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.
So... you're upset that the PH didn't magically change in a way you like.
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.
And the written lore is the only lore that's possible to use?
Do you demand that every aspect of every race be completely written out, or do you use the hooks and ideas that are presented and expand upon them? If it's the latter, why not do it for halflings?
IAnd 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?
Interesting, isn't it? They're perpetually underestimated. Which means they have complete freedom to act as powers behind the throne, to perform anarchic acts, or otherwise act however they want without suspicion.
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.
Sigh. You seem to believe that the FR lore is the "base" lore and that it's not interesting. I'm showing how--even when the writers were not going out of their way to make halflings into a cool people--FR lore has the seeds for something quite interesting.
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.
MTF suggests that "fancy feet" happens to most halflings, to the point that villages have their own ways of "coping with the phenomenon." This suggests to me that most halflings have wanderlust but are forced by societal pressure (or worse!) to remain at home instead of going exploring. Like it's the 50s or so, and they're all expected to settle down and get married an a job right out of high school, and none of those hifalutin ideas like starting a band or joining an improv theater. I'm now imagining that either halflings have a secret drinking and drug problem (cheeeese?) to deal with this, have
spectacular mid-life crises, or when necessary, they use Stepford halfling replicas (I mostly run horror games; I
will use this next time I'm able).
The very next section says that halflings that manage to go out and adventure do so in order to become legends. Which means that you have an entire race of people who
want to go out and do cool stuff and take up EXTREME ADVENTURING!!! but most of them get guilted into staying home. And those who do manage to go EXTREME ADVENTURING!!! and become halfling superstars, with the rest of the halflings becoming their groupies.
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?
Isn't that what hooks are for? For you, the DM, to grab them and expand upon them?
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?
Well, I saw it. So can anyone who saw that site, or who read MTF.
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.
Dwarfs make dwarven ale. Elves make elven wine and, sometimes, off-brand lembas bread. That's the extent of their notable culinary achievements. I think the fact that halflings are actually written as being good chefs means that you can safely extrapolate them as being
the best chefs.
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 they're just like humans, which is bad, except when they're not just like humans, which is also bad.
And again, why do a people need to have a point? There's no point to having elves or dwarves or tieflings either. You put them in a game because you like them. You take them out of a game because you don't like them.
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.
You're taking the lore at extreme face value and not actually thinking about what it means. The lore may be silent on the question of who is farming, but that's only because the writers didn't think that it was important because we're playing Dungeons & Dragons, not Papers & Paychecks. But it may very well be important, and especially if you're trying to figure out what role a race places in the setting.
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.
Except that halflings and humans
aren't "pretty much the same." They have different outlooks on society and family. They have different gods. Mechanically, they have different traits--unlike humans, all halflings are Brave, Lucky, and Nimble. And in most editions, they have different alignments (halflings are typically LG, while humans are always "any" or "any, but mostly neutral.") They have large number of differences that you're ignoring. Even if humans and halflings get along great, there's still going to be a lot that sets them apart.
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.
So again, you're mad because the PH that's on your shelf didn't magically update itself with bullet points and 14-point type.
The ideas I presented above all came from the books. I didn't pull any ideas out of thin air, like cannibal halflings. I used the info in the books to flesh out how they were written. This isn't homebrewing. This is using the books as intended.
