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?

 

[Faolyn]

Oh, wait no. They just re-roll 1's. Which, per RAW are no worse than rolling a 2. Sure, players may give themselves crit fails, but players also have their characters quote Monty Python, doesn't mean it exists in the game world. So, again, narratively, the halfling player is no luckier than any other player. Unless the DM narrates and explicitly goes out of their way to be luckier than normal.

Wrong.

A natural 1 on an attack roll is always a failure, no matter what. Even if the roll would otherwise be high enough to hit the target because of other modifiers, a natural 1 is always a failure.

A natural 1 on a death saving throw counts as two failures.

A halfling will never have to worry about any of these things. Because they have the Lucky trait, which allows them to reroll 1s.

And while a natural 1 is not an auto-fail on a skill check or saving throw, I'm pretty sure that a large percentage of tables would say it is. Which means that halflings don't have to worry about that, either.

Are you seeing why just saying "they are lucky" is leading to problems? Because they aren't. DnD is a game based on luck, based on die rolls, and THAT enforces itself at the table. You could play a halfling who generally fails when it matters, just because the D20 doesn't swing your way. And the actually luckiest player at the table could be anybody. Unless the DM specifically enforces that your character is just luckier than your peers... you aren't.

Nope. Because you don't require an elf roleplay Fey Ancestry and you don't require a dwarf to roleplay knowing how to use brewer's tools. So why would you require a halfling to roleplay an equally passive trait? Lucky is no different than any other trait. For some reason, you just think it has to be.

Halflings are Lucky. That is the name of a trait that gives them a specific ability. They don't have to also be lucky in the sense that they find lost coins everywhere or manage to prevent the king from being killed and their friends from being framed. Would you complain as much if the name of the trait was "Reroll 1s" instead?

Right, so does anyone who succumb to the frightened condition lose the right to call themselves brave? Again, my ranger may be so scared his hands are shaking, but he is still shooting the dragon. Is that not bravery? And if that is bravery, then my ranger is also brave. So, why describe halflings as "the race that is brave" when every single adventurer is brave?

They are brave. But they do not have the Brave trait. Those are two separate things. The trait Brave gives the advantage on saving throws against being frightened. It has nothing to do with how courageous they are. It's just a name.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think that depends a lot on both the table, the players, and the type of actions. IME, DMs love it when you get creative with your descriptions. We do this a lot at my table, especially when we roll badly. "I rolled a 3 for Perception, and noticed a particularly interesting stain on that floor tile."

Yeah, fair enough. In my experience DMs love it when players get creative with their descriptions of the action, not the outcome, which is usually the DM’s job to describe. Unless the DM specifically invites the player to describe the outcome, a la Matt Mercer’s “how do you want to do this?” But I suppose if it’s just adding a little descriptive flair to an outcome the DM has already narrated, a lot more groups would probably be just fine with that.

But anyway, in my example, it was more that the DM ruled that the roll was high enough to steal the apple, and since the quality of the apple is meaningless to anything, the player is free to say that they "luckily" managed to grab a really good apple. Not that they luckily managed to grab a magical apple or something like that.

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I misunderstood your meaning, it sounded like the player in your example declared that they were going to make a check rather than describing an action and the DM calling for them to make a check, then upon seeing the high result, assumes it would be successful and described the success themselves rather than allowing the DM to narrate the results. That, I think would go over poorly in a lot of groups, though certainly not every group.

Yeah, you missed one heck of an argument from a while ago on this exact same thing. And I agree with you. It's a passive trait, not one that requires the DM bombard the players with in-game examples of how it works for it to be meaningful.

Oops! Sorry for butting in without proper context.

 

[Charlaquin]

Wrong.

A natural 1 on an attack roll is always a failure, no matter what. Even if the roll would otherwise be high enough to hit the target because of other modifiers, a natural 1 is always a failure.

A natural 1 on a death saving throw counts as two failures.

A halfling will never have to worry about any of these things. Because they have the Lucky trait, which allows them to reroll 1s.

And while a natural 1 is not an auto-fail on a skill check or saving throw, I'm pretty sure that a large percentage of tables would say it is. Which means that halflings don't have to worry about that, either.

Also, like, how often do you make a check where you would succeed on a natural 1? In my games, literally never because I wouldn’t call for a check in the first place if that was the case. That means at bare minimum, halflings have a 5% chance of turning a failure into a reroll. That’s not much but it’s not nothing.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I absolutely love halflings, so this “problem” feels kinda overblown to me. Yes, Tolkien’s hobbits were generally not the adventuring types, but first of all both stories made a point about how some hobbits (the Tooks in particular) very much were driven to adventure, and were in fact surprisingly well-suited to it. Indeed, hobbits surprising other characters with their capability is kind of a running theme. Second of all, while Tolkien’s hobbits are of course the inspiration for D&D’s halflings, halflings have grown well beyond that. They are defined in D&D by their curiosity, pluck, and wit (and, yeah, a lot of that is a softening of Kender).

To answer the question of how folks have confronted this “problem”, such as it is, in their own games, I’ve specifically made the Tolkienesque notion of the halfling homebody an in-world stereotype.

My halflings are much more Bud Cubby (Dimension20) than Fatty Bulger.

In Islands World and Space Fantasy, and my FR games, Hin (halfling is absurd. No way they call themselves that) tend to be the ones running courier and postal services, and they tend to me amiable and friendly anarchist who will burn the whole thing down if they can’t peacefully solve systemic injustice.

 

[Faolyn]

Well that's like your opinion man.

The problem is not that all these races were made playable. IT was that every race was not not designed for the same level of fantasy.

Halfling was designed for a low fantasy , low magic, humanocentric LOTR-clone world. The second you play anything else, it gets outshined. That's the whole point of the thread. Integrating halflings in other types of settings.

Integrating halflings in other types of settings requires imagination and a bit of thought.

Go with their basic idea: they're simple farmers. OK. Maybe they're the only ones who really do much farming, though. Elves live in forests, dwarfs live underground, humans live in cities, and gnomes live in laboratories. Thus halflings have their niche, and because of that, they're important. Anger the halflings, and you lose your food. Halfling fighters are common protectors of the fields and crops and, more importantly, the merchants who bring the crops to the cities and forests and underground. Halfling druids are important because other races don't have their agricultural knack and so need some guidance on how to do small-scale farming--halflings may have the monopoly on civilization-friendly druids. Halfling bards are important because they travel with the merchants (to entertain them on the road) and so pick up knowledge from far-flung places, which they then disseminate as they go along. As a result, most people believe halflings are pretty rich, even though the halflings themselves rarely display their wealth. And to bring that into your next campaign, all you have to say is "most races don't have a lot of farmers and rely on halflings to do the work, and halfling merchants are a common sight in settlements" and then have an example of a halfling fighter, druid, and bard appear somewhere in the game.

Or do something slightly different than the norm. Maybe halflings have a great reverence for life (or are squeamish about killing) and so have become monster trainers, or diplomats, or the only people to regularly welcome half-breeds and members of "evil" races. Maybe halflings love to entertain and so halfling authors, singers, are common, and so are halfling circuses.

 

[Charlaquin]

My halflings are much more Bud Cubby (Dimension20) than Fatty Bulger.

In Islands World and Space Fantasy, and my FR games, Hin (halfling is absurd. No way they call themselves that) tend to be the ones running courier and postal services, and they tend to me amiable and friendly anarchist who will burn the whole thing down if they can’t peacefully solve systemic injustice.

Love it! Hin is a good name too. I‘ve always figured the names of the races in the PHB are what humans call them rather than what they call themselves. “Dwarves” is another one that feels weird as an autonym, and half-elf/half-orc is obviously a humanocentric naming convention - I assume elves/orcs would refer to them as “half-human.” My halflings just call themselves “people” and humans “big folk.” Dwarves call themselves dwerrow, as do gnomes which are very closely related to dwarves. For elves, I continue my ongoing trend of shamelessly ripping off Dragon Age and have them call themselves Ela-Vhen, which is where the common misnomer “elven” comes from, and “elf” is sort of back-derived from that misnomer. Ela is “elvish” for people and Vhen for forest, and Ela-Vhen properly refers to wood elves. High elves are Ela-Drin (from which the term Eladrin is derived), and dark elves are Ela-Drow (from which the term Drow is derived). Drin and Drow are a bit like Seelie and Unseelie.

 

[Faolyn]

That's a fair question. And, I think there are two things to be gained here.

1. Cleaning out the cruft. I'm sorry, but, Halflings and Gnomes are as relevant to the game as pages of descriptions of polearms. They are barely played, have virtually no impact on any of the settings and, despite having every possible advantage - being one of the 4 races in the SRD is a BIG advantage - they still scrape the bottom of the barrel. For fifty years. It's time to let them go. I doubt that they are going to make the PHB much bigger than it is - and I also doubt they are going to add many new races to the PHB - the 10 (ish) there seems to be a solid number.

As has been mentioned before, D&D Beyond published the percentages of what races were played. Between lightfoot and stout halflings, they made up 4.7% of the 8.8 million characters made and played on that service. That means 413,000 halflings were played just on D&D Beyond.

That is not "barely played." And for what it's worth, 4.7% of players played half-orcs. So halflings and half-orcs are tied for popularity on D&DB.

Halflings have a pretty important role in Eberron, which is a very popular setting. They had an important role in Dark Sun. IIRC, they were fairly important in Birthright, or at least had a strong plot hook. And they have more of a history than the vast majority of D&D races do, both due to they're history in the game and in popular culture (quick, picture a tabaxi village).

Tenish) races may seem like a solid number, but once upon a time four was a solid number, then seven. Used to be four classes was all that was needed. Now there's thirteen.

2. It means that going forward, the game designers do not have to assume that every group has a halfling (or a gnome) and include halfling and gnome options in every single supplement. Because, let's be honest, you can't have a supplement that excludes anything from the PHB. They've demonstrated that pretty clearly. All the player facing books for 5e had to include halfling and gnome material. Bumping the halflings and the gnomes to the DMG (or, IMO, a player section in the MM along with all the other possible player races) means that WotC isn't forced to include halflings and gnomes in every single book. It frees up so much design space and cuts away the dead weight that's been dragging in the game for decades.

So wait, you think halflings and gnomes aren't well-supported, but at the same time you don't want them in the PB so they won't be supported in supplements?

 

[Faolyn]

Sure, but why must there only be one race that makes good thieves and poor warriors?

D&D always built races for specific builds. Read the DMG section on making a race. They gave the assimar bonuses to Wisdom and Charisma specifically so they'd make good clerics and paladins.

So blame whoever decided that because Bilbo was a burglar that meant all halflings had to be burglars.

 

[Chaosmancer]

She was talking about catastrophe hitting the halflings, not a halfling being present when some other king is affected by one.

So.... being accused of regicide when you didn't do it isn't catastrophically unlucky? See, kind of weird to think about luck only applying when you actively are doing a thing. That's not how luck works.

A 1 is always worse by RAW for non-halflings than a 2, because at a minimum you are 1 less likely to succeed at your goal. For a halfling a 1 is better than a 2 because you can re-roll and are unlikely to get an equally bad result. 95% of the time it will be better, and 90% of the time it will be better than a 2.

So again, narratively, halflings are luckier than other races. The DM doesn't have to go out of his way to narrate them to be luckier. That's the status quo. He has to go out of his way to not narrate them correctly in order for them not to be luckier in the fiction.

You want to quibble over the math, a halfling is X% less likely to fail because they can re-roll 1's.

I'm pointing out the practical reality. If you could succeed on a roll of 2 or better, you generally don't roll the dice. Most rolls that actually matter require you to roll at least an 8 or higher. So if a halfling and non-halfling both roll a 2, they both had bad luck.

And again, no. Halflings are not narratively more lucky, they are some random % more lucky when they take actions that involve rolling the d20. They otherwise are exactly as lucky as everyone else. If the DM never describes a lucky thing happening to a halfling... then how is that halfling lucky? Because they might not fail when the roll the dice? That is true of everyone. Heck, many characters are 30% luckier than halflings in specific circumstances, if we want to go by this definition.

Again, it's a racial trait that makes them braver than normal, not fearless. So no, missing a save doesn't cause them to lose the right to call themselves brave. Heck, since it's forced fear and not cowardice, a failed save doesn't do that to anyone.

Exactly. So, saying "Halfings are the race that is Brave" is flatly wrong. Because every adventurer, no matter their race, is brave. Again, I don't care that mechanically halflings are X% less likely to succumb to magical fear, because falling to magically induced fear DOESN'T change the fact that you are brave. So it becomes a meaningless distinction, a statement of "Everyone is brave, but sometimes halflings are more brave than normal" which... I could say about any class with Wisdom save proficiency.

Nobody has said that, and it's not relevant in any case. The ranger being brave doesn't make the ranger's race as a whole braver than other races. Unless the ranger is a halfling anyway.

It's not meaningless. It's part of the character's racial identity and statistically the halfling will succeed at more fear saves than the other races, so will over time be braver.

I know nobody has said that. I said it to prove a point. The point being, if falling under a magical fear effect and still fighting means you are brave, then halflings aren't uniquely brave. They are just statistically less likely to be affected by a mechanical condition. Because we can't define bravery as succeeding on saving throws against fear effects. If succeeding on a saving throw means you are brave, then failing means you aren't, and the ranger is not brave. But, we know narratively that that doesn't work. Being frightened and still fighting = being brave.

No. No that wasn't agreement. I proved that they are in fact luckier no matter what, and that luck will be in the fiction as well unless the DM is DMing in bad faith and refuses to narrate their luck as luck. If you have such a bad faith DM, then the halfling is just luckier with the rolls.

So, the DM not twisting the story and giving the halfling special attention and special nods makes them a Bad Faith DM.

Wow. That is certainly a way to look at the world. "The Dm didn't really emphasize how my character is special, they are a Bad DM who isn't acting in Good Faith."

Are you sure you want that to be your position?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Sure, but why must there only be one race that makes good thieves and poor warriors?

For me, it ends up being a bit of narrative bloat. I'm not saying you can't, but for example, I hate the idea that we have Tritons and Sea Elves. They are both good aligned, water people who rule the oceans. Narratively they fill the exact same niche. Visually and even mechanically, they start having the same niche.

So, when we get an expansion of racial feats, like we got in Xanathar's... what's likely to happen? Well, they may both get one... but the Sea elves are tied to elves, and they are more consolidated under a single lore. So, more than likely, they will get more support. Which has already happened, because Sea Elves are elves, so they get elf specific feats, classes, and items already. Which means that eventually, the Tritons are... just there. No one cares about them, because anything they get as support can just go to the Sea elf, who is already more supported and therefore more popular.

So, when you realize you want a small race, but there are a lot of them, you start wondering what you can cut, and what you can focus on. Because presenting all of them is too much, and dilutes the focus.


This isn't a problem that cannot be overcome. You can obviously and clearly have solutions to this, but it creates a pressure. There may be incredibly excellent monsters in the 3.5 MM #4, but they will never be as popular as the stuff which covered the same niche first, and got the support. To beat this pressure, they have to have a powerful hook that draws attention to them, that makes you go "AHA, that is perfect for my needs!"