RPG Evolution: The Trouble with Halflings

Over the decades I've developed my campaign world to match the archetypes my players wanted to play. In all those years, nobody's ever played a halfling.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

So What's the Problem?​

Halflings, derived from hobbits, have been a curious nod to Tolkien's influence on fantasy. While dwarves and elves have deep mythological roots, hobbits are more modern inventions. And their inclusion was very much a response to the adventurous life that the agrarian homebodies considered an aberration. In short, most hobbits didn't want to be adventurers, and Bilbo, Frodo, and the others were forever changed by their experiences, such that it was difficult for them to reintegrate when they returned home. You don't hear much about elves and dwarves having difficulty returning home after being adventurers, and for good reason. Tolkien was making a point about the human condition and the nature of war by using hobbits as proxies.

As a literary construct, hobbits serve a specific purpose. In The Hobbit, they are proxies for children. In The Lord of the Rings, they are proxies for farmers and other folk who were thrust into the industrialized nightmare of mass warfare. In both cases, hobbits were a positioned in contrast to the violent lifestyle of adventurers who live and die by the sword.

Which is at least in part why they're challenging to integrate into a campaign world. And yet, we have strong hobbit archetypes in Dungeons & Dragons, thanks to Dragonlance.

Kender. Kender Are the Problem​

I did know one player who loved to play kender. We never played together in a campaign, at least in part because kender are an integral part of the Dragonlance setting and we weren't playing in Dragonlance. But he would play a kender in every game he played, including in massive multiplayers like Ultima Online. And he was eye-rollingly aggravating, as he loved "borrowing" things from everyone (a trait established by Tasselhoff Burrfoot).

Part of the issue with kender is that they aren't thieves, per se, but have a child-like curiosity that causes them to "borrow" things without understanding that borrowing said things without permission is tantamount to stealing in most cultures. In essence, it results in a character who steals but doesn't admit to stealing, which can be problematic for inter-party harmony. Worse, kender have a very broad idea of what to "borrow" (which is not limited to just valuables) and have always been positioned as being offended by accusations of thievery. It sets up a scenario where either the party is very tolerant of the kender or conflict ensues. This aspect of kender has been significantly minimized in the latest draft for Unearthed Arcana.

Big Heads, Little Bodies​

The latest incarnation of halflings brings them back to the fun-loving roots. Their appearance is decidedly not "little children" or "overweight short people." Rather, they appear more like political cartoons of eras past, where exaggerated features were used as caricatures, adding further to their comical qualities. But this doesn't solve the outstanding problem that, for a game that is often about conflict, the original prototypes for halflings avoided it. They were heroes precisely because they were thrust into difficult situations and had to rise to the challenge. That requires significant work in a campaign to encourage a player to play a halfling character who would rather just stay home.

There's also the simple matter of integrating halflings into societies where they aren't necessarily living apart. Presumably, most human campaigns have farmers; dwarves and elves occupy less civilized niches, where halflings are a working class who lives right alongside the rest of humanity in plain sight. Figuring out how to accommodate them matters a lot. Do humans just treat them like children? Would halflings want to be anywhere near a larger humanoids' dwellings as a result? Or are halflings given mythical status like fey? Or are they more like inveterate pranksters and tricksters, treating them more like gnomes? And if halflings are more like gnomes, then why have gnomes?

There are opportunities to integrate halflings into a world, but they aren't quite so easy to plop down into a setting as dwarves and elves. I still haven't quite figured out how to make them work in my campaign that doesn't feel like a one-off rather than a separate species. But I did finally find a space for gnomes, which I'll discuss in another article.

Your Turn: How have you integrated halflings into your campaign world?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Some people in the real world claim they can. In a fantasy world, it may very well be possible. I see no reason to not give that ability to humans of a particular culture, or make a monk archetype based around it.

So, if you take a non-human trait, and declare it to be a human trait, then non-humans are just humans? That is your best argument?

I guess in my next game I'll play a human who worships the human of humans and humans and appears like a human while fighting with a human and a human. Because if we can just alter the definitions of things to be human than why stop with just giving them all the traits of elves?

Because it kind of doesn't. Every race can learn magic. There's nothing that an elf (or any other race) can do magically that a human can't do magically as well.

Also, some halflings are innately telepathic or magical. In fact, four out of the six subraces of halflings have innate powers. If you choose to ignore the dragonmarked halflings, you're still left with two out of four subraces having innate powers (lotusden and ghostwise). So if magic matters for a fantasy race, then halflings are pretty magical in nature.

Except that there is a difference between "anyone can study medicine" and "every single man, woman and child has an in-depth understanding of organ function and can diagnose illnesses with a glance". Innately magical people are different from humans in an important way.

I do ignore the Dragonmarks, because 1) They are highly specific to Eberron and their exact context doesn't work outside of Eberron and 2) If trying to translate Dragonmarks from Eberron into something else, the best you would do is essentially an extended sorcererous family.


I do want to discuss Ghostwise and Lotusden halflings a bit, because they are a bit fascinating. See, in every single discussion of halflings we have ever had they have only come up about twice. Once when I brought them up, and just now when you brought them up. Over three or four different threads, thousands of posts, only a very small number of times. And actually, many people like Oofta have declared that one of the defining things about halflings is that they are non-magical (which is why they can't be merged with the magical gnomes)

So, this becomes a bit of a conundrum, doesn't it? If we accept halflings as being "pretty magical" then what makes them different than Gnomes? In fact, a Lotusden Halfling and a Forest Gnome would seem to be highly similiar, if not identical, would they not? They would both be short humanoids, with human features, that have a deep connection to nature and specifically to forests, which can manifest in magical abilities.

Therefore, do you break with the consensus of your peers and declare halflings magical, and therefore must explain how they are different from the Gnomes, or do you declare halflings majority non-magical, and therefore the rarely mentioned and often forgotten Ghostwise and Lotusden end up being exceptions, not the norm?

Cornie Fizzlesprocket is from a web story. She is not a D&D character.

Never said she was a DnD character, and I acknowledged that the aspect was not 100% DnD. But she is a gnome, and therefore her traits fit gnomes. In fact, she is a pretty archetypical gnome in many ways.

And you're... citing what are basically someone's home brew orcs and goblins as if it's supposed to mean something when talking about official D&D depiction of races? Big deal. I can home brew super-mega-awesometastic halflings. Would that convince you?

Could you homebrew "super-mega-awesometastic halflings" while keeping them non-magical, farming people who aren't very important and fade into the background? That has been the point of this discussion many times, and yet many people have declared that doing so would immediately make the race "not halflings" because halflings must fit within the very small sub-set of traits they have. If you have "super-mega-awesometastic halflings" that you have homebrewed, I'd love to hear them. In fact, that would greatly help my cause of rewriting halflings to improve them.

Meanwhile, and very interestingly, the "homebrew" you speak of doesn't seem to conflict with the innate orcishness or goblin-ness of those two races. There may be many reasons for that, but I think it is at least in part because those changes still speak to the traits of the races in question.

Beats me. So what? None of these races have the types of organizations that allow for war, nor have they been given pages upon pages of text over the decades. Halflings actually have a god of war and have had a lot of ink spilled about them. But halflings rarely go to war. That says a lot about their character as a people.

So the lack of war on the part of the Goliath or Firbolg isn't because of their natural, in-born tendencies, but because they lack the type of organizations that go to war? Is it not strange then to say that Halflings don't go to war, considering they are practically symbiotic with humans who go to war constantly? Because halflings do participate in human wars.

In fact, halflings have their own wars, such as the Hin ghostwars, and they have had their own homelands. Which they would have to defend in times of war. After all their War Goddess is a goddess of defense and vigilance. What you have actually noticed is that halflings do not go and conquer, which... why would they? Again, they are ALWAYS found in human settlements. So humans do the conquering, and halflings just occupy the lands the humans cleared. They don't have their own governments, they follow human governments, so if the humans go to war, then the halfling government has gone to war.

I don't think this really speak a lot about their character as a people (or if it does, everyone will say it doesn't), it seems to speak much more about their relationship with humans. Especially considering the number of halfling criminals that can easily arise in various settings.

Says who? You? Are you the sole arbiter of what makes a race unique and interesting? I think that they're cool.

I'm sorry your life has been such that you think "is nice" is a non-human trait on par with reincarnation. It isn't a matter of how "cool" it is that they are good chefs and nice. It is a matter that those are not traits that can be expanded into a non-human race.

Now, being good cooks can be the result of some non-human traits, but it cannot be the non-human trait itself. It is a skill set, you need to have the initial traits that improves that skill set, and frankly, halflings lack those.

This I will agree with.

But so far, they haven't, and you can't claim that D&D orcs and goblins are somehow capable of doing things that humans can't because you can point to Matt Colville's personal take on them.

It is almost funny to me that you want to insist I limit discussing a fantasy race to ONLY being DnD's take on that fantasy race. Meanwhile, halflings get constantly related back to Tolkien and the works based on Middle Earth, which isn't DnD. It almost feels like a double standard to say that we can't discuss the ease at which we can improve orcs and goblins to make them more fantastical and interesting, without changing their essential natures, while then declaring that since traditional DnD orcs and goblins are poorly done it is fine that halflings are poorly done.

So in that case, being the best, most cheerful hosts and chefs is equally as useful as whatever abilities elves and dwarfs are. Probably more useful, in fact, because you being able to change your gender over night doesn't affect me in anyway, but you being able to cook me a good breakfast does.

I don't think an entire race's identity needs to rest on what they can do for you as an outsider. The fact that halflings can provide you with useful services shouldn't define their existence, while looking at the elvish relationship to concepts like sex and gender which are completely outside of the human expierence is met with a "meh, it doesn't help ME in anyway"

Seems like a bizarrely selfish view

So if "cooking and nice" aren't what you're looking for, and "combat and war" aren't what you're looking for, and halflings can learn magic just like every other race... what are you looking for?

Something fantastical. You seem to have missed that I'm not talking about learning magic, I know halflings can learn magic just like everyone else. That doesn't address what I am speaking about.

You need something that is fantastic, something that can define them, not as "useful skills humans can benefit from" but as having an existence outside of the normal human experience.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Neither are Humans, and yet they're front-and centre in the game and in the PH.

Yes, somehow in a game made by humans, where humans are the baseline, humans aren't fantastical creatures that are not human. I am sure the reason for that is a mystery, but shouldn't halflings not be human then?

Some species are more fantastical than others. It's a spectrum, not a binary.

And halflings are too far down the spectrum towards "just humans". We need to move them up the scale.

 

[Chaosmancer]

In the few years just before covid hit, three PC Hobbits in the party was common and four wasn't unheard of. (a typical party was 6-9 characters including NPC adventurers)

Their lead Fighter, their Bard, and their Necromancer were all Hobbits; and a second Hobbit Necromancer cycled in and out on occasion. Oh, and their main Thief, an adventuring NPC, was also a Hobbit...and now you've got me wondering if at any point all five ever ran together in the same party... ::checks game log:: ...and sure enough, they did! The very first adventure I happened to check, the starting party consisted of:

Hobbit Necromancer 1
Hobbit Necromancer 2 (yes there were two of them in the same party, run by different players)
Hobbit Fighter
Hobbit Bard
Hobbit Thief (NPC)
Elf Nature Cleric/MU
Elf Nature Cleric
Part-Orc Fighter
Human Ranger (NPC)

Four of the Hobbits came out of the previous adventure together, the second Necro joined at this point from a different adventure/party. This lineup lasted for just the one adventure, after which the other Necro split off (and eventually formed yet another party around himself) and was replaced by an Elf MU; meanwhile the Hobbit Thief got petrified and wasn't de-stoned until some time later. The remaining three (the F, N2, and B) stayed togehter for three or four more adventures, then covid hit and that group went on hold where it yet remains.

Wait, you just said in a previous post you've only had 13 hobbits ever. Out of 216 played characters.

And now we are finding out that nearly half of them came from the same party, just before Covid hit? That offers a VERY different take on your previous numbers, you realize that right?

 

[Faolyn]

The point being is that they actually don't though. Humans don't remember past lives and never sleep. That's something that is distinctly elven and serves to separate them from humans. That you could give that power to a human doesn't invalidate elves any more than short humans invalidate halflings.

Humans don't live below ground, although, sure, they could. Nor do they innately see through stone. Again, you could certainly make a human that could see through stone and live underground, but, all you've done now is turn a human into a dwarf.

Or, no, you've made humans that live underground (dwarfs don't see through stone--even with tremorsense). Humans who live underground are going to be different than dwarfs who live underground. Different cultures, different religions, different goals, different lifespans, different family structures, different dietary needs and preferences, different everything. When you get down to it, the only things humans and dwarfs should really have in common is that they're post sentient mammals who like beer.

A human who can remember past lives is still going to be different than an elf who can remember past lives for those exact same reasons.

Which would be the point that's been made over and over again. Halflings don't really have anything that makes them distinctly halfling. Not being fantastical is what humans are.

That's not the game's fault, though--that's your fault for not giving them a distinct culture in your setting.

To me there are several very strong reasons why halflings are problematic:

1. Many settings, while leaving elves and dwarves more or less alone, rewrite halflings in an attempt to make them different and attractive to players. Whether it's the anti-hobbit kender, cannibal halflings, river trader halflings, dinosaur riding halflings or whatever, there have been so many very different takes on "halfling" that defining a halfling is actually pretty problematic. I mean, you, yourself mention that there innately magical halflings - which runs exactly counter to what everyone has talked about as the core of being a halfling - that they aren't special. That they aren't magical. So, "define halfling" becomes a game of throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that something will eventually stick.

Except... In Dark Sun (cannibal halflings), the elves and dwarfs are also very different, what with elves being short-lived thieves and desert-runners and dwarfs being obsessive about crafts to the point of undeath if they fail to complete their goal. In Eberron (dino-riding halflings... plus hospitality halflings plus medical halflings plus mafia halflings), the elves and dwarfs are also very different, with elves worshiping undeath and dwarfs being in league with Lovecraftian entities--plus, of course, the Dragonmarks.

So the only holdout is Dragonlance, which only turned halflings into kender because their original game had a halfling with a ring of invisibility, and they felt it was too close to Tolkien--because apparently if one halfling has a ring of invisibility, the entire race is affected?--and so changed them. Then they were supposed to be feral streetwise hunters, but Roger Moore created Tasslehoff for a story and everyone decided that all kender were like that.

I don't know what the river trader halflings are from, which suggests Nentir Vale because I don't know anything about that setting. Although I have them as river traders in my game, so clearly it's a fairly common idea.

So clearly, "many settings" don't leave elves and dwarfs alone.

2. Halflings never play much of a roll in any of the settings. They are always the "and also" race. They never really matter and removing them from the setting would pretty much have zero impact. Even settings like Dragonlance where kender are actually a big thing, they don't actually DO anything in the setting. It's the humans and the elves and the dwarves that fight back the dragonarmies. The Kender are just kinda mentioned in a couple of paragraphs at the end. In most settings they don't even play that much of a role.

That may be because elves and dwarfs are "sexier" than halflings are. That's not the fault of the halflings; that's the fault of the writers who think sexy = interesting.

3. According to the information we have, and a fair bit of anecdotal information, halflings have never actually been very popular. Again, they are the "also ran" race. If they are in an adventure at all, it's a very, very minor role. "Save the halfling town" hasn't been a plot in a module that I can think of (although, I'm sure it does exist somewhere). Yet "Save the (Human/Elf/Dwarf) town has featured repeatedly. According to what we've seen on D&D Beyond, they aren't played all that often. Think of it this way. If I told you that my 5 PC group was 3 humans and 2 elves, no one would bat an eye. Heck 3 elves a dwarf and a human would be pretty standard. When's the last time you had 3 halfling PC's at the same time? And if you have, would you say that that's a regular occurrence at your table?

See above, although "save the halfling town" has been a plot in my game--where halflings are also a dominant race, and one of only two races to have anything approaching industry and mint coins (the other race being dwarfs). Everyone else, including humans and elves, lives in tiny villages or wilderness tribes.

If you don't make halflings important in your game, then that's your fault, not the fault of the game.

 

[Faolyn]

The blandness of Humans, who are a race of non-specialists who generically fill any and all possible roles make them a much worse and less interesting race than even Halflings. There's nothing interesting about D&D Humans. I mean, what is their lore? Individual Humans can rise to great heights of power in a short time compared to longer-lived races? That's great, but without some kind of deus ex machina, a Human who conquers the world at 20th level is still going to die in less time than it takes an Elf to become a teenager.

This, very much. In reality, a D&D setting should be totally ruled by long-lived races and undead, or by short-lived but very violence-capable races. So if humans aren't total warmongers in a setting, then they should be steamrolled by other races who can afford to engage in really long-term machinations to gain power.

Heh--my friends and I homebrewed a world and realized we had kind of left humans out when it came to adding races. We eventually decided that there was an asteroid strike and all of a sudden, humans appeared after that. They're a bit of a second-class citizen (not too much, because we didn't want to add baked-in bigotry in this setting), and some of them worship the wreckage of the crater from that strike, where all sorts of abominations emerge.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I’d just like to comment on this piece here because humans in DnD are fantastical in their own way, while not explicitly magical humans are noted as being highly ambitious and adventurous, putting their hand to all things, humans contain a certain drive that pushes them to great feats, it’s one of those things that goes overlooked because it’s not explicitly listed in their stat blocks and not directly correlated to actually playing one as it’s just as easy to pick a dragonborn or a drow(and are more likely to want to be because they’re ‘exciting’ and humans are ‘boring’ because nobody is a dragonborn in reality and so it’s different) unless you’re rolling on race tables for your character and let’s be honest how many people actually do that beyond one shot characters?

Halflings fill the niche realworld humans would have in a fantasy world who are used to lives of good food and comfort but also have their own spin on them, they’re unobtrusive in the world both in the sense they’re stealthy and that they don’t carve their lives into the environment but adapt to it, they’re noted as one of the most friendly races to a decent degree, and while this is just me speculating on the point my guess is that while halflings might partake in wars or have joined existing ones they probably have a lesser record of actually starting them

This is fairly nonsensical though.

Firstly, being highly ambitious and adventurous isn't somehow fantastical in the context of humans. Humans have pushed and explored the edges of the world throughout our entire existence. Before the invention of sail boats or any way to preserve food, we had already traveled the majority of the globe.

Just... stop and appreciate that for the moment. The Inuit people have lived in the arctic since the time of the Great Pyramids (approx. 3,000 BCE), and their ancestors likely crossed into that land over ten thousand years before that. And the Chon or the Puelche people lived as far as the tip of South America (records are hard to google). So it is fair to say humans spanned the entire globe by at a bare, bare minimum the time of Classical Greek culture. We know there are human remains in South America dating back to at least 8,000 BCE

Humans have a drive that pushes them to achieve great feats. Period.


But, also, not every single human in a DnD world is seeking glory and adventure. We have farmers, we have bakers, we have cobblers, we have people who just want to live a simple life. The idea that halflings represent "real-world" humans in their love of comfort and home is ludicrous. Humans fill that role. What is happening is you are overstating the racial character of humanity to try and make humans inhuman.

 

[Faolyn]

Harry Potter Goblins were “part of the most popular fantasy series” for over a decade. There was no clamour to play Harry Potter Goblins.

Is there a Harry Potter RPG where goblins are a playable race?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Such as? In official source material, not setting specific or someone's homebrew. Because halflings have setting setting specific abilities and niches. Generic assertions don't mean a lot.

See my response to Faolyn where I answer this exact question

Millions, if not billions of people around the world believe in reincarnation. There are many people throughout history that have claimed to be someone else in a previous life, even speaking a foreign language and claiming to have knowledge they should not have. You may not believe them but that's not particularly relevant, especially when we represent human experience in a magical realm.

See my response to Faolyn, just because you can redefine human to include easily accessible reincarnation doesn't mean it is a fact of humans.

Heck, think about this for a moment. No elf needs "evidence" of elves reincarnating. They trance, they visit their past lives. They don't need to prove it to other elves, it is a fact. They don't need special rituals, or speaking in tongues, or medicinal herbs and years of special training. They just live their natural lives.

The "remembering past lives" and changing gender overnight only appears in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and I don't remember it ever appearing anywhere else. Trance is just cosmetic fluff that doesn't really mean much. It's right up there with pointy ears. Changing gender came out of left field as far as I'm concerned since it's never been part of the lore previously. Still not particularly defining.

Really? So, you can completely dismiss utterly inhuman experiences because... you weren't following the changes in lore? That doesn't seem like a very compelling case.

In a world where any race can learn to cast powerful magic, it's really inconsequential. In addition, extreme cognitive abilities are not a default assumption of the books. It's like saying every human has Batman's capabilities. It just ain't so.

Extreme cognitive abilities ARE the default of gnomes. Yes, it would be like saying every human has Batman's capabilities, that is why it is a notable non-human feature.

And, again, like I responded to Faolyn, innate magic that you are born with is different than magic you can learn. It does make a consequential difference.

Umm ... not yet. They might be able to in the next edition depending on feedback but we haven't seen what, if anything, they're doing with halflings.

And yet, a lot of people saw that and went "Oh! That makes perfect sense for Dwarves, that's a very dwarvish ability." It fits into what we expect from them, because it is perfectly in line with their depictions.

For Halflings they are finally giving them stealth proficiency, but that is a rather difficult sell to me on how that changes anything.

So in your homebrew you've made them more interesting. Kind of like how if halflings were so interesting on their own they wouldn't need special treatment.

See my response to Faolyn

But halflings already are different when it comes to strength. Pound for pound, a halfling is far stronger than any human. A halfling can have a 20 strength while being 3 foot tall and weighing around 40 pounds. A truly strong human can carry roughly 50% their body weight, a halfling with the same strength can carry 750% of their body weigh. Halflings have strength similar to ants. Even an average weight halfling can carry 150 pounds, nearly 4 times their body weight.

Now this could be an interesting angle to take... if it also wasn't true for every other short race in the game. This is true of gnomes, kobolds, goblins, literally every race that can be "small" this is true for. So it can't really be a defining feature of halflings.

But they still have to be "important" somehow, right? They have to be leaders, people in power, build cities or they don't rise to your level of expectations?

No, as I have told you many, many, many, many times before that is not what I am saying. Stop trying to strawman me or ignore me, one of the two.

 

[Lanefan]

@Lanefan - weren't you just saying that halflings played like fourth or fifth place in your parties? That they were largely outnumbered by many other races?

So, which is it?

The "fourth or fifth" (actually 6th) place is from an aggregate of all PCs I've ever DMed. The whack of Hobbits in that particular party is unusual, but as you asked if anyone had ever seen it...well...

Also, worth noting that two of those five Hobbits are reincarnations that started as something else.

 

[Gammadoodler]

What is happening is you are overstating the racial character of humanity to try and make humans inhuman.

Either..this...

..or you are assuming that the language used in the PHB for racial characteristics is meant to describe the characteristics of the races included in the PHB...

I mean..who does that?