Taller Halflings

[sunrisekid]

The whole "small nunchucks" for "small characters" ruleset really bothered me, enough to completely ignore said rules. So if the height increase mitigates the funky alt.rules for small characters then I'm all for a height increase.

I think it would be great to see halflings represented to look like the hobbits from LotR rather than the ninja-looking halflings from 3E, but that's just me. Lidda looks cool and all but I like my halflings like I like my beer (stout, but mild).

 

[M.L. Martin]

A human male is 5' 9" on average.

A "halfling" who isn't about half that height isn't much of a halfling--more like a "three-quarterling". :\

Tolkien has halflings as averaging about 3'5" at the end of the Third Age, topping out at 4' and never less than 3'. "The name thus evidently referred to their height as compared with Numenorean men, and was approximately accurate when first given. The Numenoreans were a people of great stature . . . Their full-grown men were often seven feet tall." (Notes on one of Tolkien's manuscripts, reproduced in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, p. 4)

In this, it would appear that 4E halfings are more Tolkienesque. "Is that . . . legal?"

 

[Firevalkyrie]

A human male is 5' 9" on average.

A "halfling" who isn't about half that height isn't much of a halfling--more like a "three-quarterling". :\

I look at it as body mass. A halfling, IMO, should have half the body mass of a human of the same gender - range 75 to 115 pounds for a reasonably athletic male and 49 to 90 pounds for a reasonably athletic female (before you complain to me that a 'reasonably athletic' woman should not weigh under 100 pounds, I am friends with a woman who is on a good day five feet tall and is a very energetic fencer - her weight is about 98 pounds).

 

[pawsplay]

My 2 1/2 year old weighs nearly 30 lbs. If halflings are 3" tall and 30 lbs, irrespective of their dense, Spider-man like muscles and agility... I could punt them like soccer balls.

 

[Lanefan]

I voted that I want them shorter, but by that I mean shorter in relation to other non-Gnome races. And Gnomes should be shorter still...there's nothing at all wrong with a core race being 2-3' tall; 1e got Gnomes and Halflings backwards and this has perpetuated since.

The approximate progression I use looks like this; race and average height:

Human 5'-6'6"
Elf 4'6"-5'6"
Dwarf 4'-4'8"
Hobbit 3'-4'
Gnome 2'6"-3'3"

Part-Orcs are a bit bigger than humans; Part-Elves are all over the map. Some fancy rolling can get you outside these ranges, to allow for the edges of the bell curve we see in real life.

Lanefan

 

[Charwoman Gene]

3e were so off in halfling height I completely forgot it was that small.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

My 2 1/2 year old weighs nearly 30 lbs. If halflings are 3" tall and 30 lbs, irrespective of their dense, Spider-man like muscles and agility... I could punt them like soccer balls.

Why do I get the sense your daughter may be particularly frustrating of late?

The terrible 2s can be a trial.

 

[KingCrab]

I can get into LotR size hobbit looking halflings. Not that I'm "into" halflings or anything.

 

[pawsplay]

Why do I get the sense your daughter may be particularly frustrating of late?

The terrible 2s can be a trial.

Yes, they can be. ... So, I've heard.

 

[Aeolius]

The terrible 2s can be a trial.

Whoever called it the "terrible twos" never had a three-year old.