Chaosmancer
Legend
Why? Oh sorry, is it because you think halflings are perfectly fine as written and this is all only my warped opinion? Because I've shown a lot of why I find halflings limiting, and you've responded repeatedly with the idea that that isn't a problem because I can just homebrew them and fix them. So, why is that unbalanced class a problem, you can just homebrew it and fix it?
It is the same argument. The same dismissal of the base concern in the face of rule zero. If you don't think it is a proper repsonse to a class, then why would it be the proper response to a race?
Except you are wrong. You are assuming that because I changed lore for dwarves that I didn't like that I found their base lore insufficient. You are assuming that because I was able to find things I could expand and questions that I could ask about dwarves that my lack of ability to do that with halflings is because I refuse to even attempt.
You are assuming that I didn't TRY to find something to do with halflings, that after eight years of attempting, and my coming up blank and reasoning that it is likely because the lore is so empty for them, all of that stems from my unwillingness to even attempt to understand them.
You. Are. Wrong. I did try. I did attempt. I did give them a fair shake. And the best I could come up with was still.... boring. I would have had to go and make them so completely different from halflings as to be basically unrecognizable except for the name, and I felt that if I had to go that far that there was a problem. So, stop telling me how little I even tried to attempt to work with halflings, because you are wrong and it is getting frankly annoying for you to tell me how you know how much effort I put into something.
Maybe you can expand the page count. Of course, if you expand the page count but still say "the four core races of DnD are human, dwarf, elf and halfling" then you are still setting up the expectation that halflings should be a major force in the world. Which they aren't.
And you are right, Orcs, Goblinoids, Kobolds and Yuan-Ti all of those would need a pretty major rewrite. I don't think Lizardfolk lore is weak, nor would they really need a major rewrite (I find their "lack of emotion" lore bad, as well as their "it is holy to be stupid" lore, but those are details that are fairly easily shaved off). Firbolg lore is really shaping up to be good. Next edition with their transition they should be a really strong contender. I want to fold Tabaxi into a beastfolk race, but their general lore is actually really solid, even if it is tied into some bad writing in FR.
And sure, that isn't too many... except I'm talking about replacing one race at its spot in the top... and I've just listed Six options. I'll make it seven by saying Dragonborn could be a strong contender as well, though their lore suffers from being very setting specific which weakens it overall, even if the individual lore is pretty good.
They have some pretty fancy looking stuff in their homes. Just from the artwork I've seen. Not like gaudy, but it is embellished.
And, actually, we have an example of a halfling tale written in the book. A true story about how the fishskippers got their name. See, in the water where the first of the fishskippers was fishing, there arose a troll that was named Snobble Sweed. And that troll was sharpening his knives by the water, and while it was there, the halfling caught a bream and he threw it across the stream, skipping it ten times across the water. It hit with a clap of thunder and tore the troll asunder.
Now... how likely is it that a troll was truly torn at least in half by a fish thrown by a halfling? Or do you think, maybe, the tale is just a small bit embellished?
Adventuring =/= storytelling. But nice attempt. Again, I've never said that no halfling ever goes on an adventure. Only that those who do go on adventures, as shown by the text, are a minority of the population.
Secondly, I never said that dwarves make good things because they were programmed to make good things. It is their own efforts, but they make those efforts because it is how they venerate their creator god. You asked why all dwarves take crafting seriously, and that is why. It is a religious devotion to them. Dismissing their skill as programmed into them is wrong, and not something I ever claimed.
Wasn't my argument. You asked why all dwarves take crafting seriously and none of them purposefully create shoddy work. It is because of their god and how that ties into their religion. I then figured you might attempt to use that same logic to turn around halflings on me. After all, you are so fond of telling me that I did something or thought something for one race, therefore I MUST be able to do the same for halflings. But, the same logic I applied to dwarves can't be applied to halflings, because while Dwarves have a major god of crafting, halflings don't have a major god of stories.
I have never even claimed that stories aren't important to them. My only claim on this line has been that stories being important to halflings does not make them a lorekeeper race. That's it. Of course stories are important to them, it says so right in the text. But that alone does not make them lorekeepers. IT makes them storytellers, and those are different things.
Some combination of a mercenary and a hero. Adventurers are the ones getting hired to go to dangerous places and confront dangerous forces. They are the ones people turn to when they are in danger to rescue them from that danger. Traveling around doesn't even play into it I think, because I can see an adventurer group that stays in a single location, or a very small region.
It isn't a great definition, but I think it captures the biggest part of what people mean when they talk about a character being an adventurer.
Of course it is common, it is a really good trope. And I never said that good-natured people are always good. I said that being good-natured is a trope associated with goodness. That's why it is a subversion of expectations for a bad guy to be good-natured. If it wasn't a trope associated with being a good person, there would be nothing to subvert.
But kobolds aren't reliable. In the lore they are generally referred to as cowards who only become brave when in a larger group. They rely on the strength of the group, that does not make them reliable. They are different words.
Did you actually read my response? I'm guessing no, since I specifically highlighted and bolded the words "heroic criminal"
No, those people were bad people. However, bad people can have good traits. Like preferring the company of the common man to that of the wealthy and influential. Just because a bad person can have a good trait doesn't mean that the trait itself is bad. So, like I said, it is a trait that is almost universally considered a good trait. Enough to make even mass killers and gang bosses who have it receive a measure of respect for having a "heroic" quality.
Who cares who I rooted for? The point was that bravery is a trope associated with being good and heroic. The fact that you showed a page that explicitly says that villains who are shown to be brave are showing a heroic trope to the point where they can be confused for being a hero proves that I was right. This single trait can be enough to make someone who has murdered hundreds of people be looked at with some measure of respect, because they carry a heroic trait.
If you thought my point was that people who are brave can never be bad people then you weren't paying attention to what I was saying.
Maybe because a race should be more than a collection of good character traits. Like I've said.
People keep trying to counter my point that the lore for halflings is weak and pretty empty by saying "but they are good, and brave, and heroic, and plucky and like food and farm and are friendly and kind" and that's all a meaningless answer to my actual concern. And when I put forth the idea that character traits alone don't make a race... I get told that I irrationally hate halflings and nothing would convince me to like them.... even as I put forth things to say, "well, if they were taken in this direction, it would at least be better"
CLEARLY I am lying. I hate them so much I could never have posted that multiple times in this thread.
Yes, people have made it important, but that doesn't mean it is as defining as you want to make it out for. It is just like talking about how a style of clothing is important in a culture. Does wearing those clothes define you as part of that culture? Obviously not, it is a detail, and it matters to them, but it isn't a defining element that makes or breaks the culture.
"Gently chaotic" sounds like nonsense. Like saying they are "lightly random" that doesn't mean anything. And I am not only looking at DnD, to remind you, so even if an older edition made it so that elves randomly break out into songs of figgleworps, it wouldn't really change that that is not how they are commonly thought of or depicted.
Heck, if you think about it, halflings and gnomes are more flighty than elves.
Thank you for the continued ad hominem attacks, I almost thought for a moment you would stop attacking me and instead look towards my argument.
Did you read 4e? It had a ton of really great setting lore. Sure, the specific location of Nentir Vale was left vague, but the setting was FAR from without lore.
And a lot of people would also say that only having hommlet... isn't enough. That a single town on a blank map with no lore or understanding of how the characters can fit into this world isn't good for them, and they don't like it, because they can't base their character on anything.
Being told I hate entire character archetypes and the idea of happiness is good because it tells me that halflings aren't boring? No. Sorry, you are hearing the wrong message. The fact that people can't defend halflings without making it so that being against halflings is being against anything pure, good, and innocent tells me that... that is all halflings are.
No one has countered my point about the halfling origin myth by providing an origin myth. In fact, my points about the lack of halfling lore and culture have mostly gone ignored. Except for you who had to do the enormous leaps like "well, halflings farm. And no other races explicitly says they farm, so halflings must control all the food in the world. Everyone would starve without them, they are super important." or when you got to "halfing stories sometimes accidentally have important information in them. Therefore halflings must be lorekeepers who travel the world gathering information to preserve it for future generations. They are super important."
You have to explode the importance of single bits of text completely out of proportion, and then say that since you did that I must be unwilling to even read the lore, because if I did I couldn't say it was lacking.
Who says the DM was against it? Maybe the player and the DM built the world together, and this was their solution to the player knowing a lot, and then they didn't have worry about shoehorning in plot expositions.
I know I often try and make sure that my characters are in positions to be highly informed about the world, because I am a DM and I am highly informed about the game.
Their description also doesn't say it is horrible, or even all that bad. So... I'd say it is up to the players and the DM about how good the memory of the character is. I know in my homebrew I did a weird thing with elven memory based off of a sign I saw while driving, but in general, it is up to be determined.
Perhaps a little bit, but the melancholy comes from the weight of ages, that's the point.
The melancholy up above? I mean... that was supposed to be obvious. Weight is a burden. The weight of ages often refers to the burden of things like out-living your peers.
I've had quite a lot of people who wanted to be incredibly good crafters. Not usually stone-smithing, because most groups travel and stone is heavy, but... I think I can say at least one character in the last five groups? Feels about right.
Again, yeah, humans in the real world are impressive. I get that. Really, I do. It is one of the reasons I despise Ancient Alien theories, because they belittle human achievement by saying it was all done by aliens.
But... 90 ft? Sure, the Mror Hold probably took more time and more people, but that doesn't change the fact that if I have my scaling even close to correct, the eyeball on that carving is 90 ft. They are on vastly different scales
Yes, the man who is carving that face over four years is very impressive for a human being, and I have mad respect for what he is doing. That city carved into a mountain is incredibly impressive...
But part of what makes them impressive is that we have a hard time putting that much time and effort into something. Four years when you only live til 80 or so is a big investment of time. Dwarves could live up to 800, four years on a project is much more normal for them. We have a single city carved out of a mountain? That is common practice for dwarves. I don't in anyway want to belittle what these humans have accomplished, but when you put up an idea and say "look at this incredibly impressive thing that humans did" and it is the baseline for what one would expect from a dwarven community.... I think that really shows the level of dwarven craftsmanship that people are talking about. The reason that they are considered THE BEST is because their common works are equal to our wonders. Which makes their wonders mind-boggling.
I know nothing about Birthright. I didn't even know it was a DnD setting.
Eberron and Darksun are specifically written to break all the conventions and lore. Would you accept that all Elves are petty thieves? Because that is the lore I was told for Darksun. Do people accept that all gnomes are part of a massive spy organization? Because they are in Eberron. Yes, there is halfling lore in those two settings that is interesting. Dinosaur riding ancestor worshippers is a very different take on halflings... so different that basically nothing of the PHB halfling remains. The cannibals of Dark Sun... that's all I know about them. They are savage, tribal cannibals.... and cannibal is even a misnomer, because they don't eat halflings, they eat everyone else. So, they are basically... any tribal monster race in the game, which again removes all of the PHB lore.
So, yeah, I'm not going to say that the PHB lore is suddenly okay because there are two examples of it being completely and totally abandoned that are kind of interesting.
I guess you've missed the multiple arguments over it. It was highly contested. Repeatedly.
Generic regional gods that would also be worshiped by any halflings in the area, because we are explicitly told that in FR halflings do not have a unique culture?
Yes. I 'd say that those people who try to claim that there is unifying human pantheon written into FR or Greyhawk in the same manner that there is a unifying halfling or dwarven pantheon are wrong. This is major reason that I wrote my own setting, because of the lack of human gods who are not regionally locked.
So how do you portray that in the setting? How does all the bad things that happens to a halfling PC not make them the most unlucky halfling in the world? "Lucky" as a character or racial trait is horrendous. You need to bend over backwards to make it not warp every single thing in the entire setting.
And yet, when people describe halflings as being brave... they describe them as immune to fear. As laughing in the face of dragons and cheerfully entering the tomb of horrors with not a care in the world. They describe their luck as being omnipresent and overwhelmingly good. In the previous thread there was a massive discussion about this idea that halfling luck prevents their villages from every being attacked by any major force. Nothing actually that bad can happen to them because they are lucky. They can trip down a hill and faceplant in a dragon's hoard and it is fine for them to take it because the dragon died of indigestion days ago.
And yet... in the game, in actual play, that can't happen. In fact, if a halfling never rolls a 1, they are no more lucky than the elf, dwarf, human or tiefling who didn't roll a 1. Them being this super lucky race never matters.
And the other characters also have good reason to not RP fear. They can also be brave individuals, bold individuals, and so in the game, in actual play, until magical fear comes up... the halfling is no braver than anyone else.
That's the issue. That's what makes it hard to portray in the game. Not that I don't understand what bravery is, but that... everyone wants to be brave and so the halfling is no braver than anyone else, unless I use mechanics to take away player agency and tell the raging barbarian "Sorry, you failed a moral check, Kregor Skullcrusher who loves fighting more than living is overwhelmed from fear at the battle going against them. These monsters are just that scary. Guess you should have played a halfling. They are brave."
Great, mechanical rules. Awesome.
What does that mean in the actual reality of the game world? How do I show that? Because I can regurgitate mechanics just fine, but that doesn't solve the problem I'm presenting.
I see. Just have the players solve the problem for me. And if they don't or can't.... then what? Just assume it doesn't matter?
And "they can bend like cats" is very different from "they have nose hair". I can also assume that halflings breath through their skin. The text doesn't say, but we can make assumptions.
