OK, and? It shows that races can be changed and still remain those races. Of course the basic game has to be generic. It's up to specific worlds to make them different and interesting.
"I have issues with how the general game depicts halflings"
"What about Eberron and Dark Sun"
"Those are good alternatives, but they are two settings that went out of their way to break rank with general depictions, so they are supposed to be exceptions"
"Then isn't it fine that the general game is general"
Um... No. I still have a problem with the general depiction of halflings. Just because the settings that are supposed to break the mold broke the mold doesn't change that.
Because you kept saying that there "had" to be a race that fit that area. And so examples were given.
And you can replace halflings with other races as well, either as the Small race or as the pastoral race. While they're not a typical race, loxodon are described as "oases as calm" who "believe in the value of community and life."
Sure, but can you honestly tell me that Loxodon as towering elephant people, are going to have the same issue of being nothing but a variant human that halflings have? That they are going to have nothing of interest in terms of how they live their day to day lives?
They immediately change any community that they exist in by neccessity, and I'm sure if I went trawling through MTG lore, I'd find quite a bit on Loxodon that make them unique. And the other "small" races all also change a lot about the look and feel of a community. You can't just casually put kobolds into a town with humans and expect nothing much to change, just by their very biology things have to be different in this town to account for kobold needs. And they have lore, and a whole lot of other stuff.
Halflings only live in human cities in the Realms and Greyhawk. Which are both very old settings. As I pointed out, they don't in Dark Sun or Eberron. Why? Because, as you said, those two settings went out of their way to actually do something with the races instead of having them be boringly generic. Any setting where the writers spend a few minutes actually thinking about what to do with the races rather than just taking them, unchanged, from the PH can have interesting halflings.
Basically, your argument is:
You: Haflings are boring. They just live with humans and have no role.
Others: Here are examples from other settings where the halflings are very distinct people who aren't boring and don't live with humans.
You: Those don't count, because those halflings aren't boring.
Others: So what are you complaining about?
You: That halfings are boring and live with humans.
Again, I'm talking about the general halfling lore. And you want to say that general halfling lore is fine because other settings broke that lore over their knees and did something very different. You can't just ignore the fact that the general lore is the issue, by pointing to these settings. It'd be like claiming that there is an issue with how religion is depicted in DnD and then the other side saying that there shouldn't be any issue with that because Athas has no gods. Well... good for Athas, but that isn't the whole of DnD and it is very explicitly meant to be completely different from normal DnD.
(Also, a hook: halflings live with humans. Why? Were there lands taken away from them, and now they're forced into Little Hobbiton ghettos? Are they happy about this?)
Except, that isn't the lore we are given. They live with humans because... they live with humans. No explanation is ever given. They just do.
Well, that's a hook in and of itself, now isn't it? Halflings could do a lot to affect the way a nation works and nobody pays them any mind.
It could be an interesting hook... but no one ever does anything with it. And you have to suddenly start changing a lot about halflings to make it work. After all, if they are defying kings and kings decide to do something about it... then halfings are either going to war or being forced to no longer defy the king. And neither concept is truly supported by the lore.
And if no one ever bothers to challenge them on not listening to the king... then why does it matter? How does it make them any different from the small human village who listens to the elder and that the king ignores because they are small?
That isn't their role in the Realms because it's an old setting that didn't think about how to make halflings interesting. You can take that bit of info about them and actually make them important.
FR is old therefore FR lore isn't interesting by design is kind of a poor defense when you went to the FR lore to look for hooks.
No. Every PC is an adventurer. Most are outliers. Most elves and dwarfs don't go seeking out trouble. Most humans don't, either. But most halflings do.
No, they don't. As I covered with a different poster. The entire idea behind "fancy feet" is that halflings who go on adventures are outliers. Like every other race.
So? That's the fault of the writers for not exploring this interesting concept.
Everything about halflings is the fault of the writers. Halflings don't exist to write their own lore. So, how is it fine for you to say that the entire race has this interesting hook, but then dismiss the fact that it is such a small hook that it is never mentioned anywhere except a single novel and the wiki, in a single line, and has nothing attached to it?
The point is the lack of explored interesting concepts. If it isn't explored and is just a single sentence buried where no one sees it, then what good is it?
So, being a miner is a big thing for a race, but being a chef isn't?
No being a miner alone isn't enough for a race. Just like being a chef alone isn't enough.
Being the best miners, and stonesmiths, and blacksmiths, and jewelers, who have used that expertise to shape the landscape and build fantastical monuments that stand the test of time... is a bit different than just being a miner.
It isn't? That immediately brings to mind the idea that halflings are diplomats and peace-keepers, capable of bridging the gap between any two races, no matter how different they are. That is a really important role, especially in a setting as violent as D&D.
But that isn't what the entry says. It'd be amazing as a concept for halflings if they were the nomadic diplomats of the world. But they aren't.
Could I homebrew to make them so? Sure. But I'm not talking about my homebrew world. I'm talking about the general lore of the official game.
Yes. You seem determined to give a line of description a once-over, shrug, and toss it, without spending even a moment thinking about the implications of it.
I respectfully ask you to stop reading my mind from across the internet. After all, you are terrible at it, since you are completely wrong.
If that was the only real difference between the worlds? No, they wouldn't be that much different. Because neither wood elves nor firbolgs have the kind of society that makes big changes in the world around them.
But anyway, so what? You can replace halflings with loxodon, farming goblins, or humans and say the exact same thing. It's similar but not exact.
Um, wood elves certainly make big changes to the world around them. Not sure why you think differently.
And, I like your list here, because halflings being easily replaced by humans is part of the problem. But, no I don't believe they can be casually replaced with Loxodon or Goblins, they really aren't that similar. Both of those races have lore and are more than just short humans. For example, goblins have a long history of being particularly good animal tamers and beast masters, so it would make a lot of sense for their companion animal, wargs, to stay with them as guard dogs and immediately changes a lot about the dynamics of a goblin farm and makes it far more interesting than a halfling farm. Which... is just a human farm, but with shorter farmers.
If halflings have no role or ambition, does that mean humans have no role or ambition either?
Humans have built many different organizations, factions, and cities and directly drive a lot of the history of the various worlds of DnD.
Humans are super generic, because they are humans just like us, but they clearly have roles and ambitions. Do halflings have the exact same roles and ambitions? Then what is the point of them?
So let me ask you this: humans are, in D&D-land, most commonly found in cities and towns and their suburbs. But they still need to eat. Halflings make for good farmers and seem to enjoy it, and don't have any particular desire to live in the Big City. Why on earth would humans not simply employ--or exploit, or enslave--halflings to do the farming while they, the humans, enjoy the big city life?
That's a good question. The lore is completely silent on this. It seems that we aren't supposed to question it. Or we are to assume that all human cities use human farmers.
I guess this is my fault for not writing the lore, since that seems to be why you keep accusing me of not thinking about things. Because I'm not actively rewriting the game to fix the mistakes that I'm pointing out.
That's... a bit like saying that if one group of humans was forced to adopt the customs and lifestyle of another group of more dominant humans, then you don't need that first group of humans.
Let us say I wrote a book. In that book I decide that the City of Everton has two groups of humans in it. The Hah and the Moh. They are pretty much exactly the same. They have no tension between their groups, and there is no narrative of there being an issue between them. They just both exist in the city and are different, but that difference never really means anything except to occasionally mention that a character is a Hah or a Moh.
Why did I bother to make both groups? If I'm never going to have them be any different, or have any tension between them, then I've just made unnecessary complexity.
You've phrased your response as a gotcha, but you are ignoring the issue by trying to smokescreen it behind a different issue.
So what you're saying is, you won't accept halflings that are officially non-boring (Eberron, Dark Sun), and you won't accept extrapolations from their official FR/GH lore that makes them non-boring (infiltrators, loremasters, peace-keepers, master chefs, exploited workforce), and you won't bother to come up with your own lore for them. Because... you need the PH to tell you what they're like? Do you play all of your races exactly the way the PH says?
So I think you should just up and admit that it's not that halflings are bad, it's that you don't know what to do with them.
"The General Lore for this section of the game isn't working and should be changed"
"But what about this specific thing from the setting that breaks all the general lore. Or what about changing it yourself to make your own version"
"Neither of these things address the general lore needing to be changed"
"Why don't you just admit you need to be told what to do because you don't know what to do with them"
How about... no. Again. I can homebrew this if I wanted. But me homebrewing them doesn't change how they are presented in the general lore. I don't understand why you seem to think that it is a problem with me personally that I decided to engage in the conversation about the general lore and I'm not accepting "but I homebrewed and made my own specific lore" as an answer to the issues in the general lore.
Yes. A DM can change anything they want, at any time they want, to be anything they want. That doesn't change what is in the books. Yes, there are exactly two settings that went out of their way to be completely different from anything else, and presented the race in a way that is completely different in every single way from their general depiction. But that doesn't change their general depiction. If someone hasn't purchased a Dark Sun book from 2nd, 3rd, or 4th edition, then they have basically no access to dark sun lore about Halflings. They probably do have the Player's Handbook. That book that every player generally buys. So, talking about that and how they are depicted in the most popular setting that nearly every single adventure is based in seems like a good place to focus.
All D&D, including that of the actual settings, is made up lore.
But some of it has a larger impact than others. My personal headcanon for a race doesn't change how they are presented in the books.
