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

[bedir than]

Everyone is just a human with a built in feat.

I'm specifically talking about the Lore.

Elf Lore - they're old, distant, haughty nobles that think they're better than everyone else
Dwarf lore - they're drunkards who are prone to violent reactions towards simple affronts
Dragonborn lore - they're militaristic and unified in their service of the kingdom

Any race's lore can be replaced with a human. Those that only object to halfling lore because it's "too human" merely hate halflings and aren't having an authentic debate.

 

[Hussar]

If we trust your chart and go by popularity halflings are in. There are nine races in the PHB and halflings are on the shared eight place with the half-orcs. So according to your own stated methodology they logically deserve their place, yet you want to replace them with something less popular. That you do not follow your own stated logic implies that your stance might be influenced by personal bias.

Yes, if we ignore all context, you would be absolutely right.

Thing is, halflings are at the bottom and have been, despite having every possible advantage - being in the Basic rules, being promoted as one of the 4 most common PC races, featuring in the art in the game frequently, being included in settings, etc.

But, sure, personal bias plays a role here too. The fact that I so rarely see halflings being played obviously influences my opinion. In exactly the same way that it influences so many others in this thread who want to keep halflings because they see them in their games.

 

[Hussar]

Finally. Thank you.

Now, note, you still did the same thing as before, where you downplay the stats that are supposedly so damning. If we combine the halfling numbers, we get 4.8, unless my eyesight is very bad.

Which rounds to 5, not 4.

Why do you insist on rounding incorrectly? Why do you always turn to hyperbole? It does not strengthen your argument. It weakens it.

That out of the way, a variance of 1% from survey to survey isn’t a particularly big deal, so sure, we can go with 5%. Halflings are still in the top 10.

Obviously Stout is less popular than Lightfoot, but even it is played more than the majority of races, and Lightfoot is played more than all but 8 of the other races.

Like, leave out human as an outlier, and the distribution isn’t even especially uneven!

edit: 4.7%, not 4.8%.

Sigh. Holy pedantic Batman.

5.9% and 4.7% AVERAGES TO 5 PERCENT. Well, close enough anyway. And, I REPEATEDLY stated the 4.7% number when I pointed out the graph and before. Can we please stop with the ridiculous pedantry?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Thing is, halflings are at the bottom and have been, despite having every possible advantage - being in the Basic rules, being promoted as one of the 4 most common PC races, featuring in the art in the game frequently, being included in settings, etc.

Except they aren’t at the bottom. The race that is at the bottom of PHB races caused a great upset when removed from the PHB, and Halflings are more popular than them, ranking several spots higher on the list of races by popularity.

Which you keep ignoring.

Along with the fact that “within top ten percent of races” is…not at the bottom. Hell, if we leave out the wild outlier that is Human, the top ten isn’t even a double digit difference in percentage.

You keep rounding everything down and claiming they have “no traction” and are “at the bottom”, but there is no evidence that you claims are true.

 

[Hussar]

I'm not sure this actually is true in 5e.

I'm specifically talking about the Lore.

Elf Lore - they're old, distant, haughty nobles that think they're better than everyone else

Elf lore - they are gender fluid virtual immortals who relive past lives every night with perfect clarity. The old distant haughty elf thing is largely an artifact of older editions.

Dwarf lore - they're drunkards who are prone to violent reactions towards simple affronts

Again, the whole drunk dwarf thing isn't really a thing anymore. And prone to violent reactions? When has that ever been a dwarf thing. But, I'll grant that dwarves haven't evolved all that much.

Dragonborn lore - they're militaristic and unified in their service of the kingdom

Any race's lore can be replaced with a human. Those that only object to halfling lore because it's "too human" merely hate halflings and aren't having an authentic debate.

Well, considering that the human's schtick is that humans can be anything, being able to be replaced by humans is a pretty low bar. But, last I checked, humans weren't gender fluid near immortals. Humans certainly aren't presented as particularly militaristic, nor are they presented as anything remotely like unified. Some humans can be like this, but, that's because some humans can be anything.

But, again, thank you so very much for ascribing motives to people when they have stated repeatedly that what you are assuming isn't true. I certainly don't hate halflings. Why would I? They would actually have to make an appearance for me to begin liking or hating them. Halflings lack anything that make them easy to hate. It would be like hating vanilla ice cream. They're so bland and lacking that there's just nothing to hate. This thread would be far more productive if you'd simply listen to what people are saying and not make presumptions about what you think their motives are.

See, for me, the motive is getting race choices that are reasonably equal. The PHB should reflect what is actually getting played by groups. I don't believe that halflings (and gnomes and half-orcs) do represent what is being played at the table. So, they get the chop. ANY race that underperforms as spectacularly as halflings should have gotten the chop years ago.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Sigh. Holy pedantic Batman.

5.9% and 4.7% AVERAGES TO 5 PERCENT. Well, close enough anyway. And, I REPEATEDLY stated the 4.7% number when I pointed out the graph and before. Can we please stop with the ridiculous pedantry?

It’s not pedantry to point out that you’re repeatedly misrepresenting the statistics while making controversial claims that rely on said statistics.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm specifically talking about the Lore.

Elf Lore - they're old, distant, haughty nobles that think they're better than everyone else
Dwarf lore - they're drunkards who are prone to violent reactions towards simple affronts
Dragonborn lore - they're militaristic and unified in their service of the kingdom

Any race's lore can be replaced with a human. Those that only object to halfling lore because it's "too human" merely hate halflings and aren't having an authentic debate.

Not really.
The mentalities of the dwarves and elves in D&D are due to them being old long lived races wit higher technological levels than humans for a long time.

Elves are haughty distant jerks because an elf only allowed to speak his mind after age 100 and most humans are 3 generations in by then. So who are these humans to tell them ANYTHING. If I were 300 I would think I'm better than you.

Same with dwarves with the added part that dwarves are uually 10 seconds from civilization disaster, their golden age is long gone, they don't think they deserve it, and they drinking away their resentment.

And base dragonborn are BORN into a war between 2 bitterly feuding dragon gods with draconic pide all in their heads..

They aren't human at all. People run them as humans.

 

[Hussar]

Huh, that's interesting. I hadn't bothered to go look at Ghostwise and Lotusden, because they are in supplements and never talked about. And, funnily enough one of the big rallying cries about halflings has been "they have no innate magic"

Kind of amusing to see that 50% of their subraces have explicitly magical abilities.

Also, again, Forest Gnomes outperform even the Lotusden halflings in the forest. Druidcraft and the disadvantage on tracking are nice, but don't really compare to minor illusion speaking with the animals of the forest.

I'm not sure that raw mechanical advantage plays a very large role in people's decisions to play something. It's a danger to think that optimization is a major consideration when choosing things for characters.

 

[Hussar]

Except they aren’t at the bottom. The race that is at the bottom of PHB races caused a great upset when removed from the PHB, and Halflings are more popular than them, ranking several spots higher on the list of races by popularity.

Which you keep ignoring.

Along with the fact that “within top ten percent of races” is…not at the bottom. Hell, if we leave out the wild outlier that is Human, the top ten isn’t even a double digit difference in percentage.

You keep rounding everything down and claiming they have “no traction” and are “at the bottom”, but there is no evidence that you claims are true.

Well, no evidence save the fact that halflings are largely ignored by the game publisher, and every bit of evidence we do have points to them being under performing where the only reason they are as high as they are is because they are given such a prominent position.

But, yes, no evidence.

5.9%x4.7%= 5% is not rounding down by the way. It is rounding up, no? You have a single poll that places halflings at 5.9%, from 2017, some time before there were a hundred races in 5e. 2017 is pretty early days and halflings, despite having so little competition from other official sources, still swim around at the bottom of the barrel. The next bit of information we have, sees their popularity dropping and that's from 2019.

It's 2021, do you really think that halflings have become MORE popular? There are what, 9 races in the PHB? We'll say that non-PHB races count as a "10th" race. That means each race should be somewhere around 10%. We can quibble over the percentage, I'm certainly not wedded to that specific number. But, apparently, at 4.7%, halflings really are underperforming quite badly.

The fact that other races are also underperforming does not change that fact. Like I said, I have zero problems axing many races from the PHB. I am certainly no traditionalist who needs to have a cuddle with a well trodden path PHB in order to play D&D. Again, the fact that the first time they add new races to the PHB, those new races are outperforming ALL the traditional races save humans speaks volumes to me. But, apparently, that's not evidence either.

Just out of curiosity, what would count as evidence @doctorbadwolf? What would you consider acceptable evidence that halflings (as well as a number of other races) are underperforming?

 

[Vaalingrade]

the niche is not the problem but the thing filling it could be much better.

Except the 'things to fill the niche' have been 'nothing like what the niche is'.

The niche is a 'normal' race to fill the void left by all humans being explicitly Vin Diesel and Scarlet Johannsen instead of Jason Alexander and Wanda Sykes. The solution seems to be 'how about Jason Statham and Kate Beckensale?'.