D&D General why do we have halflings and gnomes?

[Oofta]

I never said halflings shouldn't exist.

I just want a clarification of if they live by good luck, divine blessing, and/or acrobatics.

I keep getting different answers because the official reasoning changes.

They live by avoiding notice, they have little of value so there's no reason to go looking for them. Combine that with luck and having small villages (less than 100 people) in out of the way places with little or no strategic value.

Which is a condensed version of what it says in MToF. As with all races, there are campaign specific variations, what we get in MToF is the default for FR. As with all default assumption there will be exceptions even in FR.

I don't see what the issue is. Don't like them? You can't please everyone.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I keep getting different answers because the official reasoning changes.

You get different answers because the goalposts change.

It went from 'why do halflings adventure' to 'halflings are like NPCs' to 'how do halflings get along in the world' to 'halflings aren't militant naughty words enough' to 'Vikings will hunt halflings down no matter where they are on this map of Faerun' to 'halflings can't be lucky or blessed by gods, damn the rules' to 'halflings can't grow pepper' for some reason.

And at some point you were saying the feudal system is core to D&D and there's this running idea that peaceful agrarian societies are some fever dream and the Amish and Appalachia are all a conspiracy contrived by Big Halfling.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

To be fair, some of those where raised by other posters.

But the answer, of course, is halflings live the same way as everyone else lives.

 

[tetrasodium]

Subtract the selling bit and you just described rural America in the not so distant past.

I have a great uncle who:

• raised hogs and chickens that he fed from his garden of corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes and squash
• made moonshine with his corn
• his wife helped in all of this plus grew herbs on the back porch.
• extra labor came in the form of 'parties' where family like me were tricked into helping slaughter or butcher hogs and can vegetables.

He sold the moonshine as his primary means of profit. In another era, if he had say a neighbor who raised cows and goats, that'd take care of milk and textiles. As it was, most of his money went to creature comforts and making his house as kickass as possible.

As far as I know, he couldn't turn into random woodland creatures or singlehandedly unbalance a D&D game.

"Profit" implies trade. Moonshine requires sugar & cornmeal. The guy I used to get it from even swore on using a specific brand. Did your great uncle grow sugarcane & refine it into sugar as well? What about the processed cornmeal... did he grow the corn dry it & grind/flake it into meal for the mash too? Sugarcane is grown semilocally here & requires a lot to farm despite being capable of kinda growing wild into something that is still technically a sugarcane plant. Processing & refining sugar is a whole involved ordeal that involves significant amounts of work along with specialized equipment just as the corn to cornmeal process.

Also "garden" is rarely the term used for a plot of land you expect to produce all of the fruit vegetables grains & meats that you will be eating year round as that describes a farm with one or more fields. Having a garden you get some vegetables & a small chicken coop that produces eggs plus the occasional chicken on top of the food you buy through trade at a store is very different than the situation presented for that regular farmer halfling not even special enough to get a name till I called him bob for the sake of discussion.

 

[Oofta]

Ah, the overly-nitpicky contrarian argument continues.

Who said halflings sell moonshine? Anyone? Who says they must have pepper as a spice? How did people survive when pepper was not available?

This thread just gets dumber and dumber.

 

[Vaalingrade]

"Profit" implies trade. Moonshine requires sugar & cornmeal. The guy I used to get it from even swore on using a specific brand. Did your great uncle grow sugarcane & refine it into sugar as well? What about the processed cornmeal... did he grow the corn dry it & grind/flake it into meal for the mash too? Sugarcane is grown semilocally here & requires a lot to farm despite being capable of kinda growing wild into something that is still technically a sugarcane plant. Processing & refining sugar is a whole involved ordeal that involves significant amounts of work along with specialized equipment just as the corn to cornmeal process.

Also "garden" is rarely the term used for a plot of land you expect to produce all of the fruit vegetables grains & meats that you will be eating year round as that describes a farm with one or more fields. Having a garden you get some vegetables & a small chicken coop that produces eggs plus the occasional chicken on top of the food you buy through trade at a store is very different than the situation presented for that regular farmer halfling not even special enough to get a name till I called him bob for the sake of discussion.

1) I said 'aside from the selling' part.

2) your argument was that people can't sustain themselves one their own and many people come damn close like all the time and historically have done a lot.

The fact that I never helped my grand uncle do crimes and thus didn't know he needed sugar is beside the point.

 

[turnip_farmer]

What about the dialect?

It is common knowledge that halflings speak with a West Country burr.

 

[tetrasodium]

Ah, the overly-nitpicky contrarian argument continues.

Who said halflings sell moonshine? Anyone? Who says they must have pepper as a spice? How did people survive when pepper was not available?

This thread just gets dumber and dumber.

That would be post 850 that started the line of halflings personally brewing/distilling whatever they drink @Vaalingrade happened to have a relative that made moonshine.

1) I said 'aside from the selling' part.

That's a pretty major difference because not doing that means they need to produce everything that would be gained through trade by producing it themselves. Once they start engaging in trade you have a different set of problems being dismissed by the schrodinger's trade

2) your argument was that people can't sustain themselves one their own and many people come damn close like all the time and historically have done a lot.

No my argument is that someone engaging in such monumental levels of production doesn't have the time to engage in the sort of weaving long distances through the forests shunning the use of carts wagons & trade. If that person does have that much time then what they have is an incredibly valuable tract of land or is themselves far too skilled to exist as a group of free people not forced into production.

The fact that I never helped my grand uncle do crimes and thus didn't know he needed sugar is beside the point.

Moonshine is legal to buy. It's also legal to produce. Despite recent history so is absynthe

 

[Minigiant]

Do you live by food, water or shelter?

All 3.

Now if you told me

You get different answers because the goalposts change.

It went from 'why do halflings adventure' to 'halflings are like NPCs' to 'how do halflings get along in the world' to 'halflings aren't militant naughty words enough' to 'Vikings will hunt halflings down no matter where they are on this map of Faerun' to 'halflings can't be lucky or blessed by gods, damn the rules' to 'halflings can't grow pepper' for some reason.

And at some point you were saying the feudal system is core to D&D and there's this running idea that peaceful agrarian societies are some fever dream and the Amish and Appalachia are all a conspiracy contrived by Big Halfling.

Half that stuff wasn't me.

I just wanted to know how a race of little folk with no magic and minimal military survive so I could I could understand why one would leave. The answer to the fist part informs the second.

 

[Vaalingrade]

No my argument is that someone engaging in such monumental levels of production doesn't have the time to engage in the sort of weaving long distances through the forests shunning the use of carts wagons & trade. If that person does have that much time then what they have is an incredibly valuable tract of land or is themselves far too skilled to exist as a group of free people not forced into production.

'Feed a family' is not a monumental task. Cavemen did it. Squirrels do it.

Moonshine is legal to buy. It's also legal to produce. Despite recent history so is absynthe

Random dudes, at least in the 90's when my great uncle was alive, were not allowed to make and distribute unlicensed booze in their back shed.

I mean except where I lived back then 'corruption' was pretty much the literal law of the land (and I am not joking. They didn't outlaw bribing politicians in my state until the early 2010's) so he was able to pay off local law enforcement in the form of sausage and 'shine.

Actually, why couldn't halfings do the same? Orcs show up, the halflings get them hammered on corn squeazin's. Orcs learn that destroying the source of their inebriation condemns them to sobriety, so they just stop by for a banging party every few months on the way to raid the naughty words who keep trying to genocide them.