No, I didn't. I declared that elements of D&D do not need to be justified by verbal explanation for the correct choice to be retention. That the burden of proof for reform has to be not "This part serves no explained purpose", but rather "This part hurts D&D [with actual evidence of harm]".
Yeah, you did. I said that something exists in D&D only because of Tolkien, not really to fulfill a narrative niche (they certainly don't fulfill the ones in D&D that Tolkien intended for them in his stories, which are very specific to his stories and don't work in most D&D worlds, which IMO, is a good enough argument against Halflings being a core race of D&D).
I have also said that I have a hard time finding a narrative niche for halflings in my world, especially to find one that can't be accomplished by another race. To me, that's important. I want every part of my race and world to be important. I want everything to have the potential to be a Chekhov's Gun. If something doesn't have that potential, like "My race likes growing plants and living in burrows!", that's not narratively interesting to me, and doesn't help me build the best stories and world(s) that I possibly can. Having races where you were crafted by master artificers to serve as war machines, or the spirit of an alien-refugee bonded with your soul, or even a race where you are designed to be good at smithing has the potential to be an interesting narrative aspect of a campaign. Halflings don't have that.
Having Halflings being a core part of the game has caused me no small amount of distress/lost time, and so on. I wouldn't dislike halflings and make a thread about that just because I don't find them interesting, I dislike them and create a thread about them because I've found how disinteresting they are to be actively detrimental to my games.
If you are inventing something new, "Can I explain what purpose this part serves?" is a perfectly useful design heuristic. But if you are curating something that is already successful, in a universe where most new things fail, it is a very good way to accidentally destroy that success.
Elements of something that is successful are justified by the simple fact of the success of the whole, whether or not anyone has a good verbal explanation for them or how they contribute to the success. This is because people are not omniscient, so an inability to explain an element's contribution does not mean it does not contribute. The argument for change accordingly needs to be actively justified.
So, you're saying that things that are already a part of the game are inherently exempt from criticism/possible revision because they've been successful enough to exist this long? That doesn't sit well with me for many reasons, the main ones listed below:
- I was literally not alive when D&D first came out. You're essentially gatekeeping people who were not alive at the time Halflings were introduced to D&D to not be allowed to criticize them/have their criticism be taken seriously.
- Plenty of neutral/possibly detrimental traits are passed on to later generations through evolution. The bar for evolution (both genetic and cultural) is not actually "survival of the fittest", but is instead "survival of the fit enough". I'm not saying that Halflings are awful and are actively hurting D&D in general and are useless vermin that must be cleansed from the hobby. I'm instead saying that they barely qualify for a valid excuse to exist in the game (by passing the absolute lowest bar to warrant their inclusion in the game), don't fulfill an engaging storytelling niche, and only exist because of Tradition, not because of them actually being a good/inspiring storytelling tool.
- Plenty of things that are a part of something's history get removed eventually. Racial Ability Scores Modifiers have been a part of D&D for a long time, but 5e recently had a direction change by not having them on future races and including an optional rule to basically remove them on previous races. The ancestors of dolphins had legs for millions of years, but they eventually became less and less useful for the species(es?) as they spent more and more time in water.
IMO, something isn't justified by them existing, even if they've existed a long time. Physical books have existed a long time, but more and more people are reading e-books and listening to audio books. Does that mean physical books will eventually be invalidated? Perhaps. However, the fact that paper books were so useful for centuries is not a valid argument against using e-books and audio books more and more in the future (a valid argument would be more about how physical books can't lose charge, or how some people are better at absorbing information from physical books than e-books or audio books, and so on).
Changing THAC0 easily overcomes this simple placement of the burden of proof; it demonstrably didn't work well. While mathematically clever, it's easy to demonstrate that real people, en masse find subtraction harder than addition and addition harder than counting, and that people regularly flubbed the calculation in play.
I just gave THAC0 as a specific example of something changing. You want more? Tieflings. Tieflings changed, even though there was really no need for them to do so, and they became more popular as a result. Things that sometimes change because people don't find them compelling, or just because they might be due for a change, is a valid reason to change things, and it can have good outcomes if done thoughtfully and carefully.
If you've got an argument that halflings are actually confusing to players, or cause problems at the table, like THAC0 did, then you've got a case against halflings. "I don't know of a justification for including them" is not one.
And even then, actually, your argument isn't that you don't see any justification for including them. You simply don't see the justification (supporting people who want to play hobbits from Tolkien) as personally compelling. That's an even weaker argument for excision, given Tolkien's works are popular enough they're not just still in print (in multiple editions), but actively producing spinoff media (a TV series) to boot.
Again, as stated in the OP, I'm not advocating for removing halflings from the game. I'm just explaining why I don't find them compelling, giving examples of how to actually create a compelling story for a race, and shown how halflings have been detrimental in certain scenarios to my table (I consider "not being the best they can be" to be detrimental when the alternative is "changing them to possibly making them better").
That's a theory as to what exactly went wrong with that implementation, sure.
However, in any case you're applying to halflings the exact same logic that drove 4e design, as you would see if you read the books Wizards Presents: Races and Classes (December 2007) and Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters (January 2008). I accordingly expect applying very similar logic to the same task (revising D&D) would produce similar results (commercial failure).
That's also a theory. You dismiss my claim as being a theory as a rebuttal to tote your own theory.