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?

 

[Minigiant]

Hobbits (a.k.a. Halflings) also had bonuses with missiles that no other species had and which could at times be a big deal.

Halflings probably shouldn't have lost what they lost. Dwarves (and some other species) getting more is just an example of power creep.

Halflings lost what they lost because a whole mess of old school and halfling fans saw halflings are challenge mode or joke characters. So they didn't speak up when halfling was being designed weak.

Look at halflings in many OSR games. Halflings are usually the weakest race.

No one spoke up about small size being 90% of the time a penalty until the goblin players started making goblin PCs. The Halfling and Gnome fans said nothing.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Halflings lost what they lost because a whole mess of old school and halfling fans saw halflings are challenge mode or joke characters. So they didn't speak up when halfling was being designed weak.

Look at halflings in many OSR games. Halflings are usually the weakest race.

No one spoke up about small size being 90% of the time a penalty until the goblin players started making goblin PCs. The Halfling and Gnome fans said nothing.

how strange the goblin player cares more about whether they get what they want.

 

[Charlaquin]

Because there'll be (hopefully only!) one other species that makes good warriors and lousy wizards. And a third that makes great wizards but lousy clerics. And a fourth who shine as clerics but aren't much use as fighting. Etc. (there's obviously loads of room for fine-tuning these niches but I think this gets the idea across)

Same as classes: there's one class (well, group of classes now) that are good at sneaking and bad at melee; there's other classes that are good at arcane casting but not much use at sneaking, etc. Synergizing these two things such that one is playing both a species and a class that are good at roughly the same thing is where archetypal class-species combinations come from. I'm fine with this.

There's no need for 30 different playable species; much like there's no need for 50-odd playable classes. It's easy to determine when the limit's been reached, and that's when there's no niche left to put something new into without kicking something else out.

Sure, there’s no need for more than one of each. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with having more than one anyway.

 

[James Gasik]

Now that Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse has offered Small-size options to races like Aasimar, I imagine Halflings would need a boost to stay competitive.

Especially if Kender are printed with immunity to fear.

As for Halfling Luck, it is nice to have. I was playing a Battlemaster Halfling Archer, and the ability to reroll a 1 was nice, but I will admit, it probably only came up maybe a dozen times over 12 levels.

About the bravery thing, before I got Resilient (Wis), I had to fight a powerful dragon in Storm King's Thunder that had a save DC for it's fear aura that was so high for me that I couldn't save on a 20. All the advantage and rerolling in the world can't fix that.

But that has more to do with the saving throw system than Halflings. Fear did not come up for me as often as Poisoned, which is a status condition the monster design team seems to adore with all their hearts.

I like Halflings, I've played several over the years. It's annoying that Small is now straight downside instead of a mixed blessing like it was in 3e, but it only really affects certain builds. But right now, their main reason to exist is that, yeah, very few DM's are going to put them on their ban list.

I would like to see WotC lean harder into what really makes them different than "small humans". They suffer from the PHB's conservative race design, and attempts to make them more like "classic halflings", while going on to design better races that fill their niche. But as long as the LotR fandom continues to exist, and WotC continues to feel their needs to be "basic" character options, the Halfling isn't going to ever leave the PHB.

 

[Hussar]

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.
/snip

To me that’s barely played and a waste of space. And note half orcs are likely getting the axe too.

That’s essentially 1 in 4 tables has a halfling. Pretty close. Which could easily mean that halflings are almost never seen by many tables.

For a core 4 race with fifty years of history and the backing of Tolkien, it’s a pretty sad showing.

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?

Nope. I’m saying that their presence in the phb means that everyone is forced to throw them a bone in supplements that virtually no one uses or cares about.

Bump them out of the phb and now we can have support for races that are actually getting played like tieflings or dtagonborn or warforged.

I’d say that warforged are a heck of a lot more important to ebberron than halflings or gnomes. And Birthright? Sorry but who cares about a thirty year old setting that almost no one played even back in the day and hasn’t had a book for it since the 90’s?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

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.

I honestly can't see any benefit of including two races in the PHB that virtually no one actually plays. I'm sorry, but, that's really the bottom line. Despite being a Core 4 race, halflings are (and always have been) the "also ran" race in the game and gnomes may as well not exist at all.

This is your personal bias talking. A lot of people care about them, they're doing OK in popularity polls. And what's craziest about this is that you'd want to remove both halflings and gnomes. Like sure, they're similar so I'd understand removing one, but removing both would be like removing elves and half-elves.

When choosing a selection of "basic races" in PHB, they should aim for set in which most people can find something they like, so I would see an argument for removing either halflings or gnomes (as people who like one are likely be pretty OK with playing the other in a pinch) for something like warforged or tabaxi, but removing both would be removing an entire broad archetype and that's a bad move.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Out of curiosity all in person or any online? My game has been 100% online through Foundry which incorporates a bunch of quality of life features and automates a lot of the fiddly bits.

Two campaigns online, the one-shot was in person. I agree that in person was harder, since when I play in person, I don’t use any electronics.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Even if I saw it effectively as a mechanic, that still doesn't change the rest of the narrative. I've seen people take the lucky feat. They didn't feel any "luckier" than any other player. They could just re-roll the dice. That isn't luck, that's a metagame manipulation of the game engine. Because in the narrative... they were still incredibly UNLUCKY. And in fact, the reason they took the feat is they have notoriously bad dice luck and were trying to counter-act that... and it still didn't work.

You just described two of my players. The worst is that pretty much every time they use Lucky, they roll the same number or worse.

 

[FrozenNorth]

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!"

Which seems to have happened for Dragonborn, Tieflings and, arguably, Genasi.

 

[Cadence]

To me that’s barely played and a waste of space. And note half orcs are likely getting the axe too.

That’s essentially 1 in 4 tables has a halfling. Pretty close. Which could easily mean that halflings are almost never seen by many tables.

For a core 4 race with fifty years of history and the backing of Tolkien, it’s a pretty sad showing.



Nope. I’m saying that their presence in the phb means that everyone is forced to throw them a bone in supplements that virtually no one uses or cares about.

Bump them out of the phb and now we can have support for races that are actually getting played like tieflings or dtagonborn or warforged.

I’d say that warforged are a heck of a lot more important to ebberron than halflings or gnomes. And Birthright? Sorry but who cares about a thirty year old setting that almost no one played even back in the day and hasn’t had a book for it since the 90’s?

I wonder if Ebberron is the setting in less than 5% of tables. If so, does that mean it's hardly played and we should cut it? (I could swear I read something like less than 5% is cuttable...).