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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8802713" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Indeed, Dwarves are fully capable of experiencing and displaying happiness and good cheer.  While on average members of other races perceive Dwarves as being more gruff, stubborn, and taciturn, this doesn't apply to other Dwarves.Dwarves have a highly regimented and ordered society that emphasizes working together and placing the goods of the community first.  This is not something a race with lower than average communication skills would display, in fact, it's quite the opposite.  It's believed that it was these abilities; superior communication and teamwork, that allowed early man to surpass the Neanderthals.As far as ability score penalties in themselves, they really don't matter as much as some seem to think.  Consider this, if an Orc has a -2 penalty to Intelligence, all that means is that most people aren't going to play an Orc Wizard.  Any Intelligence check they make is 5% less likely to succeed if they put the same amount of points in Intelligence as other characters.It's not like there's some amazing benefit to being an Orc Wizard in the first place, so all this penalty does is ensure niche protection.  You could accomplish the same thing by going back to AD&D class limits and just saying Orcs can't be Wizards.The same is true if Dwarves had a penalty to Charisma; people would be less inclined to be Bards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks.  And unless the benefits of being a Dwarf are really good (like the access to Medium armor that D&D One seems to be removing), I think you lose more than you gain; players will be less likely to have unique characters.Not because the penalty is incredibly punishing (it's not) but it does put you at a slight advantage for no other reason than you wanted to express yourself and do something interesting!  Now sure, I get it, some people like the idea that certain races are more likely to be some classes instead of others, but again, I think that just saying "no arcane Dwarves in my game, please" is a much better way of doing things than "oh sure, you could be a Dwarven Bard, but here's this penalty.  Are you absolutely sure you wouldn't rather be a Human?"Steering this back to Halflings, I think D&D is kind of at a crossroads. Racial traits are moving away from being indicative of any particular culture, and becoming more generic, with these elements moving to backgrounds.But unless we have racial backgrounds like "Dwarven Noble" or "Halfling Sage", the only thing that's going to guide preferences and roleplaying is pop culture and a few paragraphs in the PHB.  Dwarves will start to use Swords and Bows instead of Axes, Hammers, and Crossbows.Halflings won't even look twice at a sling, etc..The races of D&D's future will have no real unique identity other than "this race is lucky, this race has innate magical powers, and this race can fly".  This is going to continue to be a problem for Halflings, in particular, as they will remain popular for some players, and not very popular for others, but almost nothing about them will tell us who and what they are; it's going to come down to if their racial abilities are more unique and fun compared to others, and what their art is going to look like.Even though I can see the advantages to this for players, I think we might need to step back off that ledge, before we just have a table of possible special abilities you can pick for your character ala carte and call that a race, taking away a vital component of the identity of races.  In summation, I believe a race's mechanics should evoke a sense of what they are all about, just as much as the flavor text does.</blockquote>

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