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?

 

[Charlaquin]

That really doesn't matter though. If you look at the natural world, it is full of organisms that seem very similar to each other. Some are related and some arn't, but there is no rule in nature that says "this slot is already taken, find your own". In fact, in nature ideas repeat themselves over and over.

Right, I agree. I have absolutely no issue with there being multiple sea-people races. I do find the proliferation of elf subraces a little boring.

 

[Cadence]

That seems crazy to me. None of these animals are closely related, why would the anthropomorphic versions be?

For the Tabaxi and Leonin though...

 

[Azzy]

Has no one mentioned the BECMI Gazetteer, the Five Shires yet? A whole country of halfings (they prefer their endonym "hin", thank you very much), written by Ed Greenwood no less.

 

[Charlaquin]

Does "having a slot filled" somewhere makes it less likely in that place yhat something will evolve to compete against the thing that's already there? (As opposed to, say, different things evolving to do the same things on separate continents?)

Not necessarily. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

 

[Helldritch]

Ok, late to the party but.
1) No problems with halflings. We have had plenty of them over the years and currently have a bard halfling in one of my groups.

2) Kenders never were a problem in any of my games. I strictly forbid stealing from the group and made it a chance per level to have the exact trinket needed whenever appropriate. Need a dagger? 5th level means 60% to have it. Need a needle? Under two gold it's a 100% Where you got it is irrelevant. It might be a spae needle from one of the character or one you handled in town.

Hey, even magical potion might be there. How you got it I do not care, nor should the other players. This made kender valued members of any group and the aspect of handling wad often leading to troubles in towns but since they so often saved the day because of this chance to have almost anything on hand, players were a tally doing the same thing as Caramon
That is defending their little friend. Need a map? That little kenderi might have it. Got captured and lost your pearl to identify? Hey! Guess what? That little Kender found it. Here it is my friend.

Doing it this way would have made it so Kenders would be appreciated.

 

[Faolyn]

Sure, a nat 1 is worse on death saves. But you probably missed your attack roll on a 2 as well. Think the only time I saw a character who didn't miss on a two, they had advantage and the DM just asked them to stop rolling, because it didn't matter, they hit.

Sure, you'd probably miss your attack on a 2. But you'd get a chance to reroll a 1, which gives you an extra chance to roll and maybe even get a crit.

But yeah, halflings are hard to kill. Halflings don't miss when stabbing people as often. And people use homebrew rules.

But that isn't the same as what we consider to be "lucky". You don't need to convince me that re-rolling 1's is a useful ability, sure it is a useful ability, my objection is that that alone constitutes enough to claim that the entire race is lucky. Lucky characters don't just bleed out slower. That's never how supernatural luck is presented in basically any fiction.

Here, let's give an example, because people hate examples,

View attachment 253755

This is a comic depicting a halfling thief. The Halfling is stealing a gem while her party is fighting a dragon. She gets the gem free, but loses her balance and hits those stalactites. Those stalactites fall down and kill the dragon, preventing a TPK.

So, I bet someone is going to say that this was an example of a nat 1 turning into a nat 20. So, I'll ask this. How many times have you had a Nat 20 "steal object" roll, auto-kill a dragon that was above half its hp and about to kill the entire party? This is how halfling luck is depicted in narratives, this is an officially licensed DnD comic (for 4e) and what it depicts is something that would never once happen at a serious table.

No. This is an example of a plot contrivance in a comic, which clearly does not actually follow D&D rules any more than D&D novels did. Now, I haven't read this comic, but I'm willing to bet that they also have people killing evenly-matched monsters with single, well-placed blows rather than the multiple attacks that it usually takes a real character. Heck, even your example seems to indicate that a falling stalactite, which is weak enough to break under the weight of a falling halfling and which maybe would do 4d10 damage if the dragon failed a Dex save (or whatever amount of damage 4e would say), is enough to kill a dragon capable of causing a TPK. I should think that alone would be enough to tell you that this comic isn't following D&D rules. If the dragon is so badly injured that 4d10 damage is enough to kill it, then it's weak enough that it would be killed by the party before it could TPK them. Especially since that halfling up there doesn't look even slightly injured.

A D&D comic that actually followed D&D rules would be more like this:

Which is why "serious" D&D comics don't follow game rules and try to be realistic but occasionally pull stalactite ex machinas out.

But I'm not complaining about the trait. I'm complaining that when someone was asked "What makes a halfling different from other races" the answer was

1) They are stealthier than other races (Only even conceivable true with the Dex mod, though they originally meant the lightfoot ability)
2) They are braver than other races (see my discussion on why that doesn't work)
3) They are luckier than other races.

These are all traits. You are confusing traits with narration. They are different things.

Unlike other races, all halflings have advantage on saving throws to avoid being frightened.
Unlike other races, all halflings can reroll 1s, and can do so every time a 1 is rolled.
Unlike other races, all halflings can move through the space of Medium and larger creatures.

Only halflings can do these three things.

Also:

Unlike other races, some halflings are also capable of hiding behind other creatures.
Unlike other races, some halflings are also naturally resistant to poison.
Unlike other races, some halflings are also telepathic.
Unlike other races, some halflings are also attuned to nature's magic.
Unlike other races, some halflings are also dragonmarked and have have magic related to healing or hospitality.

These things make halflings different from all other races.

How you choose to narrate this is up to you, not the game.

To defend point three, everyone is pointing to the Lucky feature. "There!" they say "There is why halflings have supernatural good luck that differentiates them from all other races" But, as I'm trying to point out... it doesn't actually do that. It allows a few re-rolls when you might roll a 1. That's it. It isn't causing fortuitous cave-ins, it isn't causing them to find the secret key to lost vault hidden in the sands, it isn't allowing them to stumble on the secret dryad's grove, it isn't causing NARRATIVE luck. Not unless the DM forces it to happen.

I can't think of a single race in D&D's history that has a trait that allows them to alter the narrative of the game. So why are you singling out halflings?

Exactly. Thank you. Therefore Halflings are not particularly braver than other races. They are not uniquely brave in any way. They just have a trait that grants advantage.

So again, your problem is with the name of the trait, not with the trait. Rename all their traits, if they bother you so much.

I'd never say elves have "Iron Wills" because they have fey ancestry that gives them advantage against charm. So why do we want to say that halflings must be uniquely and strangely brave when compared to other races just because they have advantage on the roll? Especially since, again, failing the roll doesn't mean you are not brave.

Is advantage on fear rolls a useful and powerful ability? Sure. Mechanically it is a good ability. But I'm not talking about the mechanics of the trait. I'm talking about the narrative.

They likely named it that because it's an interesting name, not because they expected that people would seriously think that it means that all halflings must be braver about everything than everyone else.

 

[Faolyn]

No, I mean why can’t there be more than one race that’s built to be burglars?

There should be. And technically, any race that gets a bonus to Dex (which is all Small races and several Medium ones) will be a good race to play rogues with.

The problem is that unless it's for a specific world, WotC--and TSR--has rarely put much effort into deciding how each race actually fits into the world. So it's up to the DMs to decide that.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

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.

But with 5E's low AC's and DC's, you're turning more than 5% of misses into re-rolls. Which likely hit. When you when you hit on an 8 or higher, that's a reroll on about 15% of your misses. Just like a +1 AC, it matters more on the margins. An expertise skill becomes even reliable when you reroll 20% of your failures.

If D&D had degrees of success and failure beyond crit, hit, and miss, it would be more ideal, but you all are definitely downplaying a solid ability.

 

[Irlo]

And, again, if we are going to measure bravery as "succeeds on saving throws vs fear" then the Monk, Druid and Cleric are even braver than most halflings. Being high wisdom classes. Some Ranger's too. Because, they are going to succeed on those fear saves, so they must be even braver.

Why compare halflings to monks, druids, and clerics? Compare a halfling monk to a non-halfling monk.

 

[Faolyn]

Personally I dislike massive conceptual overlap. I like a clear selection of solid archetypes that are still broad enough that they don't become totally flanderised.

Now I don't agree with @Lanefan that this is necessarily an issue with "monster races" unless you want to include a ton of them. They usually actually bring something pretty distinct to the table. Like the dragonborn are actually obviously rather different than elves or halflings. Now if you want also include the lizardfolk and troglodytes then we might face the problem I mentioned.

My personal go-to is to say that such creatures are all the same race and culture(s), it's just that the race itself is highly variable and not every member has the same abilities. "Reptilian" is a race. If you want to play one can choose from dragonborn or lizardfolk stats (or kobold or whatever other reptilian races can be found in D&D).