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

[Faolyn]

Thanks for this @Faolyn. This is honestly, truly appreciated.

See, that's I think the crux of my disagreement. I don't think it's enough. And, I think it's a number that is dropping as years go on. Or, at least the percentage is dropping. But, I have pretty much zero proof of that, other than reading chicken entrails, so, I can't really argue with you.

My belief is it doesn't matter if that number is dropping (according to D&D Beyond, which is just one platform that probably the majority of people don't use). There's still a significant number of people who play halflings.

That's actually not really accurate though. Halflings in every other setting are massively rewritten from the PHB. Darksun, Dragonlance, Eberron.

That's true. But not for the Realms or Greyhawk, and probably most homebrew settings don't make as radical a change as Dark Sun does. In Eberron, the dino-riding halflings are definitely quite different, but I think the two dragonmarked houses--one for healing and one for hospitality--are halfling-y enough to count as mostly standard. As for kender. Well.

But anyway, that's kind of the point. Their traits allow them to be molded however the DM wants and as long as they retain their most basic trait of being the Small-sized, generally not-too-magical, human-looking people, they are still halflings. I think it's a bit harder to do that with other races like elves or dwarfs.

If halflings are included in the setting, then they are rarely PHB halflings, to the point of being pretty much unrecognizable as halflings. Kender aren't even called halflings.

According to Wikipedia, it's in large part because in the early games, the ones that Hickman and Weiss used to prepare for DL, the PC halfling got a ring of invisibility and they felt it was too much like Tolkien. So they got rid of halflings and introduced kender. If only they had put a different magic item in the pile of loot!

Again, you're comparing minor races like dragonborn, which have very short histories in the game, with one of the core 4 races. I mean, of the examples you gave, only the dragonborn and planetouched (tiefling) even appear in the PHB. We need to be careful to compare apples to apples.

So think about gith. They have an enormous ton of baggage with them that it's hard to get rid of. A while ago I was doing some worldbuilding with a friend of mine and I mentioned including gith and he immediately said something along the lines of that not being a good idea because then there would have to be all these mind flayers. I hadn't even thought to include that part of their history (I'm more for grabbing things that are cool and ignoring or changing as much lore as I feel like), but that was my friend's first thought.

Likewise, other monster races have so much history that you have to start out saying what they're not (always evil, controlled by evil gods, etc.) if you want them to be anything other than their MM-counterparts.

Traditionally though, no you can't. 5e is the first PHB to add races. 4e added and subtracted. 3e and earlier never added anything that wasn't in 1e PHB. Five editions of the game and we've only seen one PHB that added races to the PHB. So, the idea that we can just add more races, while true, certainly isn't borne out by experience. And, three pages in the PHB is a LOT. That is a significant amount of space. It's not like the old days when a race description took up a couple of paragraphs.

Fair enough. However, I think that in future editions they might very well keep on including new races in the PH, now that they have precedent. As for page size, D&D books will become more and more digital as time goes by, for better or worse, and the weight of the print books won't be as big a deal--leave that at home and take your book-laden device with you.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I am looking forward to the 101-page thread on how much D&D vampires suck, because boy howdy, do they, even in 5E.

Boo..

also..

Well-played.

Edit: finding now that this was serious criticism, not just a play on words relating to how vampires suck blood..color me embarassed.

 

[Oofta]

I am looking forward to the 101-page thread on how much D&D vampires suck, because boy howdy, do they, even in 5E.

Has D&D ever done vampires well?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Has D&D ever done vampires well?

2E Nosferatu were a lot better and some of that was incorporated into the 5E core vampire, but not all of it. (And then there's the 5E nosferatu, which are an entirely different thing.)

Given how much of a mostly excellent rethink many of the 5E monsters got, I'm kind of surprised at how mediocre their vampires are.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Oh, on the topic of halflings are only a JRRT and D&D thing: I just picked up Warlock! from DriveThruRPG on their going-out-of-business-with-the-nice-print-on-demand-publisher sale and one of the four races, along with humans, elves and dwarves, are halflings. It's a game that doubles down on the Britishness of Warhammer and Fighting Fantasy, but they're in there:

HALFLING

Diminutive and slight, yet full of heart, halflings are the most accepted race in the Kingdom besides humans. In part this is because humans have difficulty seeing a Halfling as anything other than a child. As a result, halflings tend to act like children - they are impulsive, quick to tantrums if they don't get their way but also quick to forget past slights.

Halflings are quiet and can move silently when they want to, and often go unnoticed by bigger folk. However, some people struggle to take them seriously.

 

[Faolyn]

you act like 5e even listed dragonborn lore, they are popular on pure concept alone.

They're anthro dragons. That doesn't fit everywhere. Same with any other anthro race or other really alien race.

(The lack of lore should be enough to stop the people who complain halflings have no lore.)

 

[Faolyn]

The funny thing is, the mentions of halflings in Waterdeep are almost all revolving around the were-rat gang of thieves that are also halfling were-rats. The main point being that they are were-rats, with halfling just kind of added on because.. well... reasons. Haltings on their own apparently were too boring to be a thieves guild.

Maybe the idea was, they wanted to have wererats, and decided they were halflings because that's different than just having them be human weres.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

2E Nosferatu were a lot better and some of that was incorporated into the 5E core vampire, but not all of it. (And then there's the 5E nosferatu, which are an entirely different thing.)

Given how much of a mostly excellent rethink many of the 5E monsters got, I'm kind of surprised at how mediocre their vampires are.

I feel that a vampire is one of those things that cannot satisfactorily work as a level one D&D PC. In most fiction they tend to be depicted as rather powerful with a slew of special abilities, and if you depower them for the game balance they just feel wrong.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

2E Nosferatu were a lot better and some of that was incorporated into the 5E core vampire, but not all of it. (And then there's the 5E nosferatu, which are an entirely different thing.)

Given how much of a mostly excellent rethink many of the 5E monsters got, I'm kind of surprised at how mediocre their vampires are.

I kind of liked how 4E's Open Grave established that most vampire weaknesses were just lies created by vampires to lure victims into a false sense of security.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I feel that a vampire is one of those things that cannot satisfactorily work as a level one D&D PC. In most fiction they tend to be depicted as rather powerful with a slew of special abilities, and if you depower them for the game balance they just feel wrong.

I was strictly thinking of them as monsters, where they don't feel like recognizable vampires. The defining elements of Dracula aren't him draining energy from Jonathan Harker by slapping him around. This is better in 5E, but their vampireness isn't really front and center.

And yeah, they're especially tough to make as D&D PCs, to the extent that I would say that people who want to play a vampire should play a game built around that instead.