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

[Mind of tempest]

The niche that they fit. For halflings, see my post in this thread.

Quick take on races I've played over the years in no particular order:

• Dwarves are extremely practical with bad pseudo-Scottish accents, gruff and blunt to the point some people will find them insulting.
• Gnomes are hyper and bounce off the walls while trying to get out a flood of thoughts all at once. I admit though that I have a hard time with forest gnomes.
• Elves come off as better-than-thou but are really just reluctant to get too close to people that will just be around for the blink of an eye. Unfortunately I never get to play them long before they die.
• Half-orcs lean into the barbarian nature, gruff and bad mannered. Also fun to subvert the trope and have a half-orc that actually quite intelligent that just pretends to be a dumb brute.
• Warforged is one that I had fun with just the caricature of someone who does not understand biological beings at all. As in "So you do this thing to reproduce, but you don't really want to reproduce now? Why do something that does not achieve the desired function? Can I observe this ritual?"
• Gnoll in 4E was fun because I played an anthropomorphic Scooby-Doo. Kind of dissapointed there are no more dog-related playable humanoids, why do cats get all the love?
• Dragonborn are outgoing, proud and boastful of their draconic ancestry while being dedicated to family and heritage.

It has very little to do with mechanics for me. In fact, I'm kind of dissapointed that in AL my mountain dwarf wizard is no longer playing against type any more. It has to do with what aspect of personality they can represent, what "hook" I can either build on or subvert.

on dwarves, we certainly agree.
forest gnomes need more lore and to be properly crafted to better suit what they are a subraces of.
elves yeah
honestly, I would just remove half-orc and let people play orc at this point.
I am not allowed to play warforged I would just turn in to HK-47 in about 5 minutes.
we could see if we can get lupins into 5e?

so one what makes a race interesting non of us truly disagree but it is the details that seem to divide us, that is interesting

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think you mean a “I don’t think elves as currently written are particularly engaging” thread”. I believe both elvish and gnomish threads would peter out quickly. Halfling defenders seem to be particularly defensive about the race.

I find that the gnomish lore in the PHB distinguishes them better as a race than halflings, but I can’t imagine devoting hundreds of posts to that fact.

And yet at least two individuals in this thread alone have devoted literally hundreds of comments each to trying to tear down halflings. I'd rather spend hundreds of comments building something up than tearing it down.

 

[Gnarlo]

I think you mean a “I don’t think elves as currently written are particularly engaging” thread”. I believe both elvish and gnomish threads would peter out quickly. Halfling defenders seem to be particularly defensive about the race.

I thought we’d already established that humans tend to be the primary defenders of halflings

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah, that was the point of this thread, but a lot of people that couldn't see the forest for the trees.

I never expected this thread to reach this length. I can say without a doubt that this is the longest thread that I originally started on this site's forums. It's probably the longest thread that I've participated in. I wish that it had been more constructive, but it quickly devolved to circular arguments and endless "you're the one in the wrong!" accusations.

I dislike halflings. I find their lore lacking, and think that they have less ground to stand on than much of the other races in 5e. I don't want to tell anyone that their fun is wrong or gaslight anyone into thinking that their experiences were legitimate. The main point of the OP was saying that Halflings don't have a story. They're just short-people with a few random traits (Brave, Lucky) stapled onto them because the game-designers couldn't think of anything better to give them. They would be completely unnecessary as a player race if Humans were just allowed to be Medium or Small at character creation, or if there was a general "short human-looking person" race that combined Halflings and Gnomes. They're a bit redundant, and they have less stories as a race than most other races do.

That was the point, but very few people got it. Many people jumped to say "just don't play them!", or "why do you want to take away our fun!", which was not at all the point of the OP. If I wanted to removed halflings from D&D, I would have said that. IMO, putting them under a sub-type of humans isn't removing them, it's consolidating them to just simplify the game and stop people from feeling the need to cram them into their worlds/games with a bad/lacking excuse for their existing (and people can stop telling me that I don't have to include them, I knew that from before I made the OP. That doesn't stop the fact that people do feel forced to include them, which is the problem. Merging them with humans or gnomes would largely nullify that, IMO, as would making them not be one of the core races of the game (which also could be solved by not having any "core races" in 6e)). IMO, merging halflings with humans or gnomes is no more "invalidating of the halfling experience" than it would be "invalidating the grippli, grung, and bullywugs" if you were to just merge the three types of frog-humanoids into one race, or to make Lizardfolk and Saurials the same race to avoid redundancy (or even a semblance of redundancy).

Huh. I just realized that this is kind of similar to the phrase "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". Halflings have gotten a privileged/special treatment as a D&D race because they were in Tolkien, so people that liked that treatment feel that they're being attacked when it's suggested that Halflings get treated in the same manner that most other D&D races are. (I'm definitely not comparing the fact that halflings get the special treatment to the systemic oppression of real world people, I'm just showing that the phrase applies in much the same way.)

Just. . . ugh. I would like to fix halflings, but people keep getting mad that I think they need fixing in the first place.

Probably because they don’t need fixing, and your proposed fix would effectively remove them.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But I surely didn't expect "you're oppressing my playstyle!" to be amongst the most common responses.

Show even 1 post saying that.

And it all boiled down to basically "Tolkien"

False.

However, I do think that Sea-Elves and Tritons are largely redundant (especially with Merfolk existing) and that 5e should pick one and drop the other

No. Having multiple things in a niche is not a bad thing. The idea that there only needs to be one sea folk, when the land has a hundred folk, and the sea is more biodiverse in general than the land, is absolutely wild.

but I am of the opinion that it would not hurt people's fun if halflings were just a part of the Human race

You are incorrect.

Mystara, IIRC. However, never in 5e.

FR, and very much in 5e.

I would get the gnome hate thread to 200 pages alone and I would openly admit I hate them page 1.

Ah geez please don’t make that thread. I ain’t got time for that, but I also ain’t about to let y’all slander my gnomes without challenge…

 

[Faolyn]

We just look at different things and have different ideas of what makes a race interesting. To me genasi are just "let's through things in a blender and see what comes out". They don't represent anything, they just happen to be a rando combination.

They worked fine in Planescape (where they come from), where having elemental-descended people makes sense even without giving them a ton of lore. The problem is that most settings aren't like Planescape, where having a hodgepodge of weird not-quite-human people makes perfect sense.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Given the mechanics of D&D, wouldn’t every short human have exactly the same trait?

If they are still medium-sized creatures, no. Let's remember scale here too. Our full-sized, grown-ass halflings is about the same size and weight as like a 2 or 3 year old. This is not just, a "short human".

The difference in scale alone leads to a more radically different experience of life in the world than most other racial features combined.

Edit: and further, let's say you do go down this path of just making a small-sized human. Congratulations, you now have a human the size of a large toddler who can wield a sword as well as a full grown adult human, who can jump as high as a full size adult human, and with the exception of movement speed performs equally in physical contests.

Then ask yourself, if you saw a big toddler jump like LeBron while holding a longsword, would your next thought be "typical human"?

 

[Oofta]

If they are still medium-sized creatures, no. Let's remember scale here too. Our full-sized, grown-ass halflings is about the same size and weight as like a 2 or 3 year old. This is not just, a "short human".

The difference in scale alone leads to a more radically different experience of life in the world than most other racial features combined.

I kind of want to write up a halfling barbarian now that challenges everyone to arm wrestling contests.

Except of course for the other dozen or so PCs I also want to play when I get a chance.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Ah geez please don’t make that thread. I ain’t got time for that, but I also ain’t about to let y’all slander my gnomes without challenge…

Sneak preview: gnomes have historically been a vehicle to mock and beat down attempts to break medieval stasis in D&D worlds by being the only people to attempt technology but then being either incompetent or frivolous with it.

 

[Chaosmancer]

"There's no story to halfings" said the person who has written tens of thousands of words about how halflings could/could not repel an invasion by gnolls.

I never said that. This conversation would go a lot smoother is you stopped making things up and attributing things to me I never said.

What I DID say is that the primary halfling Player Character story is that of the farmboy leaving home, and without dragging halflings out of their lore and altering them significantly you can't really do something different than that.

In no world and in no langauge does one equal zero.