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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8702196" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Well, I'd say you need to tackle it in two separate questions. 1) Why are halflings hard to fit into the story of adventure?And to this, we can acknowledge the trope that halflings cling to the hardest, which is the reluctant adventurer. They don't WANT to go on adventures. Now, this isn't to say that we don't deal with this all the time, because it is also one of the most common tropes in literature. But, it makes them harder to push out the door, so to speak, because you can't just assume they wanted to leave home. This is where the follow-up halfling trope of "fancy feet" comes in, which is a direct contradiction to the earlier halfling lore, and I think a clear sign that this was a problem for DMs. Essentially, Fancy Feet says that Halflings DO want to leave home, and you have a completely legitimate reason to send them on adventures, ignore that earlier part about them not wanting to go on adventures. Which... leads to a contradiction that could be interesting, except "wants to stay home" is the default state of most people. So if halflings were more homebodies than "dwarves who seal themselves in their mountain homes" or "elves that never leave the forest" then they were extreme in a way that can cause that problem again. 2) Why are halflings hard to fit into the world?And this is where I think I can say [USER=6789971]@bedir than[/USER] absolutely points out the problem. Halflings are "the forgotten folk" in a lot of their descriptions. Halfling homes, which are incredibly important to them as we pointed out in #1, are both everywhere and nowhere. They are all over human kingdoms, but the lore says that no one knows where a given halfling village is. What do halflings do in your setting? Nothing. Per the lore halflings never go out and do anything important. Now, this may sound like it is a really easy thing to work into the world, after all they are just there. But that's like saying it is very easy to include the white of the canvas in your painting. The thing you have to do is nothing, and as you do nothing, it becomes easy to write in such a way as to squeeze the halfling out of existence. I worked in Kobolds in my world by considering how they related to dragons and the things I'm doing with dragons. I worked Goblins into my world by considering how goblins work as a species, leading to very cool stories and a very interesting life cycle. But to put in halflings, per the lore, I have to do nothing. They just exist. They never do anything, they aren't involved in any meta plots in the setting, they don't have any deep history to explore, they don't have any connections to any interesting threats. They just... are there. And that is really hard to actually make feel like they are part of the setting instead of just... tacked on to the end.</blockquote>

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