RPG Evolution: The Trouble with Halflings

Over the decades I've developed my campaign world to match the archetypes my players wanted to play. In all those years, nobody's ever played a halfling.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

So What's the Problem?​

Halflings, derived from hobbits, have been a curious nod to Tolkien's influence on fantasy. While dwarves and elves have deep mythological roots, hobbits are more modern inventions. And their inclusion was very much a response to the adventurous life that the agrarian homebodies considered an aberration. In short, most hobbits didn't want to be adventurers, and Bilbo, Frodo, and the others were forever changed by their experiences, such that it was difficult for them to reintegrate when they returned home. You don't hear much about elves and dwarves having difficulty returning home after being adventurers, and for good reason. Tolkien was making a point about the human condition and the nature of war by using hobbits as proxies.

As a literary construct, hobbits serve a specific purpose. In The Hobbit, they are proxies for children. In The Lord of the Rings, they are proxies for farmers and other folk who were thrust into the industrialized nightmare of mass warfare. In both cases, hobbits were a positioned in contrast to the violent lifestyle of adventurers who live and die by the sword.

Which is at least in part why they're challenging to integrate into a campaign world. And yet, we have strong hobbit archetypes in Dungeons & Dragons, thanks to Dragonlance.

Kender. Kender Are the Problem​

I did know one player who loved to play kender. We never played together in a campaign, at least in part because kender are an integral part of the Dragonlance setting and we weren't playing in Dragonlance. But he would play a kender in every game he played, including in massive multiplayers like Ultima Online. And he was eye-rollingly aggravating, as he loved "borrowing" things from everyone (a trait established by Tasselhoff Burrfoot).

Part of the issue with kender is that they aren't thieves, per se, but have a child-like curiosity that causes them to "borrow" things without understanding that borrowing said things without permission is tantamount to stealing in most cultures. In essence, it results in a character who steals but doesn't admit to stealing, which can be problematic for inter-party harmony. Worse, kender have a very broad idea of what to "borrow" (which is not limited to just valuables) and have always been positioned as being offended by accusations of thievery. It sets up a scenario where either the party is very tolerant of the kender or conflict ensues. This aspect of kender has been significantly minimized in the latest draft for Unearthed Arcana.

Big Heads, Little Bodies​

The latest incarnation of halflings brings them back to the fun-loving roots. Their appearance is decidedly not "little children" or "overweight short people." Rather, they appear more like political cartoons of eras past, where exaggerated features were used as caricatures, adding further to their comical qualities. But this doesn't solve the outstanding problem that, for a game that is often about conflict, the original prototypes for halflings avoided it. They were heroes precisely because they were thrust into difficult situations and had to rise to the challenge. That requires significant work in a campaign to encourage a player to play a halfling character who would rather just stay home.

There's also the simple matter of integrating halflings into societies where they aren't necessarily living apart. Presumably, most human campaigns have farmers; dwarves and elves occupy less civilized niches, where halflings are a working class who lives right alongside the rest of humanity in plain sight. Figuring out how to accommodate them matters a lot. Do humans just treat them like children? Would halflings want to be anywhere near a larger humanoids' dwellings as a result? Or are halflings given mythical status like fey? Or are they more like inveterate pranksters and tricksters, treating them more like gnomes? And if halflings are more like gnomes, then why have gnomes?

There are opportunities to integrate halflings into a world, but they aren't quite so easy to plop down into a setting as dwarves and elves. I still haven't quite figured out how to make them work in my campaign that doesn't feel like a one-off rather than a separate species. But I did finally find a space for gnomes, which I'll discuss in another article.

Your Turn: How have you integrated halflings into your campaign world?

 

[Chaosmancer]

why would the good dragons not rule a nation, they are stronger and live longer than humans, they are far more able to engage in nation set-up than most founders of nations.

Yeah, this is one of those conceits that is super easy to discard, because, you know... Good Dragons would totally end up as rulers of nations. Mostly because the benevolent, ancient, super powerful, super-wise creature is going to be begged to be in charge, especially in a world as dangerous as a DnD world.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I don't like Broccoli. I don't need people to tell me how I can use broccoli to make it more palatable to me. I'm fine with not having broccoli, and the people who like broccoli having broccoli.

I don't like sweet potatoes. Turns out that was because the "family recipe" called for the potatoes to be about 50% sugar by weight. Someone showed me a different recipe for sweet potatos that didn't do that. Turns out, sweet potatoes are pretty good. Not something I want all the time, but quite good.

 

[Chaosmancer]

While I can't speak for Wildemount or Ravnica because it's been a long time since I've read those books, in Eberron, which famously says any creature can be any alignment, the goblin nation of Darguun is still a pretty evil place--it's the only place where slavery is legal, for instance, and it treats their slaves "like cattle."

Just popping in to say, as far as I am aware, the Dhakani (the true goblins unaffected by the curse) don't have slaves. That puts goblinoids in Eberron in effectively 50/50 spot, which considering the Church of the Silver Flame once almost did a genocide, isn't too bad for an entire race of people. Especially when the evil 50% is canonically cursed.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is not a thing. "Bad luck" is not a quality that people in the real world can have, in a sense that they would actually have different random odds than others. Your friend has the exact same likelihood of dice roll results in the future than everyone else.

If things were objectively measured across the infinity of time? Sure.

But statistically someone has to be rolling worse at dice than someone else. 6d6 showing up 6/6/6/6/6/6 has the exact same likelihood as 1/1/1/1/1/1 and 2/3/4/1/5/6 after all.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Funny how we don't completely rewrite elves or dwarves in most settings. Wonder why that is?

First we absolutely do rewrite elves. And add subrace after subrace to the point the race means just about nothing.

Second dwarves are little more popular than halflings. If we look at the 2019 subrace breakdown then we find that 3.4% of characters are lightfoot halflings and another 1.3% stout halflings. If "no one" plays halflings then twice nowt is still nowt - and no one plays either hill dwarfs or mountain dwarfs. So let's kick both of them out of the PHB because, despite the oodles of lore they are given by your standards "no one" plays them. 4.7% Half Orcs - or almost exactly as popular as halflings.

Who knows what halflings would have been if we had been force-fed them as much as we have dwarfs. Instead they get a place in the PHB and as mentioned about two lines in some adventures. And yet halflings are almost as popular as dwarfs.

But I'm pretty sure that the only reason to throw halflings and gnomes out of the PHB is that roughly half of halfling concepts could easily be gnome concepts if halflings weren't there and roughly three quarters of gnome concepts could easily be be halfling concepts if gnomes weren't already there (especially now the mad engineers get a class so there's no need to add a ridiculous race). The insistance on cutting the bottom two especially when a lot of the concepts that they can fulfil overlap looks like a serious case of motivated reasoning, deliberately looking at where the halflings are and then setting the bar just over their heads.

Can you give a non-arbitrary reason why the bottom two must be removed together. And why this is somehow better than removing the bottom one or the bottom four. There's an obvious reason to remove the bottom one, especially when concepts overlap. Because that way you don't get interference. And you don't get silliness by splitting a race into subraces and then removing all the subraces because they break about evenly, dwarf-style.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If things were objectively measured across the infinity of time? Sure.

But statistically someone has to be rolling worse at dice than someone else. 6d6 showing up 6/6/6/6/6/6 has the exact same likelihood as 1/1/1/1/1/1 and 2/3/4/1/5/6 after all.

Yes, but that is just a record of history, not property of the person affecting their "luck." Your friend will in the future have just the same odds than everyone else

 

[Irlo]

yes but we have already had your, I have not seen this other guy posting before thus new ideas might be present on how to make the halfling menace palatable to me.

I don't have ground-shaking new ideas to convince you. It's pretty unimportant to me to convince you. These things are just a matter of taste. Your initial response read as extremely dismissive of my taste, and I responded to that. If that wasn't your intent, we can move on.

I lean pretty heavily into the lore provided in the PHB, that halflings are well-integrated and welcome in a variety of communitites. I lean away from any notion of a shire (that is, an isolated pocket of exclusively halflings) -- that just doesn't interest me. Yes, there are settlements nearly exclusively occupited by halflings, but they're near and interact with other nearby settlements.

My favorite halfling community that I've used in a few campaigns as a DM is focused on shepherding goats on a mountainside. A dragon lives within the mountain, demanding tribute from towns in the region and terrorizing them, but it protects the halfling shepherds on its mountain from local kobolds and trolls. Working together, the dragon and the halflings make and market an eldritch cheese veined with strange molds that enhance elvish reveries (trance).

I've played two halfling characters in recent years. One was a rogue with an urban background -- no-nonsense dungeon delver, there to do a job, get paid, and get out. The other was a rustic folk hero who slayed a rampaging boar and was himself nearly killed. When he awoke, he found he was a paladin blessed by Yollanda and went out to intercept trouble before it could come to his village.

Is any of that palatable?

 

[Irlo]

I find it so disingenuous to continually get told that stories from literature don't matter in DnD, that the only thing that matters are the mechanics. You don't really believe that. You can't believe that and be able to truthfully answer the above questions. Heck, halflings only exist because of a novel.

So, no, I think it does matter to pull up DnD literature, and point to what it says halfling luck is like, then point to the game and say "this is nothing like that" and discuss how this is a potential problem. Because the narrative does matter. That's why you will never find a demon immune to radiant damage, because it would break the narrative of what those things mean, even though mechanically, radiant damage is no different from lightning damage.

I'll not be disingenous. Narratives matter. D&D wouldn't be much of a game without them.

But the narratives that matter are the narratives in our games, at our tables. If the narratives of D&D-branded comics and literature or D&D-adjacent fiction or works that inspired D&D from the beginning do not match the narratives of my game, it really doesn't matter. To me. I see that it matters to you. Just as it doesn't matter to me if the narratives in your games don't match the narratives in mine.

The idea that it's a potential problem just doesn't resonate with me. I'm not dismissing your experience. I understand what you're saying. It just is not my experience.

 

[Irlo]

I can say that your aversion makes sense to me, because I've never had an issue integrating these monster races. Heck, I actually have a world I built for a long-form story (don't want to call it a novel since it is a web-format) where the only races are Humans, Gnolls and Goblins, and it works incredibly well.

Kobolds I have had a harder time with, but I've finally found a way to integrate them with drakes, dragonborn and dragons, so that works for me.

Yes, my aversion is just a matter of taste. As a DM, I can easily integrate kobolds and goblins into the game world. I use them all the time, but I don't like using them as PC races. It don't want my adventuring parties to be travelling menageries. (Yes, it's arbitrary for me to enjoy dwarf-elf-human-halfling parties and to not enjoy kobold-goblin-changling-aaracokra parties. For those who do enjoy that, go for it!) When I DM, my players don't generally ask for the non-traditional D&D races. If they do, I work with them despite my aversion. As a player, my enjoyment of the game is diminished when the other PCs are a strange collection of oddities. I briefly played in one game with a wide range of odd characters, and I enjoyed it despite that. I played an unsophisticated human who knew he was surrounded by weirdos but tried to be cosmopolitan about it.

 

[Hussar]

You know, this is one of the reasons I kind of wish Hussar just didn't post. Because... he's the only one talking about kicking halflings out of the PHB. Everyone else is talking about rewriting them.

Me? I just wish people would actually take the argument at face value instead of ascribing all sorts of motives and assumptions to what I'm saying. All I said was that the least popular two races be removed from the PHB and shunted to a different book, in favor of two new options which hopefully would gain more traction with gamers.

At no point have I ever said a single negative thing about how halflings are written. I certainly don't hate them. Why would I? I haven't seen a halfling played in about ten years or so. The last gnome I saw was in 4e. Why on earth would I have any feelings at all about this?

But, apparently, I'm doing the equivalent of eating puppies without ketchup.

To be fair though, the argument isn't totally off base. If you rewrite halflings to 11 (as has been suggested), are they actually halflings anymore? Kender were written as the anti-halfling. They weren't just dialing halflings to 11, they were replacing halflings. Kender are now seen as halflings, but, that's because over time, D&D has just kept chipping away at the halfling archetype and replaced them with kender - physically and culturally in the game. In 3e, Lidda would be completely unrecognizable as a halfling to a D&D player in 1982.

My point is, I don't think it will matter to be honest. You can't put lipstick on a pig. FIFTY years and halflings are just not very popular. I'm sorry, but, that's true. They're the "also ran" race. And the only reason they have stuck on is nostalgia and Tolkien.

So, sure, rewrite them all you like. It won't matter. Ten years from now, when the next PHB revision comes out, we're going to be having this exact same conversation with people clenching on to their favorite halfling in the face of overwhelming evidence that halflings are irrelevant to the rest of the hobby.