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

[Cadence]

Wrong again. Everyone knows birds aren’t real. Also, dinosaurs are lizards and lizards are lame (as I’ve already established with my brilliant powers of deduction). It’s basic science.

I'm not telling them that!

 

[Bardic Dave]

I'm not telling them that!

Oh, good point! Uh oh! You think I’ve said too much?

 

[Cadence]

Oh, good point! Uh oh! You think I’ve said too much?

I listened to the radio broadcast of the show (not sure if it was the Hitchcock version or the original) when I was a kid.

Yes.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Or to put it another way: Halflings, as a people, avoid being the center or focus of major world events. Some plucky and brave halfling individuals are willing to help out when the demon lords attack.

Exactly.

Chaosmancer has an unfortunate tendency to assume that either every single halfling has to act in the exact same way or absolutely none of of them act that way, when I doubt they'd require humans, elves, or dwarfs to be like that.

Yeah the reply to my last post was just weird, and went on too long a tangent for me to even try following.

Now I want to see an adventure where it was all the halfling villages that got attacked first and nobody else realized until it was too late.

That would be pretty interesting!

 

[Chaosmancer]

The fact that you don't accept the reasons that multiple people have explained is not my problem.

It's pointless to repeat because you just reject it out of hand.

Have a good one.

How is it "rejecting it out of hand" to ask why they are overlooked? You just state it like a fact even though... it doesn't make sense. Being small and short is not something that makes you weak and helpless in DnD worlds. There is no reason for people to overlook halflings as far as I can tell, so why is it?

Because humans build kingdoms? Sure, humans have kingdoms with a dozen or so important people at the top... but the majority of humans are just folk. Same with everyone else. So unless you mean "everyone who isn't a mage, king, famous scholar, or questing knight is overlooked" I just don't understand where this comes from.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

you can't make a race of perpetual nobodies who never matter it defies the laws of nature in ways far more fundamental than the way magic does.

Go ahead and tell me what the most important thing to happen in Kentucky, North Dakota, or Idaho was in the past year besides Covid. Something specific to each state.

No fair looking it up, denizens of the Forgotten Realms don't have access to the internet. But YOU live in the information age....so surely at some point the past year you will remember SOMETHING that happened in those states, right?

Or maybe certain areas get a LOT of attention...like the coasts, Texas, Chicago, Denver.....and other areas get zero attention....vast swathes of the continental US that nobody hears about and might as well not exist in other people's minds.

This is the niche of the halflings. They are the flyover race. The race that's happy to work their 40 hours at the farm and then have an exciting visit to the "big city" nobody has heard of to go to Applebee's (which they still like).

It's not unfathomable giant numbers of people can live their whole life without notice or attention or world shattering contributions to the era. They are Nebraska, Ohio, and Mississippi.

 

[Mind of tempest]

This is a sentiment I actually more or less agree with.

At least in that I have no especial need for an entire race to play the disregarded underdog.

My preference would be for halflings to be inscrutable rather than insignificant.

kinda has to be scrutable from the player perspective to be playable but that would at least be an improvement.

Go ahead and tell me what the most important thing to happen in Kentucky, North Dakota, or Idaho was in the past year besides Covid. Something specific to each state.

No fair looking it up, denizens of the Forgotten Realms don't have access to the internet. But YOU live in the information age....so surely at some point the past year you will remember SOMETHING that happened in those states, right?

Or maybe certain areas get a LOT of attention...like the coasts, Texas, Chicago, Denver.....and other areas get zero attention....vast swathes of the continental US that nobody hears about and might as well not exist in other people's minds.

This is the niche of the halflings. They are the flyover race. The race that's happy to work their 40 hours at the farm and then have an exciting visit to the "big city" nobody has heard of to go to Applebee's (which they still like).

It's not unfathomable giant numbers of people can live their whole life without notice or attention or world shattering contributions to the era. They are Nebraska, Ohio, and Mississippi.

look that is a slightly unfair real-world question as I have no way of accessing anything interesting that might have happened there that you would not have heard of, secondly, the nation they are in is one of the youngest for its status and any history before it was more or less burned and exterminated.

plus the question is not whether people can but one interior race of people can which has literally never happened in the history of the world and our world is mundane and bland not a place filled with dragons or demons trying to swallow your soul.

okay if they are to be the flyover races why bother having them in the all-important phb the book which contains the races that are core? hell, why have they been core for nearly fifty years why have the nobodies in the core, plus literally every possible society has an army of nobodies that run it what is the point of having a whole race of them when literally everyone produces this type of person?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

kinda has to be scrutable from the player perspective to be playable but that would at least be an improvement.

look that is a slightly unfair real-world question as I have no way of accessing anything interesting that might have happened there that you would not have heard of, secondly, the nation they are in is one of the youngest for its status and any history before it was more or less burned and exterminated.

plus the question is not whether people can but one interior race of people can which has literally never happened in the history of the world and our world is mundane and bland not a place filled with dragons or demons trying to swallow your soul.

okay if they are to be the flyover races why bother having them in the all-important phb the book which contains the races that are core? hell, why have they been core for nearly fifty years why have the nobodies in the core, plus literally every possible society has an army of nobodies that run it what is the point of having a whole race of them when literally everyone produces this type of person?

If you can't process the other 400 times someone has said "This is an archetype some people like to play, it's just you that doesn't value it" then I'm not confident you will hear it when I say it....again.

 

[Yaarel]

I would love Halfling and Gnome be ethnicities (subraces) within a lineage (race) called "Hob".

Heh, @Crimson Longinus, I am guessing you might object, but your Eldri could also be a Hob ethnicity. Many 5e-ers might view the Eldri as a cross between Halfling and Tiefling. But in my eyes it resembles a cross between Hulder and Nisse, and in this sense a kind of land-being.

Hob
• Halfling (Material)
• Gnome (Elemental)
• Eldri (Fey)

 

[pemerton]

What makes you quiet guy who was happy to be a dishwasher more underestimated because he was a halfling instead of a Genasi? Or a human, or a half-elf?

And, you gave a sort of answer to that, halflings "act like Switzerland" they don't get involved... but look at the type of things we are talking about getting involved in. We are talking about things like being attacked by raiders who may want to kill everyone. About Giants rampaging over the countryside. About Dark Gods being summoned to destroy the world. You can't just "act like Switzerland and not get involved" with stuff like that. But those are exactly the scenarios where we are pointing to and asking "where are the halflings?"

And if halfling adventurers are out there dealing with these problems... who is going to underestimate and overlook the halfling people? There is no reason for them to be less important than humans, unless you are only looking at humans who go looking for trouble. Because when trouble comes looking, there should be a fair number of halflings stepping up like you say the fantasy is, and they don't. Unless it is the PC.

How is it "rejecting it out of hand" to ask why they are overlooked? You just state it like a fact even though... it doesn't make sense. Being small and short is not something that makes you weak and helpless in DnD worlds. There is no reason for people to overlook halflings as far as I can tell, so why is it?

Because humans build kingdoms? Sure, humans have kingdoms with a dozen or so important people at the top... but the majority of humans are just folk. Same with everyone else. So unless you mean "everyone who isn't a mage, king, famous scholar, or questing knight is overlooked" I just don't understand where this comes from.

You (Chaosmancer) seem to be asking questions looking for an in-fiction explanation that will make sense in accordance with basic canons of historical and social-scientific reasoning.

I think that's a mistake. There is no such explanation available! The fact that Halflings are underestimated and overlooked is not something that is to be explained by reference to the (imagined) properties of the fictional communities. It's a literary conceit, imposed on the fiction to serve a particular aesthetic purpose.

@Neonchameleon and @doctorbadwolf (I think I'm remembering properly) have already said as much. I think @Sabathius42 is making much the same point by saying "This is an archetype some people like to play". It's not a very effective response to an aesthetically-driven conception to argue that it makes no sense in terms of the imagined in-fiction causality.