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.

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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?
 

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Michael Tresca

Michael Tresca


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I love love love halflings!

I find them very easy to pop into a campaign. I actually like to lean into the "humans with masks" trope and use different races for NPCs without worrying about where they came from in the world. Is the bartender big and brusque? Why not make them an orc? A dwarven smithy and a gnome smithy are going to elicit different reactions from the players because of the tropes surrounding those races. At the same time, making the stubborn, piggish town guard a Halfling is a fun way to upend tropes.

Halfling often show up in positions in which I want the players to interact with underdogs, folk of the earth, or streetwise people. Their small size means they have a slightly different perspective on the world, and it's fun to communicate that to the players.
 

I mean we have perfectly fine examples in the Shire, Buckland, and Bree. Small rural communities, big on neighborly hospitality, maybe a little cautious of outsiders.
true but I wanted anything other than Tolkien as I want to see them have a place outside of Tolkien, I may hate them but at least one them has some real backing so it does not feel like hating one-dimensional cardboard cut-out.
 

Ok, but what make they REALLY distinct besides the size? Something that says, "wow, humans never would do able to do that in a biological way?"
Size is distinct enough. Humans don't send their toddlers out onto the battlefield. Adult halflings are the size of human toddlers. And they grab swords, spears, and shields to go out and kill monsters/bandits/whatever.

And strangely enough, they are pretty successful at it (or at least they rarely fail disastrously)
 



I agree gnomes and goblins are far more fun than pecks

and yeah, halflings do play as just short human farmers and laborers. if anything by taking the example of Sméagol, I tend to view them as just a more settled type of goblin.
These pecks are tolerated scavengers on the fringes of human settlements, commonly exploited and crowded into ghettos.

Otherwise I’ll make them NPC trooping fey, and thus more capricious than most
 

First off: round here they're not Halflings, they're Hobbits. Pretty much full-on Tolkein, only with a) a bit more connection with and information abut the world beyond their borders and b) a bit more willingness to get out there and interact with said world, largely due to one of their deities quietly being among the most powerful of all deities. The exceptions are the Hobbits of the south seas, who are a maritime species based on a scattered group of offshore islands and who happily interact with anyone they can trade with/pirate from/sail for.

Our Elves and Dwarves are also quite Tolkein-ish in many ways.

And in our games they're played about as much as any other second-tier species (i.e. anything not Human, Part-Elf or Elf), which is to say maybe 10% of all characters over time have been Hobbits.
 

I'm not sure why people keep imagining D&D halflings just as hobbits. They have for a long time not been just that, they have a decent dose of kender in them. And I prefer them that way, makes them more adventure-friendly.
 

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