NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8703098" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Because this is what people constantly tell us is the draw of halflings, combined with the fact that many people have expressed it is the problem with halflings. I wouldn't say that halflings loving the comfots of home mean they never leave home, but their exaggerated trait that makes them clearly not human is their love of comforts. And they are just like the famous novel series Hobbits, and Hobbits.... never wanted to leave home. But, rolling back a bit, why is it they need to be viable on the world stage? Well, it goes back to the purpose of world-building. If I asked you what is going on with the races of Eberron, where do they fit, what could you say? Quite a lot. You have the elves, what they believe and how their island nation is cut off from the world. You have the humans scattered throughout the different kingdoms. You have the gnomes running information across the world. All of this matters because it gives people a snapshot of the place of the races in the world. The orcs live in the Demon Marshes and fight ancient evils with the old ways. Great, that tells me something about them and how they fit into the world, and gives me some general clues of what to expect. Now, take a generic fantasy world. You need to explain it to a new player, to get them excited to pick a race and play the game. They know nothing of fantasy. Well, there are a lot of racial options, even just focusing on the PHB you have seven distinct options and you'll probably want to include Aasimar to counter tieflings as a "this goes both ways" sort of thing. So you start explaining everything. And then you get to halflings, and... they are just people. They don't have any special stories. They don't really have any land. They don't really have anything that drives them except a love of comfort and family. And the other part of that is, as a person whose been looking at these other options, I'd immediately ask "Wait, so no one else loves their family?" Well... of course they do. So you end up with this blank space... just like humans. Because that's what humans are in DnD, they are the blank space. You have a town and don't know who lives there? Humans. Because they are us, ordinary people with no special abilities or powers. And that is the problem, is because humans fill in the blank space, and the halfling traits are largely universal... there isn't much to tell a new player. They've never done anything, they just... exist. And they feels boring and lazy to build, and it will come across as boring and lazy to most other people, except for those so dyed in fantasy that "isn't special" is what draws them to the race. Which is fine, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem for the rest of us.</blockquote>

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