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

[Yaarel]

D&D and etymology don't really mix that well.

We could actually have a pretty good thread about how screwed up D&D's idea of monsters is from a folkloric perspective. Basilisks and cockatrice are different creatures somehow. As are gorgons, medusae and catobelopas.

And then on this very topic:

Hobs, redcaps, brownies, faries, fairys, sprites, pixies, elves, dwarves, sidhe, and goblins? All the same guys.

Gnomes, kobolds, and earth elementals (as said). Different set of same guys.

Trolls? A class onto themselves, rather like saying 'bird' or mammal for all the the variety you're lumping together.

Orc? Basically a modern invention that's actually newer the 'robot' as its own thing.

I'm honestly shocked D&D back in the 80's didn't somehow have singular monsters called youkai, tengu, garuda and rakash...ah crap...

Heh, Gygax makes knowledgeable people cry.



Hobs are house spirits.

I associate Redcap with the red cap of Nisse (a Scandinavian house sprite). But "redcap" actually is a demonic sprite in Scottish lore that really did keep it red by dipping it in blood.

Fairy. The word "fairie" (of many different spellings) means "magic", as well as "realm of fay". In British lore, the term fairy meant any kind of magical creature, including a sphynx. However, as the term came more and more to specify the fairy as described by Shakespeare, new terms entered the language to fill in the gap (like "magic" as a neologism to replace "fairy"), and to help disambiguate (like using "elf" to mean a human size fairy).

A goblin (ultimately from German kobold via French), is in English synonymous with boggard, and so on, and is a malevolent sprite, as opposed to a hob which is a helpful sprite. The term "hobgoblin" is an oxymoron where a sprite that plays practical jokes that cause pain and laughter, is both helpful and harmful, simultaneously. In this sense, Shakespeare uses hobgoblin for Puck (≈ bug, bogey, boggard, puk, boogie, etcetera), as the royal jester of the fairy court.

Sidhe are a Celtic land spirit. In Scotland Sith is an other name for an Elf in the sense of a human size fairy.

For me Dwarf in the sense of Norse Dvergar is a highly specific concept.

The Norse word "troll" means "enchanter", "witch". Under Christian influence, it came to be a Scandinavian loantranslation for the British term "fairy", which in the sense fate and magic, also means "enchant". Trolls are various magical creatures, and in Scandinavia there are very different kinds of trolls from beautiful to grotesque, but they came to be understood as members of the same family.

Orc is apparently a word occurring once in Old English, in Beowulf, as orcneas, of unclear meaning but in a context of various magical creatures.



Any way, in D&D, Halfling and Gnome resemble each other and often get grouped together. That their etymology says they are both a kind of house sprite is telling.

Even the 5e art for a Halfling looks much like pop-culture images of a Gnome.

(Heh, one could almost argue that a Halfling is a Half-Gnome, descending from Human and Gnome parentage. Heh, these hybrids remain Small but become less magical.)

 

[jayoungr]

Tolkien himself said the word hobbit came from holbylta, meaning hole-dweller (Old English).

 

[Vaalingrade]

Even the 5e art for a Halfling looks much like pop-culture images of a Gnome.

I hate gnomes and even I wouldn't call the 5e halfling at a gnome.

That my good person is a drawing of existential dread.

 

[Yaarel]

Tolkien himself said the word hobbit came from holbylta, meaning hole-dweller (Old English).

In any case, a "hole-dweller" suggests a land sprite. (Consider many sprites live in small caves, in reallife British lore.)

Before Tolkien, James Hardy wrote in his 1895 The Denham Tracts 2, about British folklore: "The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles ... hobbits, hobgoblins." In this earlier context, the "hobbit" definitely relates to the "hob", same as "hob-goblin" does.

This earlier hobbit is thought to derive from "hob" under the influence of "rabbit".

Possibly both are true, where Tolkien initially referred to the hobbit as a hob, whence the home-oriented lifestyle, but later wanting to explain the second syllable more thuroly, offered hol-bylta.

 

[Faolyn]

If a large percentage choose based on stats and mechanics then halflings are still a failure because no one is playing them.

That’s the point that keeps getting ignored. Despite having every possible advantage, no one plays halflings.

Three out of five players in one of my games do.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

If a large percentage choose based on stats and mechanics then halflings are still a failure because no one is playing them.

That’s the point that keeps getting ignored. Despite having every possible advantage, no one plays halflings.

Except plenty of people do.

 

[Yaarel]

For the record, according to DnDBeyond

Percentage of Player Characters

Dwarf ≈ 6.6%
• 3.6% Mountain
• 3.0% Hill
• <0.9% other

Halfling ≈ 4.7%
• 3.4% Lightfoot
• 1.3% Stout
• <0.9% other

Gnome ≈ 3.1%
• 2.2% Rock
• 0.9% Deep
• <0.9% other

So, Halfling has some traction, but not much.

However note, if they become one lineage: Halfling+Gnome ( ≈ 7.8% !)

Then the Gnomeling surpasses Dwarf ( ≈ 6.6%)

 

[pemerton]

They do have an identity. Taking solely from the PH and their part in MTF, the vast majority of halflings:

1. are stealthy
2. are lucky
3. are brave
4. are nimble
5. enjoy an easy, comfortable life but are willing to go into great danger and suffer great hardship when the cause is right
6. are reliable and cooperative
7. are open and welcoming to all because they judge by intentions and actions, not by race or appearance
8. are good cooks and good farmers
9. are good-natured, cheerful, and optimistic even when things are bleak
10. are practical
11. are knowledgeable of old lore
12. are natural storytellers and prefer aesops to outright instruction
13. are empathic and generous, even to those they don't know
14. are humble and not interested in shows of wealth
15. are great hosts
16. are filled with curiosity and wonderment
17. are unflappably calm in the face of danger
18. are good with the common folk and prefer them to nobility, soldiers, and scholars
19. are peaceful and peace-seeking
20. are good at seeming harmless and innocuous, so they are easily overlooked

And there are no evil gods in their pantheon. None. Even the gnomes have an evil god.

This is their very complex hat. No other race has that combination of traits. Each race has some of those traits, and some individuals of other races have all or most of them, but no other race has them all. Not even humans.

So, traits #3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19 and the lack of evil gods all read as... they are Good aligned. They have generic hero traits. I mean, seriously, some of these are just bland "I'm the good guy"-isms.

You also repeated yourself, unless Brave is somehow different than being unflappably calm in the face of danger. Or being open and welcoming is different than being good-natured is different than being good hosts.

So, let me kind of narrow down this "very complex" hat that you've made here.

Stealthy and nimble. Lucky. Good, salt of the earth people, like stories and have many old stories. Very brave. Cook and farm.

That's a whole bunch of character traits, sure, but does it really tell you anything? Except that halflings seem to be monolithic in personality traits. No other race has these universal personality traits of every member of the race being good, kind, helpful salt of the earth people? Isn't that a good thing?

I mean, reading this list, it is over and over again telling us how good, how pure, how good, and how uncorrupted and how good halflings are. They are just simple, kind folk with nothing more than their comforts of home. ALL OF THEM. I can see why people keep saying they make perfect adventurers, every single one of them is a YA fantasy protagonist.

And yes, I'm getting a little hyperbolic and frustrated, but it seems that listing personality and character traits and saying "all halflings are like this" is perfectly fine, but saying that I can play those characters without playing a halfling is me being a terrible and closeminded person.

The stealth and nimbleness of halflings is because they are "little people", like brownies and the like. The rest of those traits are JRRT's idealised conception of the English - right down to the ancient lore buried in their everyday words and folktales, and their enjoyment of comforts but the readiness to withstand hardship if that's what's demanded of them.

This is not a coincidence - this is exactly what JRRT set out to achieve when he invented Hobbits!

Hobbits only contrast with humans when humans are framed either as weak-minded and easily swayed to evil (eg Bill Ferny, the Easterlings and Southrons, etc) or are framed as inheritors of ancient and epic warrior mantles (eg the people of Gondor and of Rohan). There's no difference between a Hobbit and Barliman Butterbur except that the latter is taller. But just like any Hobbit he's a stand-in for an Englishman who falls into neither of the above two categories.

None of this is to deny that JRRT's Elves and Dwarves also work, at least in part, as literary devices. But it's particularly evident in the case of Hobbits, and hence it's no great surprise that we see this carry over into their role in FRPGing.

 

[pemerton]

Tolkien himself said the word hobbit came from holbylta, meaning hole-dweller (Old English).

I'm pretty sure that's an invented etymology, after the fact. (See Thomas Shipley Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth, p 61 of the 1992 edition.)

JRRT had his own theory that linguistic intuitions, including inventing the word "Hobbit", manifested deep understandings of ancient lore - hence why he also thought his readers could make sense of the untranslated Elvish in LotR. But I think it would be fair to say that this theory is controversial at best!