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?

 

[AnotherGuy]

I find the stat penalties dull as they are not interesting weaknesses they do not promote ideas but cull them.
I want weaknesses that builds ideas that are interesting not just making my character weak, sickly or stupid.

I'm thinking you can have both.
For instance, a halfling with decent to high STR can be off-putting for some.

 

[Stormonu]

TBF, I'm less interested in ASIs than abilities races get. Sure, -1 STR to Halflings makes sense on some level, but their Lucky ability is a far better trait for doing things that actually differentiate the races.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I’m not a big fan of rolling either, but this is definitely something I’d try for a one-shot.

Definitely an interesting idea. Seems like the challenge is either how to keep your potential results within the D&D sweet spot for PCs, or how ok you are willing to be with PCs being pretty significantly outside that sweet spot (e.g. on 3d8, there's a 1 in 15 chance you roll a 20 or above at chargen)

 

[James Gasik]

Perhaps one way to do this (if you really wish to impose your will upon racial ability score tendencies*) it is use die rolling, but set priorities, so that, when playing a Dwarf, your first or second highest die roll result must be Constitution, and Charisma can't be your highest die roll result. There is still the possibility for an 18 Charisma Dwarf, but it requires you to roll three 18's to get there; just as it is technically possible that you have a low Constitution, though you would need largely terrible rolls.

But no actual bonuses or penalties are granted from race, and you can use your ASI's (however they are derived, be it Background or Class) as you like.

So, as an example, I randomly rolled these numbers for a Dwarf character:

14, 17, 13, 17, 14, 12 (man my dice are on fire today!).

So a theoretical Dwarf character would have 17 in anything but Charisma, 17 Constitution, and a Charisma no higher than 14; still viable for any class, especially once you take an ASI into account.

*I don't feel the need to do this myself, but if my players expressed disdain that Goliaths aren't generally stronger than Halflings, this is what I'd suggest.

 

[Faolyn]

Goblins are not Hobgoblins. And yes; in the real world an elephant can help build a house by providing labour but that doesn't mean elephants can design, engineer, and build houses by themselves.

Same is true of standard Goblins and Kobolds. They can provide labour to help other, smarter creatures build what those others have designed but other than the rarest of exceptions they can't design, engineer, and build anything similar on their own.

Elephants aren't capable of reading blueprints or using fine motor skills. Kobolds and goblins are.

Curiously, kobolds and goblins have traditionally shown to be very good at building traps and gadgets--kobolds especially, who literally have a god of traps. They just lack the resources to build fancy things because larger, more powerful creatures have claimed those resources first. Why did you decide to go against tradition when it comes to kobolds and goblins but adhere to tradition when it comes to PC races and their stats?

 

[Gammadoodler]

Perhaps one way to do this (if you really wish to impose your will upon racial ability score tendencies*) it is use die rolling, but set priorities, so that, when playing a Dwarf, your first or second highest die roll result must be Constitution, and Charisma can't be your highest die roll result. There is still the possibility for an 18 Charisma Dwarf, but it requires you to roll three 18's to get there; just as it is technically possible that you have a low Constitution, though you would need largely terrible rolls.

But no actual bonuses or penalties are granted from race, and you can use your ASI's (however they are derived, be it Background or Class) as you like.

So, as an example, I randomly rolled these numbers for a Dwarf character:

14, 17, 13, 17, 14, 12 (man my dice are on fire today!).

So a theoretical Dwarf character would have 17 in anything but Charisma, 17 Constitution, and a Charisma no higher than 14; still viable for any class, especially once you take an ASI into account.

*I don't feel the need to do this myself, but if my players expressed disdain that Goliaths aren't generally stronger than Halflings, this is what I'd suggest.

I think taking the die rolls out of the players' hands is maybe even worse than giving bonuses and penalties to the results. Maybe even worse than just rolling stats in order.

At least with bonuses and or penalties, you can still apply your strongest result to the most relevant attribute for your intended class.Needing to be "thrice lucky" to choose outside of a racial archetype seems pretty punishing (especially in the context of something like 5e where the attributes are poorly balanced against each other).

 

[Mind of tempest]

I'm thinking you can have both.
For instance, a halfling with decent to high STR can be off-putting for some.

true but there is an equal number of people who care that they can play a 20-str halfling either for serious or pure humour.
personally, I want weaknesses but ones that are fun to deal with like humans being bad at night or elves with a weakness to iron(would it just be iron would it include steel, others in its elemental group?)

 

[Lanefan]

That might be goblins and kobolds in your campaign, but, that's very much not how they are presented in D&D. Goblins and kobolds are both builders and miners, very capable of doing both. Both are described as being very capable of building traps and mechanical devices as well. Never minding that goblins and kobolds are just as smart (on average) as humans.

See, this is largely where things get really weird. Neither goblins nor kobolds are described as being incapable of doing anything a human can do.

For Goblins, I can see this as an outgrowth of having made them (grumble grumble) playable as PCs. Are Kobolds also PC-playable these days?

 

[Lanefan]

If you enjoy the greater randomness of rolling your stats, one way to do it would be to have the players choose their race first, then have the number/type of dice rolled depend on the race.

Or, for added complexity (!), put each stat for each species on its own bell curve translated from the standard 3-18 curve.

How this works: you roll your stats as normal. You then select your species. If it's not Human, you consult a chart which takes what you rolled and applies it to the bell curve for each stat for that species. So, for standard Elves the Intelligence range is 6-18, so if you rolled a 3 it would become a 6, of you rolled a 12 it would become a 13, and if you rolled an 18 it wouldn't change.

This is how we've done it for ages, though in fairness we only have a few PC-playable species compared to 5e. Yes it adds some time to char-gen (for non-Human characters) but we find the results are worth it.

 

[Lanefan]

Elephants aren't capable of reading blueprints or using fine motor skills. Kobolds and goblins are.

Curiously, kobolds and goblins have traditionally shown to be very good at building traps and gadgets--kobolds especially, who literally have a god of traps. They just lack the resources to build fancy things because larger, more powerful creatures have claimed those resources first. Why did you decide to go against tradition when it comes to kobolds and goblins but adhere to tradition when it comes to PC races and their stats?

I didn't. Traditional (as in, old school) Goblins and Kobolds can't usually read anything, and their languages don't have a written form. Literacy just never made it to those cultures.