the Elf is, the Elf can use its spell slots to cast the Elf spells so they are in play, and in a balanced way appropriate to the level.

And if the Elf is a non-spellcaster, and is less magical, and cant cast Elf spells, that is ok too, flavorwise.

It is also great to create a new spell to specify an Elf trope.

 

[Don Durito]

This is why I’m not super crazy about Elves as a common PC race, or even as common NPCs (probably an unpopular opinion, I realize). When Elves are common in the setting, they do tend to wind up as little more than pointy eared humans.

I like Elves a lot. I like them as ethereal, aloof, inscrutable Fey folk. When a player plays an Elf, I like it when they really lean into that side of things

That being said, I would never tell my player they can’t play an elf or that they’re playing an Elf wrong. I’ve had some players take Elves in radically different directions that I never would have thought of myself, and the results have often been delightful.

Yeah.

I don't tend to remove elves from my games completely, but I remove them as a player race because I want them as fey folk from the otherlands. I feel they're better as antagonists or inconstant allies.

I prefer Changelings for PC elf like races (although I feel that the recently released Hedxblooded make better changelings than the original changeling - by this I mean the 'replaced by elves as children' traditional style of changeling).

 

[Gammadoodler]

This is why I’m not super crazy about Elves as a common PC race, or even as common NPCs (probably an unpopular opinion, I realize). When Elves are common in the setting, they do tend to wind up as little more than pointy eared humans.

I like Elves a lot. I like them as ethereal, aloof, inscrutable Fey folk. When a player plays an Elf, I like it when they really lean into that side of things

That being said, I would never tell my player they can’t play an elf or that they’re playing an Elf wrong. I’ve had some players take Elves in radically different directions that I never would have thought of myself, and the results have often been delightful.

To be fair. I am kind of playing a game here for demonstration purposes rather than as an expression of internal belief.

The point was that we can choose how we want to see things, and reasonable people may disagree with those points of view.

(There are reasons I dislike Elves as a matter of taste, but I don't actually see any real issue with them being in the game)