Aloïsius said:
halfling are now a nomadic race, rather than just agoraphobic gardeners. And the reason why they changed their outlook is that the old ones reeked of Tolkien rip-off. Deal with it : there is no way WotC will use hobbits in its game.
Errr...whatever.
Humanity at large is not made ONLY of gardeners.
The vast majority of humans who have ever lived were subsistance farmers. I recently heard that it was estimated that for the first time in human history, less than 50% of the world's population was now farmers.
In any event, a close examination of the text finds that there was much more to the Shire than mere farmers. They had coal mines, chalk mines, brick masons, stone masons, merchants, millers, rope makers, carpenters, weavers, sherriffs, border guards, and every other sort of craft or trade that you'd expect to find in a medieval human community. They even had a knightly warrior lord, 'The Thain', though most of the Shire seemed to have forgotten why they had one during a period of long peace.
Sure, there are people keeping to their houses, like the hobbits do. But there are professional warriors (because human are warlike, something hobbits are not), there are explorers (because humans are often struck by wanderlust, something hobbits are not), there are researcher (which translate into wizards) because humans are realy curious (something hobbit are not, as soon as it's something else than gossip).
Hobbits are presented as somewhat idealized humanity. Nevertheless, the non-warlike state of the Hobbits in the LotR is clearly a result of current social conditions, and not a racial indisposition against violence. At the end of the story, not only are the heroes quite martial indeed, but Frodo finds himself needing to restrain several Hobbits from committing atrocities in the midst of battle against thier former tormentors. I dare say that that suggests that the Hobbits are no less warlike than than any human culture without a strong martial tradition, and probably more warlike than cultures on the extremes of human behavior like the Amish. So no, the evidence is that the Hobbits aren't racially defined by anything not present in equivalent human cultures.
As for Wanderlust, it doesn't seem to strike Hobbits in general, except that it does seem to generally strike the Hobbit aristocratic class - The Tooks, the Brandybucks, and thier relations. Which is hardly suprising, because thoughout human history its always the bored leisure class that goes travelling. While wandering about may seem perfectly natural to you in a fantastically wealthy cosmopolitian mobile society, it is hardly the natural behavior of people living in rural villages throughout human history - most of whom would have been born, lived, and died and never ventured beyond 8-10 miles of thier birthplace.
As for curiousity, the intellectual curiousity and desire to know is not nearly as universal to the human race as you describe and when it is present is generally considered as 'wierd' as it would have been considered amongst Hobbits of the shire. The learning - even so much as literacy - which cultivates that curiousity isn't particularly common in human history, and certainly not until recently amongst rural farmers.
Your argument that "any excuse you could use for a human works just as well for a Hobbit" does not hold water, because humans don't need any excuse to go adventuring. While hobbits do.
Really? So, how many times have you picked up a rifle and gone looking for danger in some hostile corner of the Earth? Joined the military have you? Astronaut? Worked on a fishing boat off Alaska just for the fun of it? Arctic explorer? How much adventuring of any sort do you actually do, and how much hardship and risk of life and limb are you really attracted to?
