Other than the Flaming Fists, the rest of those are not from down the block. And Halaster minds his own business. Undermountain doesn't attack Waterdeep.
Sure, Halaster does.
Do the goblins, oozes, undead, monstrosities, constructs, Kobolds, Yuan-Ti, Drow, Duergar... I mean I could go on. There is an entire city called Skullport that is full of pirates in Undermountain, and that is just level 3 of a 16 level structure. None of them ever break into the surface?
And you can say that the Cult of the Dragon isn't from "down the block" but the entire point of cults is that they infiltrate normal society.
Not generally, no. Occasionally a DM will put something in it other than rats.
That is so far from the norm that I had to read it twice. Sewers in DnD are always full of something more dangerous than rats.
Does the American armed forces protect Americans? Yes. Do they protect the prairie dogs? No.
This highlights the very problem I am trying to bring your attention to.
You are comparing halflings to an animal. Not a group of people, an animal. Because that is how much impact they are having on society. And you had to go there, because you recognize that protecting the countries borders means protecting all the people within those borders. So you had to compare halflings to animals instead of people.
Nope. If I buy you a wall, the wall is for you. Coincidental "protection" is not protection
You are so wrong I can't even think of a proper way to say it.
The heater just kicked on in my house. Are the dogs not benefitting from the warmth of the heater to protect them form the cold just because we bought the heater for ourselves? That doesn't make any logical sense.
Whose reality? Different races have different outlooks. It's a mistake for you to apply human mental states and views to halflings.
IT isn't just humans though, that is the problem. Humans, elves, Dwarves, Tieflings, Gnomes, Goliaths, Minotaurs (in certain settings), Orcs. Every race must be vigilant against their own destruction. If a force is sweeping across the land threatening all of them, they react to that threat.
Except halflings don't.
Why are you assuming the person sending them is an idiot?
What makes you think they are an idiot? "Lord of the Dead tries to kill all of the living and rule over a dead world" is pretty common as far as plots for Super Powerful Necromancers go.
You do realize that most of a country is just wide open empty space, right? The living live in clusters that don't take up much area. The dead aren't going to be sent walking through the hugs tracts of emptiness. That's just dumb.
You do realize that most medieval areas and by extension most DnD settings have villages within a day of each other, right?
You aren't getting thousands of miles of empty plains like what you have in the US, you are dealing with a very contained ecosystem that can be traversed in a week or two by foot.
Nope. Dwarves, elves, and other small communities hidden in out of the way places will be safe as well. I don't assume that the person directing/sending the undead are morons.
Oh, so the guy trying to destroy all life in the kingdom is just going to miss all of the small communities. Also, the elves and Dwarves are running kingdoms, kingdoms that are going to see this as a potential threat that they need to figure out a way to deal with.
Maybe it will be a classic "close their borders" response, but they are certainly paying attention and reacting.
But I guess this guy is just concerned with destroying cities and is going to be ignoring any community that is small enough. Because that accomplishes his goal of killing all life in the kingdom.
There was no kender there. But if you don't understand halflings, why would you understand kender.
See, this is the point though.
That insane, hyper childlike demeanor? That "A dragon with an orb that can answer any question? I want to ask it why the sun rises in the East, or why flies are called flies since other creatures can fly" style of character. That defines kender. Children with no concept of how the world works, who are completely divorced from reality. They are like cartoon characters, barely any concept of right and wrong, no concept of danger, and completely divorced from the struggles other people can and do face.
If that is your view of Halflings, no wonder they make no sense. You are playing them the same way I would a fey, or an insane person. Blue-Orange Morality and all.
Mr. Strawman strikes again!! I said many half-elves become adventurers. Many of almost none(low populations) doesn't equate to a lot of adventurers. I'd be willing to grant the obscenely high rate of 20% to half-elves.
See, this is the problem though. I did some digging, and yes this is setting specific, but FR has some baseline numbers and I can grab my old Greyhawk atlas to do some comparatives.
According to a post I found "For Forgotten Realms? Fortunately, you don't have to do any speculation here: The 3.5e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting includes these kinds of demographics, which is great.
The Sword Coast North (not including the city of Waterdeep) has 660,960 people (Humans 65%, Dwarves 10%, Orcs 8%, Half-Orcs 5%, Elves 4%,
Halflings 4%, Gnomes 2%,
Half-Elves 1%). It's safe to assume the majority of the Dwarves are Shield Dwarves and the majority of the Elves are Moon Elves."
According to the Wiki (which references the same book for this number) Waterdeep has a stupidly high population of 1,347,680, with 5% half elves and 5% halflings.
So, breaking down those numbers. 1% of 660960 is 6609 (rounded down) and 5% of 1347680 is 67,384
That is 73,993 half elves in the Northern Sword Coast and Waterdeep. At 20% of them being adventurers that is 14,798 half elf adventurers.
For halflings 5% is the same 67,384 and their 4% is 26,438 giving them a total of 93,822 halfings in the same region.
To just barely surpass the number of Half Elf adventurers, using your 20% number, you would need 16% of all halflings to be adventurers. That gets them 15,011 barely few hundred more.
To get a truly significant amount more, say half again? You would need 24% of all halflings to be adventurers.
Or, to put it more succinctly, the populations of half-elves are so close to that of halflings, that for them to be less common as adventurers by a significant margin, they'd have to be quite a bit less likely to adventure than halflings.
Heck, gnomes are really close to population numbers as well, getting 2% and 3% to the halfings 4% and 5%
I went ahead and googled instead of doing the hard work myself. Found this on Canonfire
"populations of the kingdoms of the Flanaess listed in the LGG and you get 27,921,630.
1,429,316 are halflings, roughly 5.1% of the total population.
1,391,833 are elves, roughly 4.9% of the total population.
680,934 are dwarves, roughly 2.4%
557,024 are gnomes, roughly 1.9% of the total population.
38,046 are half-elves, roughly 1.2% of the population."
So, in Greyhawk you might have a better argument.
20% of 38046 is 7,609 for half elf adventurers, meaning that to match that Halflings would need to have 0.5% percent. So that works out...
Except as
@Minigiant points out, in this example there are 1.5 million halflings in the region, and only about 40K half-elves. Halflings out number every race except humans in this setting. Halflings outnumber Half-elves in this example over 37 times.
So, again, if so many of other races become adventurers, for halflings to outnumber them significantly, one of two things need to happen.
1) Halflings are far more likely to be adventurers
2) Halflings populations outnumber these other races by a wide margin.
Which, just because I found it amusing. Let us assume that half of all halflings in Flanaess live in shires. That is 714,658. To have shires of 100 people and no more (which remember it is supposed to be less than 100) you would need 7,147 shires in the setting.
Looking at the map here
Regions of Greyhawk there are about 56 regions in all of Greyhawk.
That means that there would have to be, approximately, 128 shires per region. Which is more than the number of cities and villages in some of those regions.
