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

[Bohandas]

Halflings always struck me as superfluous as well. The later editions' halflings at any rate.

The halflings from the first couple of editions had an identity, and that identity was to be this comic except with a foot fetish instead of a pee fetish.

Gunshow - Piss World

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Because the purpose of the contrast is to bridge between reader and story. In a RPG that bridge is created by the fact that I am sitting at the table with my friends while imagining myself to be part of a fantastic world.

No, the purpose of the contrast in LOTR isn't even just to create a bridge between reader and story, but even putting that aside, that is also useful in dnd. Halflings are more the everyman than humans, in dnd. They like comfort just as much as you do, sitting in a comfy chair playing games with your friends, but that doesn't stop them from going on wild, terrifying, adventures.
And that's just the start of the benefit they provide to the game and the play experience.

It's a bit like playing at playing a person who is playing an adventurer. The meta seems unnecessary at best, and unstable.

It's not like that at all. There is no inherent meta, here.

In the fiction itself, the contrast between ordinary people and adventure can be established just by having ordinary people.

Putting aside that this isn't really even true, because for many, many, players and groups, what is normal in the group is normal, not what is normal amongst NPCs, I want to adress the idea that this is the purpose of halflings, more.

Because it isn't. It was the purpose of hobbits, but not even their only purpose. Hobbits and halflings exist to contrast those things both within the fellowship/party, and within the world at large. They also exist to have a people who tend toward simple lives, and show that even such folk can be heroic, when called upon. That even the simplest, smallest, folk, will rise to the need set before them. Hobbits make the world more optimistic.

Halflings, though, are not just Hobbits. They have grown beyond that. Hell, even Hobbits aren't just what we see in the main books. Not only are there hints of more wild hobbits in the forests, and mentions of the river folk from whom hobbits originate, but games like The One Ring have extrapolated on those ideas and made whole cultures of non-shire Hobbits, and Bree Hobbits are different from Shire Hobbits in The Lord of The Rings.

Halflings are even more encompassing than that, including river traders with a love of adventure and new horizons and a more mobile idea of what home is, happily bustling city halflings who find niches to thrive in amongst the big folk, silent reclusive halflings with telepathy, forest dwelling halflings who live with nature and manage the danger of a very magical natural world, healer halflings and magical hostitality halflings, and plains nomadic halflings with close ties to natural spirits and the land.

What they all have in common is:

They're underestimated.

They're small.

They're community and family oriented, keeping strong bonds of family even across great divides (see the Boromar Clan of Eberron, and it's ties to the Plains) and most of them form bonds readily with non-halflings, lacking the human impulse to default to fear and distrust of outsiders. They're often cautious, but they don't assume the worst about strangers.

Most of them are fairly happy, curious, and relatively easy to please (simple pleasures and comforts), and like to make their spaces cozy and welcoming.

There are a thousand characters that spring to mind just from that, without ever getting into the specifics of each culture, their gods, their ideologies, etc.

There is value to a small underestimated race with no natural magic and who folks don't tend to distrust or dislike. A brooding assassin from that people will feel different from a human assassin, as will a friendly baker turned adventuring cleric whose healing potions are biscuits.

(That's also before we get onto the issues with reproducing, somewhat uncritically, JRRT's idealised conception of rural England. But I'll allow that that's a separate concern from the literary-type one that you replied to.)

Yeah no real issues there. It's not a problem to idealise a very broad and general style of life, like rural farm communities. Doing so is not inherently problematic. The only arguments I've ever seen against doing so have been...very classist, at best.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Which, at the end, fails utterly as the Shire is pretty much destroyed by the end. Perhaps if they spent a bit more time engaging with the world and a bit less time sitting around doing nothing, they wouldn't have been harrowed.

I'm not sure I took the same message from the LotR that you did.

This is objectively false. They literally take the shire back, and it isn't even that badly damaged. They recover completely within the lifetime of the non-ringbearing fellowship hobbits. Like...well within.

 

[pemerton]

It's not a problem to idealise a very broad and general style of life, like rural farm communities. Doing so is not inherently problematic. The only arguments I've ever seen against doing so have been...very classist, at best.

It seems to me that JRRT's vision of rural England is not going to survive class-oriented analysis intact: it's a sort of wish-fulfilment for someone whose self-conception is as one of the gentry. It certainly doesn't interrogate any relations of production.

But that is perhaps a little off-topic.

 

[Yaarel]

Same basic attitude, different lifestyle.

I don't get this repeated assertion that "city halflings are just humans," coming from multiple posters in the thread. If halflings live in an elf city, do they become elves?

A halfling living among elves, is more like a human living among elves.

I think the problem is, its main trait Lucky, besides being subtle, is simply too underpowered. It feels negligible to me. So what is left is a nonmagical human-like person who is short. Both the character concept and the implementation of its mechanics, feel too human.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

"Sainted" firbolgs? "ranted"? Good grief. I make a couple of posts every ten pages or so, and I'm ranting?

There's trolling going on, that's certainly true.

Yeah, it's time for me to bow out. I catch up, see the same non-arguments being put forward again and again and then the ad-hominems start in. Not worth it. I mean, I KNOW how this is going to play out anyway. When 6e finally comes along, they'll include halflings, same as every other edition, because the good folks like the ones in this thread, would lose their freaking minds if we tried even a little bit to unchain ourselves from the rotting corpse of Tolkien and D&D Tradition. It's just never, ever going to happen. So, we are stuck with the same, tired, boring old crap, edition after edition, becoming less and less relevant to genre fans as time goes on and gamers will just continue to ignore the PHB in order to play stuff that's actually interesting and the same tired old DM's will bitch and moan about the "Star Wars Cantina"ization of D&D.

And so it goes for another ten years...

yeah, no. sorry bud.

It ain't tradition, and your insistence on talking about one of modern history's most continually beloved and well read fiction authors' "rotting corpse" is pretty damn disgusting.

I literally despise traditionalism, and regularly butt heads with people around here because of it. Halflings are a valuable part of dnd because of what they are in the modern game, not because I love the Hobbit. I have friends who don't even like Middle Earth, having been raised more on Le Guin and Kay than on JRRT, who enjoy playing halflings. Why? Because of what they bring to a character.

They are part of DnD's basic identity, sure, and that is a strong part of why they aren't going anywhere, but that isn't some "traditionalist" stubborn refusal to change, it's just a brand maintaining it's identity. Just like I don't have long hair because of tradition. I have it because I enjoy it and I'd feel less like me without it.

 

[Bohandas]

Hell, even Hobbits aren't just what we see in the main books.

No, they're less. They don't even fit into Middle Earth; They just kind of appear out of nowhere at the end of the Silmarillion. Also, it is made clear in the books that the Took family are the only hobbits to have ever done anything interesting

EDIT:

They are part of DnD's basic identity, sure, and that is a strong part of why they aren't going anywhere, but that isn't some "traditionalist" stubborn refusal to change, it's just a brand maintaining it's identity. Just like I don't have long hair because of tradition. I have it because I enjoy it and I'd feel less like me without it.

I don;t think they are. The only settings that they play any memorable role in are Dark Sun and Eberron, and even there their role isn't particularly central or essential, at least not compared to the other standard PC races, or the Thri-Kreen, or the Warforged. And in all the other settings halflings seem out of place and arbitrary whenever they appear in an adventure

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I am the one fixating on quality on the thread which whole premise that people are arguing that the quality of halfling lore is objectively bad? Wow!

Hey. The Original Poster of this thread here. I haven't been posting much in this thread now, because it seems to be going in circles, but I just want to call out this "premise of the thread as halflings being objectively bad" thing as BS, because, well, it is.

I'll refer you back to the OP. I compared Halflings and their lore to Warforged, Kalashtar, a couple of my own homebrew races, and other examples in order to support my stance of disliking them. That's literally the definition of "subjectively", you know, by comparing their lore to other races' lore. "Objectively bad lore" would be lore that was racist/sexist/otherwise-bigoted, or just so bad that it is actively detrimental to the game and has practically no upsides. Subjectively bad lore/races are lore/races that are bad in comparison to other lore/races (you know, literally the whole premise of the thread).

The argument isn't and never has been "Halflings are entirely useless, have no point in the game, and are actively detrimental to it". The argument is "Halflings have remarkably boring and/or lacking lore, have a 'point in the game' that can be erased by just letting Humans be Small, and aren't so much 'actively detrimental' to the whole of the game as they are 'occasionally annoying road-blocks in a variety of circumstances explained throughout this thread (albeit, many of them are somewhat niche)". To try to say that the point of the thread is to "prove" the "objectively bad/harmful nature/lore of Halflings" is both a mischaracterization (likely intentional at this point, as the thread has gone on for 75+ pages), and attempting to move the goalposts from the actual intent of me and others in this thread that have been arguing in favor of the OP.

Get back to discussing whatever now! I feel that I have made myself clear. Hopefully this helps prevent any future mischaracterizations/misunderstandings about the intent of this thread and those arguing in favor of its premise.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Also, it is made clear in the books that the Took family are the only hobbits to have ever done anything interesting

This is false.

the rest is just randomly aggro ranting without saying anything that hasn’t been said already in this thread.

 

[Mind of tempest]

So those who like halflings (or pineapples)...are they objectively "wrong"? Is this basically what this convo is about?

Another thing. DnD is made to appeal to a general audience. We are not the general audience. They don't critically disect the lore or do white room DPR analysis and raise a fuss if the Champion fighter ticks in at 2.74371 percent lower DPR. They've seen LOTR and wanna play an unassuming halfling who comes from a simple, rustic upbringing. I don't find that upsetting.

look many of us do not like halflings but if we have to have them we want better integration and quality, if one has to have pineapple pizza you want good quality correct?

Yikes on trikes.

I'm not going to read 75 pages to point out that if you want to drop hobbits from D&D because they're Tolkien's thing, you also have to drop elves and dwarves and orcs and goblins for the same reason. Are we also going to excise everything cribbed from Moorcock and Anderson and Vance and Burroughs and Howard and where does it end?

Halflings have a niche. They're the SLBs (stealthy little bastards). 'Nuff said.

the problem is they lack most lore and are badly used in any default lore.

Nothing wrong with that. I thought the thread was about errata'ing them out the Players Handbook. You know that you can use whatever lore you want to in your own campaigns.

goals drift.

I agree with you in regard to their literary purpose. But this seems in many ways an issue that has been brought to the fore again by 5e's efforts to return Halflings to something along the line of their hobbit roots.

It's weird because I expressly remember the widespread praise when 3e drifted them away from that.

they still were underutilised and were dull lore-wise, do not get me wrong it was an improvement but they could be more.

Have you read all the way to the end? The Shire recovers. A mallorn grows where the Party Tree had been. And there is a Hobbit baby-boom!

While I love LotR, I can feel where Moorcock's "Epic Pooh" criticism is coming from. But I don't see how you can take away from LotR that the problem for Hobbits was not being sufficiently committed to external affairs!

did not his work have more or less the opposite problem of just being kinda bleak, also how common the hobbits never seemed to care about the world it seems most odd?